Ron DeSantis wants to take over a small liberal arts college. Students are fighting back

Ron DeSantis last month announced the appointment of six conservatives to the board of trustees at the New College of Florida, a small campus overlooking Sarasota Bay. Outside an auditorium, a few protesters held up signs declaring: “NO HOSTILE TAKEOVER!” The focus of the controversy was Christopher Rufo, the most prominent of six conservatives recently named trustees at New College of Florida by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, as part of his war on “woke.” In a hyper-politicized age in which conservatives push for more control over what students are taught, this small college overlooking Sarasota Bay looks set to become a pivotal battleground in the war over the mission of public universities. Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University and author of “Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech,” said New College could become “a real laboratory for how much, and in what way, state governors might intervene in how universities operate.” A majority of U.S. professors identify as far left or liberal — 60% in 2017, up from 41% in 1990, according to surveys by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. New College, he said, had a “culture problem.” “We have an echo chamber here, where only one orthodoxy is allowed,” Rufo said. “Doing a full 180 and making it conservative or traditional or classical is not going to help anybody,” said Rocío Ramírez Castro, who studies anthropology and Spanish at the New College of Florida.