Two people I know have been hired by them to start this fall, and both are good scholars and normal people. One is a colleague from my former institution (a lit and film guy) who held a distinguished professorship there and was beloved, but was lured away by New College with higher pay and proximity to ocean. Both are liberal and I doubt they’d go if the place was in terrible shape, so it’s possible that the situation is not as bad as the worst reports make it sound.
I dunno. I remember Colin McGinn announcing he was leaving a much better philosophy dept (Rutgers) for U Miami “because I love to surf.” (This was before he got in trouble and had to leave.) I absolutely get that proximity to the ocean is a thing; but New College is under sanction by the AAUP, features library directors who throw out books representing entire intellectual fields (someone thought to take photos of the discards, so it was all over the news), and the much-quoted response to this, from the highest profile member of the board of trustees, was “thanks for taking out the trash.”
As for pay, yes. But that reminds me of my favorite scene from I Know Where I’m Going, when Catriona Potts tells Joan Webster, “Well… yes …. but money isn’t everything.”
I just mean, these are people with something to lose professionally and I assume they wouldn’t make this decision if they thought the place was burning down. My former colleague told me things seemed a lot more normal than he expected (from the media) when he interviewed there, no sign of Chris Rufo and the faculty were all normal scholars. But, of course, their judgment could be wrong. Still, having now read several NYT articles about how, eg, scholars are fleeing Florida universities en masse that quote all of two dudes, both of whom are clearly leaving for better offers at fancier schools and pretending they’ve been hounded out for their politics (I would also like to be hounded out all the way to Cornell!), and knowing several people at UF who can attest that there is no exodus beyond the usual turnover, I am more skeptical of the media treatment of any change initiated by Republicans.
As for the AAUP, one might doubt its own commitment to academic freedom these days: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-aaup-abandons-academic-freedom. (Joan Scott responded with the rejoinder that this is not just about boycotting Israeli academics, you see, but that we should all be encouraged to boycott academics and universities in ALL the countries we don’t like! Great news for academic freedom!)
Well, Florida was never a respectable place to be a professor. Like Nevada, it’s insanely anti-intellectual, and it has a political class that reflects that. New College was the one weird, non-athletic, non-corrupt, academic location… And now that’s gone. The model is De Santis’s beloved Hungary, where you throw out your one serious university.
It’s bizarre to claim that New College was the only serious school in Florida. UF is one of the best public universities in the country; it’s not even remotely comparable to Nevada, which is ranked #200 or something, if it’s ranked at all. I’m pretty sure all of Florida’s public colleges are better than Nevada, even the shittiest ones. DeSantis didn’t build this, but his tenure doesn’t seem to have undermined the public universities on any standard measure of quality beyond media coverage and dramatics – good students still showing up (lured by free tuition), faculty still teaching and doing research, rankings remain steady.
New College was just a small liberal arts college for weirdos, which it seems to continue to be. Their new hires seem like normal scholars (eg) and their course offerings for Fall look pretty standard: https://newcleis.ncf.edu/pls/ncpo/bwckgens.p_proc_term_date. Even gender studies somehow survived, and after all that public recrimination! So not clear in what sense the place is “gone.”
Read it and weep. After many Calif. schools (both Fla and CA are big rich fun in the sun states) you finally get to one Fla school (44), after which you need to scroll down to 66 to get another. Fla’s gov is famous for telling everyone all the time how embarrassed he is to have graduated from evil Yale, and the state’s cultural center houses its adored stable genius, Donald Trump. America is an anti-intellectual country, and the failure of Florida, with all its money and assets, to be anything other than an epicenter of anti-intellectuality is – well, it is what it is. Let Florida be Florida. And let Florida continue demonizing, above all other states, California, with its incredibly impressive roster of evil universities.
US News rankings UF at 28, and 9 among publics. Nevada is 195. They are not comparable. California’s public universities have always been the best; no one has been able to dislodge Berkeley and UCLA, not even Michigan, with its effort to function like a private school. But UF is playing in that league, not the Nevada league. Floridians can demonize their competition as freely as Californians and New Yorkers demonize them. That’s just trash talk that means they are in competition to begin with, unlike Nevada.
August 27th, 2024 at 6:58PM
Two people I know have been hired by them to start this fall, and both are good scholars and normal people. One is a colleague from my former institution (a lit and film guy) who held a distinguished professorship there and was beloved, but was lured away by New College with higher pay and proximity to ocean. Both are liberal and I doubt they’d go if the place was in terrible shape, so it’s possible that the situation is not as bad as the worst reports make it sound.
August 28th, 2024 at 6:51AM
I dunno. I remember Colin McGinn announcing he was leaving a much better philosophy dept (Rutgers) for U Miami “because I love to surf.” (This was before he got in trouble and had to leave.) I absolutely get that proximity to the ocean is a thing; but New College is under sanction by the AAUP, features library directors who throw out books representing entire intellectual fields (someone thought to take photos of the discards, so it was all over the news), and the much-quoted response to this, from the highest profile member of the board of trustees, was “thanks for taking out the trash.”
As for pay, yes. But that reminds me of my favorite scene from I Know Where I’m Going, when Catriona Potts tells Joan Webster, “Well… yes …. but money isn’t everything.”
See 1:17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WeZP2NJYOA
August 28th, 2024 at 12:20PM
I just mean, these are people with something to lose professionally and I assume they wouldn’t make this decision if they thought the place was burning down. My former colleague told me things seemed a lot more normal than he expected (from the media) when he interviewed there, no sign of Chris Rufo and the faculty were all normal scholars. But, of course, their judgment could be wrong. Still, having now read several NYT articles about how, eg, scholars are fleeing Florida universities en masse that quote all of two dudes, both of whom are clearly leaving for better offers at fancier schools and pretending they’ve been hounded out for their politics (I would also like to be hounded out all the way to Cornell!), and knowing several people at UF who can attest that there is no exodus beyond the usual turnover, I am more skeptical of the media treatment of any change initiated by Republicans.
As for the AAUP, one might doubt its own commitment to academic freedom these days: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-aaup-abandons-academic-freedom. (Joan Scott responded with the rejoinder that this is not just about boycotting Israeli academics, you see, but that we should all be encouraged to boycott academics and universities in ALL the countries we don’t like! Great news for academic freedom!)
August 28th, 2024 at 8:26PM
Well, Florida was never a respectable place to be a professor. Like Nevada, it’s insanely anti-intellectual, and it has a political class that reflects that. New College was the one weird, non-athletic, non-corrupt, academic location… And now that’s gone. The model is De Santis’s beloved Hungary, where you throw out your one serious university.
August 28th, 2024 at 11:51PM
It’s bizarre to claim that New College was the only serious school in Florida. UF is one of the best public universities in the country; it’s not even remotely comparable to Nevada, which is ranked #200 or something, if it’s ranked at all. I’m pretty sure all of Florida’s public colleges are better than Nevada, even the shittiest ones. DeSantis didn’t build this, but his tenure doesn’t seem to have undermined the public universities on any standard measure of quality beyond media coverage and dramatics – good students still showing up (lured by free tuition), faculty still teaching and doing research, rankings remain steady.
New College was just a small liberal arts college for weirdos, which it seems to continue to be. Their new hires seem like normal scholars (eg) and their course offerings for Fall look pretty standard: https://newcleis.ncf.edu/pls/ncpo/bwckgens.p_proc_term_date. Even gender studies somehow survived, and after all that public recrimination! So not clear in what sense the place is “gone.”
August 29th, 2024 at 5:50AM
Read it and weep. After many Calif. schools (both Fla and CA are big rich fun in the sun states) you finally get to one Fla school (44), after which you need to scroll down to 66 to get another. Fla’s gov is famous for telling everyone all the time how embarrassed he is to have graduated from evil Yale, and the state’s cultural center houses its adored stable genius, Donald Trump. America is an anti-intellectual country, and the failure of Florida, with all its money and assets, to be anything other than an epicenter of anti-intellectuality is – well, it is what it is. Let Florida be Florida. And let Florida continue demonizing, above all other states, California, with its incredibly impressive roster of evil universities.
August 29th, 2024 at 11:02AM
US News rankings UF at 28, and 9 among publics. Nevada is 195. They are not comparable. California’s public universities have always been the best; no one has been able to dislodge Berkeley and UCLA, not even Michigan, with its effort to function like a private school. But UF is playing in that league, not the Nevada league. Floridians can demonize their competition as freely as Californians and New Yorkers demonize them. That’s just trash talk that means they are in competition to begin with, unlike Nevada.