Film explores the sack of New College

Ron DeSantis and his over-paid, under-qualified, anti-education Visigoths have been on a mission to ruin every college and university in Florida.

Things have mostly been going according to plan.

Mostly, but not entirely.

Kids at Florida International University recently scored a small victory for free speech when a federal judge ordered the administration to stop punishing them for “expressive activities” indoors.

University President Jeanette Nuñez was hosting a “fireside chat” with Alex Rodriguez, former shortstop with the Seattle Mariners (just the kind of hard-hitting intellectual activity Florida colleges are becoming famous for), when 20 students in “ICE Off FIU” T-shirts stood up in silent protest.

They did not disrupt the event; they did not utter a single word.

That was the “expressive activity.”

And it was, as anyone with the least acquaintance with the First Amendment could see, constitutionally protected speech.

Nevertheless, university cops demanded the students’ names, threatening them with expulsion. University administrators disciplined them, demanding they record two-minute apology videos “reflecting” on their sins.

Wonder why the big brains at FIU didn’t sentence them to wear a scarlet “E” for “Expressive” and spend a night in the stocks?

The students had been trying get a meeting with President Nuñez to register their concerns over the university’s deal with ICE allowing campus police to crack down on supposed undocumented people.

The student body at FIU is 65% Latino: DACA recipients, F-1 visa holders, some asylum-seekers, and many, many children of immigrants.

Jeanette Nuñez, a child of immigrants, refused.

I mean, why should a university president actually speak to the students at her university?

Contempt

The Board of Governors and the various university boards of trustees are now stocked with DeSantis’ hand-picked vandals.

Former politicians or businesspeople with no higher education experience have been made presidents of FIU, Florida A&M, Florida Atlantic, the University of West Florida, and, most famously (and egregiously) New College of Florida.

They demonstrate contempt for the institutions they run and the students who come to those institutions to learn and grow and the scholars who teach them.

They despise critical thinking; they want to push “patriotic education,” focusing on the fantasy of “American Exceptionalism,” pretending hard that our history of violence, racism, homophobia, and misogyny is either exaggerated or no longer relevant.

They are at war with the 21st century.

The pathological hatred that drives DeSantis and his vandals is on full display in “First They Came For My College,” a scorching documentary about how the state dedicated itself to destroying what once was a top tier liberal arts school, producing scores of Fulbright Scholars, Emmy Award-winners, musicians, politicians (some Republican!), and artists.

New College once prided itself on providing “an Ivy League education for the price of a good stereo.” Its new masters are turning it into a jock-and-Jesus junior college.

In the first scene, a student named Gaby Batista addresses the audience with a series of questions: “Who has been to college? Raise your hand.”

Batista went on: “Who’s been to Florida?” And, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced a Christo-fascist takeover of your college.”

If that sounds a little dramatic, keep watching. It’s an understatement.

Vandals

On Jan. 6, 2023, exactly two years after a MAGA mob rioted at the U.S. Capitol, hell-bent on overturning the 2020 election, a smaller bunch of MAGAs seized New College.

As Harry Hanbury, producer of “First They Came for My College” and a New College alumnus, says, “There’s no mistaking the point of that date.”

Ron DeSantis had sacked the entire Board of Trustees, replacing them with political allies who stomped into Sarasota, preening and sneering like low-rent Bond villains.

Few had ties to Florida, much less New College. There was a former member of Donald Trump’s “1776 Commission,” an outfit dedicated to pushing lies about American history; a climate change denier; a COVID conspiracy theorist; and Christopher Rufo, a think-tanker dedicated to protecting oppressed white people from DEI.

He’s the guy who ginned up the national moral panic over Critical Race Theory and assured the nation Haitian immigrants were, indeed, eating America’s pets.

Rufo’d seen a video of somebody grilling something at an Ohio backyard barbecue and swore it was a cat, never mind the “cat” had wings.

Rufo gleefully uses the language of violence, proclaiming, “we are over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within.”

It was, as the governor’s wrecking crew said themselves, “a hostile takeover.”

“I wanted to create a historical document,” says Patrick Bresnan, the documentary’s director, to “bear witness” to how Ron DeSantis’ hatred of what he calls “woke” and New College’s former students call “radical acceptance,” led him to target this small, diverse, welcoming institution.

Bresnan, whose work has won top awards at Cannes, Sundance, SXSW, and many other film festivals, wanted “First They Came for My College” to “empower the students to tell the story.”

‘They really don’t care’

Instead of spending a lot of money on a professional film crew, Bresnan hired New College students as his camera people, giving them iPhones with big hard drives. Young people like Gaby Batista and colleagues at The Catalyst, the New College student newspaper, chronicled the “hostile takeover,” from the trustees’ smug faces as they fired Patricia Okker, the president (she was insufficiently anti-woke), to refusing tenure for high-performing professors to throwing hundreds of books into a dumpster behind the library — the administration had shut down the Gender Studies Program, so who needs to read about LGBTQ or social justice topics?

Bresnan and his young collaborators play fair, bringing in students favorable to the new regime and trying to get Richard Corcoran, the cigar-chomping DeSantis ally installed as New College president, to talk to them.

Of course, he blew them off.

In one of the most powerful scenes, capped and gowned students surrounded by cops and monitored by surveillance cameras are subjected to one of the most chuckleheaded graduation speeches in history. Megabucks DeSantis campaign donor Joe Ricketts, famous for calling Islam a “cult,” drones on about how he became successful because he never spent money on fun things and his wife never bought a “new dress.”

The students decide they’ve had enough and begin to chant “Free Palestine!”

Ricketts gives up: “I hate it, but they really don’t care what I have to say.”

Corcoran comforts him, saying, “We will win, Joe.”

Maybe.

Maybe not. The young people in this documentary will give you hope for a better day. They are bright, funny, generous, and dedicated to carrying the tolerant, intellectually honest lessons they learned at New College out into a world in sore need of them.

They are Ron DeSantis’ worst nightmare.

Four months

There are only four months left before Florida is finally rid of him, but don’t think he’s easing up on his mission to turn our colleges and universities into MAGA academies.

He’s the most proudly backward governor since (acting Gov.) Charley Johns, who, you will recall, dedicated himself to rooting out non-existent communist infiltration of the NAACP at Florida A&M and outing gay professors at the University of Florida.

In 2025, the state prohibited in-state tuition for undocumented students. Now we’re going to ban them altogether, even kids who may have been brought to the U.S. as babies, even ones with better test scores than many a Florida native high school valedictorian.

In addition to ridding ourselves of the foreign-born students and professors who may elevate both the academic and cultural qualities of our colleges and universities, why not also stop taking so many out-of-state students?

Who knows what “woke” ideas they’re bringing across the Georgia border?

The boards of trustees, usually weak-kneed in the face of governmental bullying, are not happy with this.

UF trustees chair Mori Hosseini called attempts to limit non-resident enrollees “a travesty.” FSU trustees chair Peter Collins called the move “ham-fisted.”

“I think the question you have to ask yourselves is, how good do you want us to be?” said Collins. “If you don’t want us to be great, yeah, we can start admitting a lot more students that don’t meet the criteria.”

Other than in football, the administration doesn’t much want our state universities and colleges to be “great” — unless their definition of “great” is Bob Jones University.

Meanwhile, New College has become a pitiful shadow of itself, fixated on teaching a retrograde version of American “greatness” and giving scholarships to hordes of baseball players with unimpressive test scores.

Spending is out of control: Educating each New College student costs around $134,000. The average in the rest of the state university system is $11,000.

Graduation and retention rates are plummeting. New College’s rankings are, too, falling almost 60 places since the takeover.

In an almost unbearably apt metaphor, Corcoran has bulldozed the college’s glorious nature preserve, destroying century-old pines and oaks and astroturfing the gardens.

As “First They Came for My College” recounts, they couldn’t even leave New College’s mascot alone, ditching the Null Set — which looks like this { } — and signifies both something and nothing.

Instead of a clever math joke, New College is now stuck with the “Mighty Banyon,” a cartoon tree.

“We were the canary in the coal mine,” says Gaby Batista. “New College was their little political playground.”

DeSantis, Corcoran and the rest of the vandals may think they’ve won: New College is now Bob Jones on the Beach.

But as long as there are smart, determined people like Gaby Batista and the makers of this documentary resisting and testifying, we’re not yet lost.

“First They Came For My College” is showing at venues around the state and at the Tallahassee Film Festival on Oct.11th.