New College of Florida (“NCF”) is a taxpayer-funded liberal arts college in Sarasota. It is also one of the hardest-left colleges in America. To claw it back to the center, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the board of trustees, all of whom oppose woke education trends, such as Critical Race Theory, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” anti-Americanism, and “studies” majors (e.g., women’s studies, queer studies, etc.). Michelle Goldberg, at the New York Times, has written an over-the-top piece about the new board’s alleged depredations. It’s both amusing and illuminating.

The essay, entitled “This Is What the Right-Wing Takeover of a Progressive College Looks Like,” begins with the tale of Matthew Lepinski, a computer science professor and the board’s faculty chair, who “was willing to give the right-wingers sent to remake his embattled progressive public school a chance.” He did so despite his colleagues’ opposition: so even in the face of opposition from his fellow faculty members:

In the ensuing months, there was concern among Lepinski’s colleagues that he wasn’t doing enough to stand up to their new overlords. “Some of us had been a little frustrated with his willingness to try and play nice,” Amy Reid, a French professor and the head of New College’s gender studies program, told me. But Lepinski believed in dialogue and compromise. “I thought maybe there was a path forward with this board where we could focus on the things that unite us instead of the things that divide us,” he said.

Eventually, the reconstituted board’s depredations so appalled him, though, that he quit.

Good for Lepinski to stand by his principles! However, was what the new board members did that heinous? Is the campus now Mississippi in 1954, with blacks lynched and gays thrown into prison? Not quite.

Image: New College of Florida (cropped) by Upstateherd. CC BY-SA 4.0.

For those who do not wallow in leftism, the board’s actions are returning the college to the American normal of just a decade or two ago. Here, stripped of Goldberg’s emotional language, is a list of its changes:

The board

• “fired the school’s president, replacing her with Richard Corcoran, the Republican former speaker of the Florida House.”
• “fired its chief diversity officer and dismantled the diversity, equity and inclusion office.”
• removed the “gender-neutral signage” from bathrooms, returning them to single-sex bathrooms.
• hired a new athletic director, Mariano Jimenez, to implement a traditional college sports program and to bring fraternities and sororities to campus.
• changed the way professors get tenure. The leftist way was to let professors apply for tenure after only five years (the norm is six) and to view the board as s rubber stamp. The board refused to be a rubber stamp and told the professors to hold off for another year.

That’s it. Those are the specific horrors of a “right-wing takeover.”

Naturally, people on campus are girding their loins for more. A so-called “trans woman” suspects that board members plan to attack two of his classes: “Politics of the African Diaspora and Alternatives to Capitalism.” I hope they do that. As a federal taxpayer who undoubtedly helps fund NCF, I can’t think of a better thing to do than to end classes that use taxpayer funds to teach that America is evil and the system must be destroyed.

Goldberg reluctantly concedes that it’s not the evil “right-wingers” on the board who will destroy such classes. Instead, the legislature, which represents the will of Florida taxpayers, will be the boogyman: “[A] bill making its way through the Florida Legislature requires the review of curriculums ‘based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.’”

It's Goldberg’s next sentence, though, that sums up the whole tone of the essay: “The sense of dread on campus, however, goes beyond what’s happening in Tallahassee.”

That sense of dread is truly existential. At the tenure meeting mentioned above, the 54 people registered to speak tried desperately to explain why a college must be a forum for “eccentric kids”—and by eccentric, it’s clear Goldberg means people who wallow in their racial and sexual identities.

Goldberg reserves special animus for Christopher Rufo, who has revealed to Americans the racial and sexual madness infecting America’s institutions (government, corporate, and academic). Rufo, says Goldberg, didn’t attend the tenure meeting because he had been in Hungary, “where he had a fellowship at a right-wing think tank closely tied to Viktor Orban’s government. (This seemed fitting, since Orban’s Hungary created the template for Rufo and Desantis’s educational crusade.)”

The implication is clear: Orban is a fascist, so Rufo is, too. Goldberg was clearly offended by this tweet:

I wish Dr. Lepinski well and look forward to recruiting his replacement. We are restoring classical liberal arts education at New College and any faculty that prefer the old system of unfettered left-wing activism and a rubber-stamp board are free to self-select out. https://t.co/M4hLqRfePq

— Christopher F. Rufo вљ”пёЏ (@realchrisrufo) April 26, 2023

For Goldberg, pulling a taxpayer-funded institution out of an abyss where it wallows in America-hatred, race-hatred, and sexual deviancy is a repressive nightmare. And while I find her rage-filled emotionalism amusing, we should remember that she speaks for the ruling class that controls our elected government, our unelected government, the management of big corporations, and education. They will not go gently in this fight.