Incompossible with Florida

HINTERNET EXCLUSIVE: The Bonfire of the Humanities at New College

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I’ve known Chris Noble since he was in graduate school, when we used to frequent the same circles of Leibniz scholars. Chris wrote what I have long taken to be among the most interesting and subtle philosophy dissertations I’ve ever read, on the topic of Leibnizian spiritual automata. He went on to build an academic career as a professor of philosophy at New College in Florida. If you’ve been following the news of that state’s politics over the past years, particularly as concerns higher education, you will already be able to anticipate something of what fortune had in store for him. I’m proud to have Chris’s eyewitness featured in our space. Please don’t forget that it’s your paid subscriptions that enable us to support our guest contributors in turn. —JSR

Introduction

In August 2018, I started a one-year visiting position to teach philosophy at New College of Florida, the state’s public liberal arts honors college. I had spent the past nine years teaching at Villanova University, the Augustinian Catholic institution near Philadelphia where I also completed my PhD. The change brought the promise of full-time employment as well as great leeway to offer courses in the history of philosophy, my area of scholarly expertise. To replace a retiring scholar of Medieval philosophy—a specialist in Duns Scotus—my new colleagues wanted someone who could incorporate non-Western material into the philosophy curriculum. I had been given a mandate, in other words, to teach courses in both the history of Western philosophy, as well as in traditions from around the globe.

At the same time, I was anxious about whether I could fit in at my new school. The sole job interview had taken place remotely via videoconference and my future colleagues had ended our conversation by letting me know that “we’re a weird place.” As I prepared for the move, I learned of free-spirited student traditions like walking around campus barefoot and wearing homemade costumes to commencement in place of traditional academic regalia. New College’s academic program, dating back to its 1960s founding, was both unorthodox and experimental, aiming to empower students to follow their intellectual interests wherever they might lead. “In the last analysis, every student is responsible for his or her own education” read the school’s traditional first principle, while its student association’s constitution proclaimed “[t]hat the natural state of the human spirit is ecstatic wonder! That we should not settle for less!” I learned that each semester, students negotiated a contract with their academic advisors that detailed a “satisfactory” semester of study—in addition to passing at least three courses, a contract might stipulate that the student must develop better study habits, join a student organization, or even take up a hobby like knitting. Students had ample opportunity to conduct independent research, including in the form of “tutorials,” courses designed one-on-one with a faculty member. Most importantly, they received “narrative evaluations,” detailed accounts of their performance and growth, as well as recommendations for further study, rather than grades. The school of roughly 700 students had also become, in recent decades, an LGBTQ+ haven. All told, I had spent sixteen years of my life in the traditionalist world of Catholic higher education (prior to my time at Villanova, I completed my undergraduate studies at Jesuit Boston College), could I adjust to this most liberal of liberal arts colleges?

When I finally arrived on campus, I could hardly believe the school was real. Between class discussions of the Dao de jing or St. Thomas Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God, students sought me out to talk about our shared interests in experimental music, or to fill me in about excursions to surrounding neighborhoods to forage for tropical fruit. I spent as much time as possible outside in the balmy Florida weather, holding student meetings at picnic tables and tormenting my partner, then living in snowy Boston, with videos of dolphins captured during lunchtime walks on the campus bayfront. Although I never dared leave my office barefoot, I was soon teaching in shorts and sandals.

For our January-term “Independent Study Project” period, I decided to offer a group project where students would learn to play the ancient Chinese board game Go—one of my hobbies—while studying its links with literature and philosophy (figures including Confucius, Leibniz, and Deleuze & Guattari have all commented on the game). This project was also timely; Go—vastly more complex and elegant than comparable games like chess—had only recently been conquered by AI, as evidenced by the crushing 3-1 defeat, in 2016, of South Korean champion Lee Sedol at the hands of AlphaGo—a program developed by Google—in a best of-five match followed by viewers from around the world. To my pleasant surprise, nine students signed up; one, already an accomplished player, went on to organize a campus Go club. Real place or no, this experience showed me my path at New College. I could help students draw links between the most ancient of human traditions with our most daunting contemporary problems. I could help channel their natural sense of wonder in mapping intellectual constellations that ranged over history, philosophy, literature and science. Last, but not least, we could all have fun.

When offered a position on the tenure-track starting the next year, I was thrilled to accept. I felt fortunate to have landed at New College: not just the rare small liberal arts college with a public-school sticker-price, but one where I had found genuine intellectual community with my students. The coming years were not without challenges—like many small colleges these days, we struggled to retain students. Those who left often complained about the school’s subpar dorms and physical infrastructure, the maintenance of which had long been deferred by the state. There was also hostility from the state legislature: early in 2020, then Republican state representative Randy Fine (he now represents the sixth district of Florida in the U.S. House), proposed a bill to merge us with one of the state’s universities, citing our high cost-per student ratio relative to our larger peers like the University of Florida. Although the bill eventually died, it made it distressingly far through the legislative process. Above all was the Covid-19 pandemic, during which time I found myself teaching remotely from my partner’s Boston apartment. I was haunted not just by the specters of illness and death, but by the Florida sunshine and palm trees beckoning to me from students’ Zoom backgrounds. Nevertheless, after returning in person and starting to prepare for my coming tenure application, I felt that I could not imagine a better professional life.

“Florida’s Classic College”

Things proved, in fact, too good to be true. On January 6, 2023, the two-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, the campus community received an unexpected email from Dr. Patricia Okker, New College’s then President. Florida Governor DeSantis, she wrote, was appointing six politically conservative trustees to the college’s 13-member Board. Appointees included an editor at First Things, the conservative “Journal of Religion and Public Life;” the editor of the right-wing Claremont Review of Books; and Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow who first came to prominence by instigating a nationwide moral panic over the teaching of “Critical Race Theory.” Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz announced the new trustees’ mission to transform the college—allegedly captive to “woke” indoctrination—into “Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a “Hillsdale of the South,” a reference to the conservative Christian “classical liberal arts college’‘ in Michigan. One of the new trustees, in fact, was a Hillsdale professor, and Rufo has since served as a “distinguished fellow” there.

After establishing a majority voting bloc, the new trustees fired Okker and appointed Richard Corcoran, a DeSantis political ally with connections to the conservative “school-choice” and charter school movements, as interim replacement at over twice his predecessor’s compensation (Corcoran was elevated to permanent office as President in October 2023). They eliminated the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office. They denied tenure to five of my colleagues. In further evidence that nature abhors a void, the new administration created an athletics program ex nihilo for a school whose tongue-in-cheek “mascot” had been the null set (it is now the “Mighty Banyan”). Rufo told the New York Times that this new emphasis on athletics served the goal of “rebalancing the ratio” of male to female students. In the fall, returning students were displaced to local hotels to make room for the new recruits.

The new regime justified this radical transformation as part of the larger project of recapturing higher education from the left. According to Rufo’s 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, leftist intellectuals inspired by the likes Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Friere, and Derrick Bell, have executed a “long march” through American higher education since the 1960s. The fruits of this alleged revolution include DEI trainings and the teaching of fields like “critical race theory” and gender studies. For the trustees, a reformed New College would showcase how the political right would run things if given the keys to public educational institutions. As Rufo later put it,“New College has the opportunity to create a curriculum on par with our private-sector counterparts, such as Hillsdale College, and to demonstrate that public universities don’t have to succumb to left-wing ideological capture. With sufficient political will, they can govern themselves on a different set of principles entirely.”

An exodus of faculty ensued, including my colleague Nick Clarkson, who stepped down as Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in August 2023. As Clarkson wrote in his public resignation letter, “I won’t work in an environment characterized by censorship, refusal of accountability, blatant disregard for students’ wellbeing, and consistent denigration of both my work and my personhood.”

“Goodness, Truth, and Beauty”

While I shared Clarkson’s sentiments regarding our new hostile and authoritarian regime, I had my own private fear: as a resident historian of philosophy, would the new trustees force me to help them? I am a Leibnizian, both in the sense that my scholarship centers on the work of canonical seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and in the sense that I adopt a Leibniz-inspired approach in my own philosophical work. At New College, I regularly taught classic texts by influential Western philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. As mentioned above, I hold a Ph.D. from Catholic Villanova University, where, for five years, I had taught core curriculum ethics courses on “the good life” emphasizing virtue and the ideas of Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas. One of my Villanova classmates even happened to be Lee Cole, an Aquinas scholar and Hillsdale alum who now Chairs that school’s Department of Philosophy and Religion. Would trustees come knocking on my office door to pitch me on their new “classical” liberal arts program?

My fears proved misplaced: no one in the new administration ever approached me about curricular changes. Instead, I learned from news reports and tweets that, in claiming to “restore” a “classical” liberal arts education, they were planning to build a program around the pursuit of what they cryptically described as “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” Emblematic of this approach was the administration’s elimination of New College’s interdisciplinary program in Gender Studies. In August 2023, Rufo moved at a board meeting for the administration to take steps to eliminate the thirty-year old program, an action that would remove students’ ability to pursue Gender Studies as their “Area of Concentration,” or “AOC”— the college’s equivalent of a major. At the meeting, trustee Spalding, Professor of Government at Hillsdale, claimed that Gender Studies is, as a field, “very confused,” a “mish-mash,” and “ideological activism” rather than genuine scholarship. Although Spalding acknowledged that gender is a “very important question” that is “dividing our society” (trustee Mark Bauerlein—Professor Emeritus of English at Emory University and senior editor at First Things—added that “there have been many brilliant books, work and teaching done in the area”), the board approved the motion. According to Spalding, Gender Studies is “not something that should be elevated to being a discipline at a serious liberal arts college.”

After his motion passed, Rufo wrote on Substack that New College’s new mission to “restore classical liberal education and to revive the pursuit of transcendent truth” is at odds with “post-modern, anti-normative” fields like gender studies and queer theory that are “explicitly opposed to classical conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful.” The following month, he spelled out his views on gender in dogmatically religious terms in an essay published in Hillsdale’s house journal: “[n]o matter how advanced trans pharmaceuticals and surgeries become, the biological reality of man and woman cannot be abolished; the natural limitations of God’s Creation cannot be transcended.” The next summer, viral images taken by students showed piles of books left outside in dumpsters revealed that the College had purged itself of volumes once belonging to its Gender and Diversity Center. As critics invoked Nazi book burnings, Rufo tweeted “[w]e abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.”

Clearly, Rufo and his fellow trustees are exercised by the idea at the heart of academic Gender Studies: that what we call gender comes in a wide variety of forms that differ across times, places, and cultures. Worse yet is the idea of gender transition, which, for Rufo evidently entails artificially transgressing one’s God-given nature. As a result, their decision to eliminate the program raises questions regarding the academic freedom of students and faculty to pursue inquiry as they please, and, if indeed motivated by genuine religious conviction, the encroachment of religion upon American public education. I personally wanted to get to the bottom of all this talk of “goodness, truth, and beauty.” Acquainted as I was with the phrase as referring to the so-called “transcendental” properties thought by many pre-modern philosophers to be shared by all things, I was still in the dark about what it had to do with gender studies. More urgently, why was it upending the lives of everyone in the New College community?

My Very Own Classical Education

The takeover had an additional, personal dimension for me and my family. Days before the new trustees were announced, my partner and I learned that we would be having our first child. Amidst uncertainty at the College and with the knowledge that I would soon be on parental leave, we chose to relocate temporarily back to the Boston area to be closer to family support. While gaining this distance enabled me to better prepare for impending fatherhood, I felt duty-bound to investigate the takeover’s driving philosophy. A colleague informed me of the association between the Claremont Institute—home to new Trustee Charles Kesler—with the so-called “West-Coast” interpretation of mid-twentieth century emigré German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss. Together, we read Strauss’s 1953 book Natural Right and History, which features a paean to the self-evident, timeless truths announced in the American Declaration of Independence. His fear was that the forces of historical and moral relativism—here associated with German philosophers like Hegel—would soon overcome the native liberalism of his adopted home.

I began researching Hillsdale College, home to Trustee Spalding and the school frequently named as the model for De Santis’s New College. I discovered that, for Hillsdale, pursuing “goodness, truth, and beauty” is both the special vocation of Western man and code for the idea that we are all created for a purpose by God. According to the school’s website, “the good of anything is found in its ability to accomplish what it was created for…to realize its purpose for existence as intended by its maker.” Our purpose is “to seek truth, in order to discover and to act on what is good and beautiful in this life,” a task that “has essentially been the job description of Western Civilization for almost 3,000 years.” The network of personal connections between Hillsdale, Claremont, and the New College takeover became clearer: long-time Hillsdale President Larry Arnn, for instance, had helped found the Claremont Institute and studied under political philosopher Harry Jaffa, one of Strauss’s students and figurehead of the “West-Coast” school.

I learned that, under Arnn’s guidance, Hillsdale has been supporting a nation-wide network of “classical education charter schools.” The name “Classical education” hearkens back to an earlier era of American higher ed, before the advent of the “elective system”—courses that students enroll in voluntarily from a range of options—and when curricula were dominated by the study of classical Greek and Roman languages and literatures. Rather than furnish specialized scientific knowledge, the classics were thought to supply the lessons on virtue requisite for careers in the clergy or the professions. In adopting this term, the contemporary classical education movement signals its nostalgia for a more virtue-centric approach to shaping the youth than it finds in standard public education. “The human individual possesses both intellect and soul and, accordingly, the proper business of education is to train the mind as well as to improve the heart” writes Hillsdale Professor Emeritus of Education Jon Fennell in a co-authored paper on classical education’s “epistemological rationale.” To this end, classical education also “affirms the existence of standards of correctness and truth as well as of beauty and genuine significance.”

While the movement venerates the classics, it does not fully embrace this older ideal. It seems content, for instance, for its students to read these texts in English translation—a privilege not enjoyed by the Harvard and Yale men of old—and its curricula extend beyond the bounds of classical antiquity. Indeed, its approach borrows more from a different old-fashioned model of liberal education, the so-called “Great Books.” Originally developed by educators like Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago, the “Great Books” approach was itself a reaction against the specialized humanistic, natural, and social scientific learning which, with the rise of the specialized PhD degree as the qualification for university teaching, had supplanted nineteenth-century classical study. Instead, it wanted to give students from all walks of life direct access to primary source books, the greatness of which lay in their capacity to transcend their contexts by posing fundamental and enduring human questions. Originally, Great Books programs privileged works from the global West, and Hutchins defended this bias as a way of introducing American students to their own native tradition. However, excluding the works of other civilizations and traditions was also a feature, not a bug of his vision: according to Hutchins, the defining feature of Western Civilization, as opposed to any other, was an ongoing “Great Conversation” carried out in and through the great books.

The tensions inherent in this model should be readily apparent. Even if we could assume that our students are in fact “Western,” who determines which books are great? Do other venerable written cultures—those of China or India, for instance—lack their own great books or conversations? Has the Western “Great Conversation” really unfolded in splendid isolation from the rest of global intellectual history? Finally, as important as understanding one’s own tradition and heritage may be, is it not at least equally important to expand one’s horizons? For reasons like these, St. John’s College, one of the traditional bastions of the Great Books approach, now offers Master’s programs in both Eastern and Middle Eastern Classics at its Santa Fe campus. Hillsdale, however, does not appear to concern itself with these questions. According to Fennell, “it is difficult to envision a classical school that fails to affirm that its purpose includes inculcating virtue and wisdom, or that refrains from noting that the school exists to acquaint the young with Truth, Beauty, and the Good, to rightly order their loves, and to initiate them into them Great Conversation that is Western civilization.”

Through my amateur sleuthing, I also discovered that Hillsdale offers a suite of free online courses, meaning that anyone with an Internet connection can obtain a “Classical Education” of their own. In October of 2023, I decided to become a virtual Hillsdale student myself, enrolling in “Introduction to the Western Philosophical Tradition,” a course delivered by Hillsdale Professor of Philosophy and Religion Nathan Schlueter. The 14-lecture course surveys the history of Western philosophy, its introduction promising that a “good education in philosophy” serves as a “bulwark against ideas that are destructive to human life and freedom.” Over the next few weeks, I watched Schlueter’s lectures during three a.m. feedings, our newborn son imbibing philosophy along with his bottle. Ensconced in a wood-paneled library located somewhere—I can only assume—on the Hillsdale campus, Schlueter speaks affably and directly into the camera, making it feel like we were taking our own private philosophy tutorial. My sleep deprivation notwithstanding, I proudly scored a 98% on the final quiz and received a digital certificate of completion signed by Arnn. I also received an email indicating that, for a $100 tax-deductible gift to Hillsdale, I could own my very own DVD box-set of Schlueter’s course, “perfect for parents and grandparents who want to educate their children in an age that denies fundamental truth, goodness, and beauty.”

Schlueter’s course presents itself as a standard Western-centric introduction to philosophy, covering canonical figures from the Classical, Medieval, and Modern periods like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche. However, it also has a clear agenda. On Schlueter’s telling, Western philosophy moves from a glorious beginning in classical Greek antiquity, to an apotheosis in Aquinas’s Medieval synthesis of philosophical reason with Abrahamic revelation, and then into a period of decline in modernity and postmodernity. This developmental arc concerns the degree to which philosophers have managed to contemplate the “self-evident,” eternal, and “objective” truths which, for Schlueter, are directly baked into the world. Realism about these truths, whether in the guise of metaphysical forms or universal moral values, is good, whereas all varieties of skepticism, relativism, historicism, and subjectivism are bad.

For Schlueter, modern philosophy is largely bad because, by adopting a Baconian vision of science that reduces knowledge of nature to the power to manipulate, it loses the capacity to appreciate self-evident truth. According to Schlueter, this catastrophe leads to the rejection of objective natural realities whether physical (e.g. Kant’s denial of our knowledge of things in themselves) or moral (e.g. Nietzschean creation of values). The result is an ongoing breakdown in Western man’s relationship with nature, since we fail to recognize the self-evident truths that are everywhere around us. Rather than allowing our mind to conform to the authority of external reality, we subordinate that reality to the powers of our mind. Ultimately, in Nietzsche we encounter a postmodern “crisis of reason” in which, according to Schlueter, “we don’t know reality, we create reality.”

In the final lecture, Schlueter locates the solution to postmodernity’s crisis of reason in the work of beloved twentieth-century Christian apologist and fantasist C.S. Lewis. For Schlueter, Lewis’s 1943 book The Abolition of Man supplies the saving rejoinder to modern skepticism. Lewis’s book is an all-out assault (in the words of Lewis’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter, “a harangue”) on the idea that value ascriptions like the claim “this sunset is beautiful” express merely subjective feelings and beliefs. In other words, for Lewis, “this sunset is beautiful” cannot simply mean that I feel that the sunset is beautiful. Instead, the beauty of the sunset must be inherent in the real sunset itself. Lewis concerns himself with this semantic point because he believes that if value judgments are not anchored in objective truths, then we lose any shared standard of moral judgment. Further, lacking the reverence and awe we should properly feel before wonders of nature or acts of human heroism, we become “men without chests” bereft of the metaphorical heart required to combat evil.

Lewis argues that a proper and reverent commitment to the “objective value” of nature is present in “traditional morality.” However, decadent moderns have lost sight of this truth and embraced subjectivism. Modern society has thus, for Lewis, lost the capacity for collective ethical deliberation and abandoned the foundations of civilization itself.

For Lewis, we cannot restore the natural physical and moral order with reason alone. This instrument is incapable of proving the real existence of “objective value” to those who lack the eyes to see. Instead, drawing on Plato’s tripartite account of the soul in the Republic, Lewis suggests that a virtuous human life must rely on a harmonious relationship between reason, spirit and appetite; head, chest and belly. Only in this way can we properly recognize the truth and govern our base desires: “As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the spirited element. The head rules the belly through the chest.” In this way, the crisis that Lewis diagnoses is not, in fact, one of reason alone: it is one of conviction. The solution? An education that restores the spirit, chest, or heart: we must adopt “a dogmatic belief in objective value,” which “is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”

In fairness to Lewis, the lectures compiled in The Abolition of Man were delivered during the second world war, and the Britons whom he addressed—oppressed by bombing raids and rationing—surely needed a morale boost. In one passage quoted by Schlueter, Lewis writes of the need for spirit that “in battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.” In our own time, Schlueter’s choice to close the course with Lewis reads most of all as a refined way of stoking chesty indignation against liberal toleration. Sick and tired of the woke agenda? Take this course and learn to let the anger flow through you. This feature of the course is symptomatic of what is—in my opinion—an unfortunate decision about what the study of philosophy is for. Reading old books of philosophy is the best way that I know of to learn about how people radically different from me envisioned themselves and the world. Reading such books with students helps them recognize just how little they know about what it has meant to be human. In Hillsdale’s “Introduction to the Western Philosophical Tradition,” however, philosophy is not about learning something new about what human nature may be. Instead, it is preparation to wage war against what you have been told human nature is not.

Lewis’s defense of “objective value” in fact provides the one substantive inclusion of “non-Western” thought in Schlueter’s course. Lewis calls the way of life committed to objective value “the Dao,” in honor of the Confucian “way” or “path” of virtuous human behavior. Schlueter muses that “the Dao” is “a strange word for [Lewis] to use… why does Lewis choose a word from Chinese to write to Westerners about the crisis of the West?” He answers his own question by pointing out that Lewis’s point is that moral virtue and “the chest” is not just localized in the west: “traditional societies” from around the globe were also aware of these truths. Lewis’s, “Dao” is, therefore, a genuinely trans-cultural idea. Despite endorsing Lewis’s moral realism, however, Schlueter does not take the step of encouraging his viewers to open a book by Confucius or any other “non-Western” figures. The claim that moral truth transcends culture excuses the course’s own incuriosity towards what other peoples have thought and felt. If the Dao is truly universal, why leave home to find it?

Over time I realized that there is another way of understanding Schlueter’s agenda, one that becomes visible if one takes up a vantage point further to the political right. Indeed, Hillsdale is not only engaged in a civilizational struggle against the progressive left. Rather, its “classical education” also seeks to tame the wild energies coursing through the young right, to channel them away from more extreme reaction. Lewis’s book is as much a bulwark against right-wing nihilism as against liberal relativism. From this second perspective, the course is an attempt to convert students away from figures like Nietzsche and towards the comforts of traditional orthodoxy. But make no mistake: both sides are not the same. One side it views as tender young hearts and minds in need of a classical education; the other it regards as something not quite--or even less than--human: as “men without chests.”

I cannot say for sure that the spirit of Schlueter’s course pervades Hillsdale as a whole. However, I suspect that it does. Unlike at most contemporary research universities, where philosophy departments typically wield little institutional power, philosophy appears to be at the beating heart of Hilldale’s classical education. Recall that Arnn himself has an academic background in political philosophy; unlike most college presidents, he will talk to students about Aristotle. Further, its peculiar vision of philosophy is baked into its institutional self-understanding. In a description of its “Classical Liberal Arts” core curriculum, we are told that Hillsdale students “follow a journey through literature, philosophy, theology, history, the fine arts, and the natural sciences, and begin to see the world as a cohesive whole.” To this metaphysical unity corresponds a unity of the sciences, for which the glue, Schlueter argues in “Philosophy, The University, and Hillsdale College,” an essay published on Hillsdale’s blog, comes from philosophy: “without the centripetal pressure of philosophy, each discipline tends to spin off into its own insulated and autonomous sphere.” Philosophy exerts this binding force because it leads directly to a knowledge of the source of all things: God. “The philosophical quest for Wisdom inevitably becomes a search for God,” he writes: “philosophy always leads to theology.” According to Schlueter, unlike competing institutions, Hillsdale’s academic program advances the cause of civil and religious liberty by “defending the rightful place of philosophy in higher education against the forces of secularization, specialization, and professionalization.”

Learning to Think

The new New College administration clearly favors a virtue-centric “Great Books” model of liberal education that aims at the “good, the true, and the beautiful.” Indeed, it has gone so far as to enshrine the phrase in the school’s updated mission statement: “together, we seek the good, the true, and the beautiful, in the firm knowledge that only through the eternal verities can we move the earth.” All students now take a core curriculum “Logos” course on what may be the most foundational text of all Western civilization, Homer’s Odyssey. In January 2024, the administration announced that the school would be starting an online degree program in the Great Books in collaboration with the “Ricketts Great Book College.” The eponymous Joe Ricketts, billionaire Founder of TD Ameritrade and co-owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball franchise, was named that year’s commencement speaker. A bizarre Ricketts promotional video intersperses apparently AI-generated images of great intellectuals like Leibniz (“brought to life as never before”) with footage of academics extolling the greatness of what you will learn. One unfortunately edited clip simply reports that “the sex is wonderful.” Great sex notwithstanding, New College’s collaboration with Ricketts failed to inspire any great deal of interest; the program is now defunct.

According to Corcoran, a liberal arts education should teach students “how to think” rather than “what to think.” Indeed, the alleged sin of my old school was teaching students “what to think” by indoctrinating them with “woke ideology.” How do we teach students how to think? According to Corcoran’s 2024 book, Storming the Ivory Tower, by inculcating them with the wisdom of the “Great Conversation”: “For students to learn to think, we do not have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to do what educators have done for hundreds of years: expose students to the conversation of the centuries” (276). Conveniently, this project benefits from the rigorous bodily discipline that comes with the school’s new emphasis on athletics. David Rancourt, a former lobbyist turned higher-ed thought leader serving as New College’s Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives, has argued in First Things, of which New College trustee Bauerlein is an editor, to proclaim that “the Great Books ought not only to be read but lived.” Schools should impose strict honor codes and “encourage competitive sports, especially team sports,” because “without concrete activities and campus policies that encourage morality and virtuous conduct, the Great Books are just great stories.”

It does not require a fancy liberal arts education to see that we cannot neatly separate teaching the “how” of thinking from teaching the “what.” As an example, if teaching students “how to think” means inspiring them to seek “goodness, truth, and beauty;” if it means arming them with the Great Books in an age that denies the reality of the former and the greatness of the latter; then it unavoidably comes with a pretty large helping of teaching students “what to think.”

After a semester of teaching at New College remotely, and then a subsequent year of unpaid leave, I finally resigned my position at New College this past August. I have not set foot on campus since I packed up my office in May 2023, and I know that I would not recognize the place now. On top of the missing colleagues and students, the building that housed my office has been demolished. One day, without warning, workmen showed up to raze the Uplands Preserve, bayfront parkland where I liked to commune with raccoons, snakes, and osprey. Why? So that the school could put up beach volleyball courts. Distraught neighbors, many of whom used the Preserve to walk their dogs or to witness the awe-inspiring sunsets over Sarasota Bay, organized a memorial service for the many trees displaced by what the school had done.

My love for Leibniz arises from the fact that he, more than any other figure in the history of philosophy, followed the idea of “goodness, truth, and beauty” to its logical conclusion. Leibniz infamously argued that we inhabit the “best of all possible worlds.” Prior to creation, Leibniz has us imagine, God surveys all the possible forms the world can take. He then chooses the best world, or the one that is most intellectually and aesthetically pleasing to Him. God weighs every detail, and so what appears to us as evil—natural disasters, political injustice, war—is really for the best, part of divine providence or God’s plan. There is no true disorder; everything has its “sufficient reason;” and nothing that exists deserves to be thrown away in some metaphysical dumpster. Goodness, truth, and beauty indeed.

Leibniz’s vision has always been unpopular. Most famously, it was the target of Voltaire’s relentless satire in Candide. I too was skeptical at first, telling myself and others that my fascination for his philosophy came from wanting to understand how Leibniz—certainly a candidate for the greatest mind the world ever produced—could have erred so wildly.

But I slowly came around. For starters, Leibniz surely had a point when he argued that we should not let despair stop us from working to make things better. I found myself in more substantial agreement, however, with the anti-sectarian methodology that Leibniz developed from his hyperbolic optimism. If everything that exists has its proper place, then it follows that every idea has meaning. Old or new, “Western” or “non-Western,” Great or middling, it can teach us something about the world. At the very least, we should not blithely condemn ideas that appear to us as unfamiliar or foreign. From Leibniz’s perspective, those who are guilty of doing so substitute their own meager standards for God’s judgment. Not only do they limit their experience of the real goodness, truth, and beauty manifest in the world, but they risk consuming themselves (and the rest of us) in hatred. As Leibniz once put it, philosophical schools are “right in a good part of what they propose, but not so much in what they deny.”

For Leibniz, learning “how to think” thus means learning to experience the good in things, to make new connections, and to be wary of the desire to condemn. Whether my students personally believed in God or in Nature alone, it was this lesson that I wanted to teach at New College. Alas, the ugliness of this world proved too great; my New College found itself—in Leibniz’s terms— “incompossible” with Florida. In the end, I do recognize that the school was not just the victim of De Santis’s authoritarian educational program. New College’s utopian ambitions were also out of step with a world that treats education as an expensive commodity, and for which the humanities are increasingly an afterthought. But what really made the place the best of all possible liberal arts colleges was the trust it placed in students, its recognition that “in the last analysis, every student is responsible for his or her own education.” It gave to all of us who knew and loved it reason to believe that “the natural state of the human spirit is ecstatic wonder.” We should settle for nothing less.