DeSantis to transform New College of Florida into "Hillsdale of the South"

[kaysixteen]

Awright I give up, Uncle.   I was wrong.   I may well be misremembering my experience out there, which was 21 years ago, but it is also very true that Hillsdale has gone far off the deep end into Trumpanzee territory since then-- indeed, the professor who was the main hiring man for the job I sought back then was a member of a very liberal mainline prot sect, and he made it clear most faculty there were in such groups.

[apl68]

I've been curious enough to do a bit of looking regarding New College.  It looks like an interesting and unique little institution.  It would be a great shame to see it damaged or possibly even wrecked by ham-fisted meddling.  Given the funding climate for liberal arts in public systems, though, it would likely be doomed in the long term even without that.

[pondering]

One of the DeSantis-appointed trustees of New College, Eddie Speir, has indicated that he hopes to declare financial exigency to enable "terminating all contracts for faculty, staff and administration and immediately rehiring those new faculty, staff and administration who fit the new financial and business model."

Source: https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1619883181335007232

[jimbogumbo]

Article posits that the DeSantis New College effort will be commonplace: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/ron-desantis-new-college-florida

[onthefringe]

I've been curious enough to do a bit of looking regarding New College.  It looks like an interesting and unique little institution.  It would will be a great shame to see it damaged or possibly even wrecked by ham-fisted meddling.

fixed that for you.

[Hibush]

Article posits that the DeSantis New College effort will be commonplace: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/ron-desantis-new-college-florida

Waiting to see Lucien Greaves appointed President of Hillsdale in a turnabout.

[Parasaurolophus]

*Ahem* :

The newly remade board of trustees at New College of Florida voted Monday to give the Sarasota school's interim President Richard Corcoran a pay bump of nearly $400,000 over his predecessor. The board decided that Corcoran, a former Florida House speaker and state education commissioner, will receive a base salary of $699,000, plus an annual housing stipend of $84,000, a $12,000 automobile stipend and an annual retirement supplement of $104,850. Former New College President Patricia Okker, who was fired last month amid a conservative transformation of the board, had a base salary of $305,000. Her housing stipend was $40,000 a year.

[pondering]

*Ahem* :

The newly remade board of trustees at New College of Florida voted Monday to give the Sarasota school's interim President Richard Corcoran a pay bump of nearly $400,000 over his predecessor. The board decided that Corcoran, a former Florida House speaker and state education commissioner, will receive a base salary of $699,000, plus an annual housing stipend of $84,000, a $12,000 automobile stipend and an annual retirement supplement of $104,850. Former New College President Patricia Okker, who was fired last month amid a conservative transformation of the board, had a base salary of $305,000. Her housing stipend was $40,000 a year.

Two birds with one stone for DeSantis: stoke culture war BS to stay in the headlines ahead of his presidential run, and corruptly reward a pal with an overpaid sinecure at taxpayers' expense.

What really saddens me is how many Floridian voters fell for this nonsense. The FL Democrats are hopeless, but a 20-point margin for this grifter is a pretty soul-crushing result.

[spork]

*Ahem* :

The newly remade board of trustees at New College of Florida voted Monday to give the Sarasota school's interim President Richard Corcoran a pay bump of nearly $400,000 over his predecessor. The board decided that Corcoran, a former Florida House speaker and state education commissioner, will receive a base salary of $699,000, plus an annual housing stipend of $84,000, a $12,000 automobile stipend and an annual retirement supplement of $104,850. Former New College President Patricia Okker, who was fired last month amid a conservative transformation of the board, had a base salary of $305,000. Her housing stipend was $40,000 a year.

Two birds with one stone for DeSantis: stoke culture war BS to stay in the headlines ahead of his presidential run, and corruptly reward a pal with an overpaid sinecure at taxpayers' expense.

[. . . ]

It's the standard government grifter playbook.

[kaysixteen]

So why exactly is it that DeSantis did so well in the election last fall?

[pondering]

So why exactly is it that DeSantis did so well in the election last fall?

I don't have a comprehensive explanation for this, but a few factors that I've noticed from living here and talking to neighbors and people at my church (who mostly voted for DeSantis):

- The state is increasingly trending red, although perhaps not as much as DeSantis's 19-point win would suggest. Note that Rubio (who isn't embracing the MAGA nonsense with quite the same gusto) won by 16 points. Every day conservative elderly people move here to retire from every other state, and during the pandemic lots of working-age people and families did the same, attracted by the "free Florida" (i.e. anti-vax, anti-mitigation measures) messaging from DeSantis.

- The Florida Democrats are utterly hopeless and uninspiring. The gubernatorial candidates in the primary were a weed-loving, pro-gun libertarian woman or Charlie Crist - a slimy, former *Republican* governor, who won the Democratic primary and predictably crashed and burned in the general. They also have no ground game whatsoever, while the Republican turnout/persuasion machine is very well-oiled. I live in what should be a competitive suburban area (lots of college-educated people who would be a natural part of the current Dem coalition) and over a dozen Republican canvassers knocked on my door. Absolutely nobody came from the Democrats. My mailbox was filled with attack ads on all the Democratic candidates, and there was almost nothing from the Dem side to balance that avalanche of propaganda. I don't live in South Florida, but I gather all this was even worse there, with the added factor of right-wing Spanish radio that constantly demonizes the Dems as socialist Marxist baby-killers etc. - a potent message for various deeply religious Latin American diasporas.

- DeSantis plays a clever double game. When addressing the Floridian electorate at large, he poses as a somewhat moderate figure, with funding for the Everglades, promises of raises for teachers (a disingenuous mirage, according to my teacher friends), infrastructure investment, tax cuts etc. The hardcore culture war stuff - "Don't Say Gay," "Stop WOKE Act" etc. - is aimed at a different target audience: the nationwide MAGA base that will vote in the presidential primary. It seems obviously duplicitous, but I think we academics forget that most people don't have the time/inclination to follow the news and observe the world around them outside of their little bubble. Florida voters seem to make a point of ignoring the high-level corruption, cronyism, and jobs for the boys that have been the hallmarks of Republican governance in the state for the last 3 decades. If all you know about DeSantis is what you hear when you occasionally tune in to the radio while commuting, he might seem like a reasonable figure.

- I can't emphasize enough how important the "freedom" thing has been during/in the wake of the pandemic. As a person with chronic health conditions I would have felt much safer in a more cautious blue state, but as an observer of human attitudes it's undeniable that DeSantis's "deny the problem and remove any mitigation measure" approach that he implemented from mid-2020 onwards is very popular. In a state that relies on the tourism industry and countless small businesses, I can see the economic motivations behind this attitude. The fact that Florida had larger per-capita deaths than other states has seemingly had little effect; people either see it as an acceptable price to pay, or buy the state government's propaganda that everything medical experts and epidemiologists say is just woke indoctrination.

[mythbuster]

Pondering is spot on.

I will also add that he benefitted greatly from the timing of Hurricane Ian. DeSantis really shines in national disasters. He comes across as reasonable and intelligent when discussing flooding and evacuations. It's the military background kicking in. Then he got the disaster relief machine moving to rebuild the Sanibel causeway in a week, and ran a huge ad campaign of people thanking him for how he helped them. It was all very morning in America.

[jimbogumbo]

Rufo takes aim at UCF: https://www.city-journal.org/univ-of-central-florida-racism-in-the-name-of-anti-racism

[kaysixteen]

As I read it, racism appeals, often nowadays dogwhistles, have helped dudes like DeSantis succeed in places like Florida.   But I might be wrong-- most educated Yankees such as myself tend to view most white southerners as racists, barely reconstructed-- witness things like the overtly and shamelessly racist law passed in MS recently, imposing GOP appointed judges on the 80% black population of Jackson, rendering this county the only one in the state that doesn't actually get to vote for its own judges.   So I am I wrong in this analysis-cum-judgement?

[apl68]

As I read it, racism appeals, often nowadays dogwhistles, have helped dudes like DeSantis succeed in places like Florida.   But I might be wrong-- most educated Yankees such as myself tend to view most white southerners as racists, barely reconstructed-- witness things like the overtly and shamelessly racist law passed in MS recently, imposing GOP appointed judges on the 80% black population of Jackson, rendering this county the only one in the state that doesn't actually get to vote for its own judges.   So I am I wrong in this analysis-cum-judgement?

I've never lived in the Deep South (Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia), so I can't really speak to attitudes there from personal experience.  Attitudes in Mississippi certainly give the impression of being extreme.  I've been to both Little Rock and Jackson--both southern cities, of similar size, and both state capitals--and it's like night and day.  Go to Jackson, and it's obvious that the white population simply abandoned the city altogether and let it rot rather than accept desegregation.  In Little Rock there was a great deal of white flight, all right, but the city wasn't just abandoned wholesale.  It's a far more vibrant city than Jackson.  Jackson literally looks like it has been through a war, with cratered streets, municipal parks that look like they haven't been maintained in decades, and whole blocks of abandoned buildings near the state capitol.  Little Rock is mostly in better condition, and has invested a lot in parks and other civic amenities in recent years. 

Mississippi is also notorious for basically leaving its black majority regions in the Delta to fend for themselves in terms of education and medicine.  Conditions in the equivalent areas of Arkansas and Tennessee are nothing to brag about, but again the difference is like night and day.  Every Mississippi Delta town of any size also has its own "segregation academy," where ALL of the county's white children go, while an all-black public school nearby is virtually falling into ruins for lack of investment.  It's as if the entire state just cut its own nose off to spite its face.  And racism is indeed the most plausible explanation.  You see evidence of stuff like this in parts of Arkansas, notably the Pine Bluff area.

And then you've got other areas, like the town where I grew up and the one where I now live, where black and white students have been going to school together for well over half a century now.  It's just the done thing.  Neighborhoods are still largely segregated, but it's not at all unusual to have black families living on mostly white streets now.  Some, though not most, churches have racially mixed congregations (Ours is one that does).  When BLM demonstrations came to town a couple of years ago, our white Mayor and Chief of Police joined in the events.  They're big on "community policing." 

What I've observed, in many years of experience in multiple communities in Arkansas and Tennessee, is that racist attitudes are still pretty common, but not as severe as they once were.  "Unreconstructed"--the idea that nothing has really changed since the 1950s--is hyperbole.  What I see is less the hard-core caste attitudes of the past, and more a lot of mutual misunderstanding.  Whites suppose that since gross segregation and legally-codified second-class citizenship for blacks are a thing of the past, then blacks have no business complaining about anything.  Blacks generally disagree, and they have their reasons--they've still got very much the short end of the stick in terms of poverty rates, health outcomes, and underinvestment in their communities. 

Then you've got factors of class involved.  Wealthy, suburban whites, some liberal and some conservative, keep themselves largely segregated from poor and working-class whites and blacks alike,  and often regard them all with fear, mistrust, and condescension.  Which the objects of these feelings are well aware of, and they're not happy about it.  The poorest whites and blacks are often just kind of mad at the whole world, and that's where you find the ugliest racial attitudes. 

In my experience, people in general, in all kinds of places, just don't have enough understanding or compassion for people that aren't like them.  They don't think about the fact that we're all created in the image of God, and that Jesus died for all of us.  Among those who do understand these things, I've witnessed some remarkably transformed attitudes regarding race, class, and more.  There just aren't enough of them.