Thanks for writing this, Chris. I'm sorry about your experience at New College, but I'm grateful you shared it. I wish you the best of luck wherever you land next. I especially appreciate how you position the takeover in the broader context of right-wing politics and connect it to the revival of Great Books. I've also been thinking about that connection recently as I've watched the growing popularity of K-12 schools that promote "classical education" and watched "canonical" books like Moby Dick flood my Notes feed. It definitely feels like the vibe has shifted. Your piece made me think about how Gender Studies not only questions gender constructs, but it's also a discipline rooted in skepticism and relativism. It critiques power structures and historical narratives, arguing for modes of thought beyond rationalism and dualism. Along with its disciplinary partner literary studies, it destabilizes the idea of a Western canon, asserting the relevance of other voices and art forms. Beyond the obvious DEI stuff, this is what's really incompatible with the Hillsdale model.
One small thing, though it matters to this Floridian: For nearly 60 years, New College was possible in Florida, until a group of mostly outsiders decided to colonize an existing community and impose their vision--something that's unfortunately all too common in Florida's 500-year history. I remember watching the takeover in despair here in Orlando while many outside the state dismissed it as simply "Florida being Florida," even though Rufo was clear New College was just an experiment to test out this model of educational capture. A few years later, we're watching Trump siege the Ivy League, and all I can say is I'm not surprised. New College was the canary and some chose not to heed its dying call.
Thank you, Liz. And yes, as you may be aware, one of our slogans in 2023 was "your campus is next." Fully agreed on what you write re: "skepticism" and "relativism." New College Trustee Bauerlein in particular has argued that the humanities/liberal arts should not be centered on "critical thinking."
Chris, I had not heard about that from Bauerlein. That is completely astonishing. It seems to me that with that attitude, the notion of populations as biopolitical resources to be managed (and considered replaceable, and expendable) risks coming to fruition at the College.
I'm terribly sorry, but I began this and found I couldn't read very far. I am a Floridian. New College was a Florida spring, out of which flowed spirit rather than water. It is our eternal shame what we did to it. I hope you land on your feet -- I hope you have landed on your feet -- Chris. But, more than that, I hope New College is returned to us someday, shimmering in the sun.
As a graduate of Reed College, I was disappointed when my son declined admission with a full scholarship to New College of Florida back in 2009 because I felt it was the closest institution of higher education to Reed that he got into. Between the kind of ideologically driven censorship and curricula bludgeoning you describe and the general view that higher education is a commodity whose only worth is the promise of obtaining a higher salary, what liberal arts college has a chance these days? Reed is trying. But, unlike New College of Florida, it is a private college and the state of Oregon can't directly interfere with its governance. Yours is such a sad tale. It's the first "insider" account I've read about what happened to New College. Painful. I wish you all the best in a new job where you have secure academic freedom.
Thank you for your kind note, Mira. It will likely come as no surprise that there were lots of connections to Reed amongst the New College faculty. One of my former colleagues, in fact, has recently found a new home there.
Ah. Good for him or her or them. It’s very different than when I was there in the 1970s, but it’s still an excellent college. I really hope you find a good new home too.
Thank you so much for writing this. I attended New College from 2000-2003 as a philosophy and religion double concentration, and was an avid student and admirer of both April Flakne and Doug Langston. I was also lucky enough to learn just a bit from Mike Michalson as well through Varieties of Religious Existentialism and then a Kant tutorial. It's wonderful to read about someone like yourself continuing and really expanding the education they provided - the ideas behind New College are truly such a treasure. I would not be who I am today were it not for the spectacular education I received at New College. So of course it breaks my heart to see the school fall apart under fascism. I hold onto the community that remains between all of us and the resistance that continues to teach me so much about how to respond to what is happening in the world now.
I suppose that if anyone reading this is curious, I can share this write-up of a history of philosophy course that I taught at New College (and which I believe represents a good example of what was possible there). It is also, let's say, my alternative to the class that I write about in the article (also has a guest appearance by JSR):
Thank you for allowing this Novocollegian (‘69-‘73) to peer under the hood of ‘What DeSantis Did’ to my alma mater. When I arrived there was a Freshman Core Curriculum surveying Aesthetics as a way to break the ice of rigid High School thinking. Existentialism was big, God was Dead, and students were indeed responsible for shaping their education. The sunsets and thunderheads and waterspouts were incredible.
Bravo, Chris. Thanks for pulling back the curtain and letting us have a look not just at the demise of a wonderful school but also at the thought leaders (can they even be called leaders?) crashing their way through a narrow minded worldview.
My parents attended the University of Chicago under Hutchins, and were molded by that experience to become active in many liberal causes. They approved of my choice of New College because some of the New College curriculum emulated UofC. In the early days there was a core curriculum for first year students. When I matriculated in 1969 only the humanities core was available. It was fantastic- a firehose of philosophy, literature, art and history of Western Civilization. In spite of this classical emphasis we were still weird. To this day I consider New College as the formative influence on my life. Indeed it taught me how think.
Thank you so much for the comment, and for the info about the early days.
Despite the "tensions" I describe in the piece, I should be clear that I do appreciate the "Great Books"--when done responsibly in a non-partisan way that neither dismisses the value of specialized scholarship nor closes itself off from the wider world.
I was struck by how the story of New College maps onto the broader crisis Horton et al. (2025) describe in Trust in Science (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1643081/full): credibility treated as a credential rather than a relationship, trust assumed to flow automatically among insiders. What the Florida case exposes to me is that "teaching people how to think" still too often happens in sealed rooms—among those who can afford the time and psychic space to ponder "the good, the true, and the beautiful."
But trust in science, like trust in education, doesn't come from transcendence; it comes from contact. It grows through consistent engagement with everyone—not just those who have the luxury of debating first principles, but also the service workers, parents, adjuncts, and overextended contract staff who keep the whole system running while trying to hold a life together and who, according to recent research, don't trust the increasingly transactional systems, individuals, and institutions that steward social good.
I love working with academics; I share their hopes for clarity and coherence. Yet as an administrative assistant and working mother juggling contracts who grew up in red, working-class America, I feel the widening distance between the thinkers, the stinkers, and the drinkers—the few who shape narratives of reason, the many who labor within them, and the rest of us who absorb the fallout. The "thinkers" often speak of public trust as if it were a communications problem—a matter of better messaging—when it is really a structural one: too little reciprocity, too few porous boundaries.
Westerlund's idea of identity on credit fits painfully well here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr5hGHOV15M). Within academia, once trust is earned among peers, it is treated as permanent collateral—proof of credibility that travels unchecked. Outside that circle, however, those of us living on rolling deadlines and borrowed time experience something closer to ressentiment: watching trust circulate where access and security already exist.
I think you are right that trust in science cannot be maintained by citing virtue or invoking "objective value." It requires humility—the kind Noble ends with when he writes that New College's greatness lay in the trust it placed in students, its belief that "every student is responsible for his or her own education." That principle must extend beyond campus gates, and for too many higher education institutes this extension has been failing for a while now (and I don't think the current approach is fixing that - it feels like angry backlash, as The Hinternet's 'A World-Historical Upgrade from March suggested to me, at least.) Until the scientific community practices the same distributed trust—engaging not only its peers but the whole social ecology that sustains inquiry—appeals to "truth" will keep sounding like privilege rehearsed as principle to far too many. I think there are some interesting moves to be more truly inclusive—see the work by Owen R. Thornton at UNC: https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/articles/j9602g974.
Thank you, Professor Noble, for your insightful essay. I have worked in the Save New College movement since the Board of Trustees meeting in which Dr. Okker was dismissed. In all this time, your essay is the first I have read that articulates the dogmatic reality behind the sloganeering that has characterized the hostile takeover of New College. Your account of Schlueter's online course and the whole Hillsdale approach to education is especially helpful. It explains how the "Teach-them-how-to-think-not-what-to-think" mantra that has been repeated on campus ad nauseam is self-contradictory. The campaign to promote "free speech and civil discourse" and eliminate "woke indoctrination" aims to establish exactly the kind of stifling orthodoxy it claims to abolish. The project is Orwellian, albeit with a much gentler touch than anything Orwell himself contemplated.
Rodrigo Díaz
New College alumnus
Class of 1991
PS: my contract sponsor was Douglas Langston, Duns Scotus scholar you mentioned.
Thank you, and yes, Douglas Langston, RIP. I did not know Professor Langston well, but he did still come into the office some after his retirement. He gifted me copies of both "God's Willing Knowledge" and his edition of Boethius. I hope that I was able to do justice to his legacy in my time at New College.
What I find most ironic here, is that the Leibnizian view you explain, in which God "surveys all the possible forms the world can take, [and] then chooses the best world", reads to me like the very epitome of a top-down worldview, where the universe is centrally ordered and controlled, from its origins all the way down to its smallest detail. Even if one were to abstract away the God of classical theism, the picture still reads extremely top-down.
At the farthest zoom level, that doesn't sound all that different from the kind of top-down view that the College's new and sad mission statement wants to impart! It's almost like a top-quality vs a shoddy version of the same basic thing.
For me, the beauty of the scientific revolution, and philosophy informed by it, is not to "reduce" all of reality to some elusive physical principles (that never really worked), but to shift the entire perspective, from top-down to bottom-up. Order and complexity emerge from the bottom up, from the interactions of simpler components, without anything resembling a central plan or a preordained design, in an evolutionary, chaotic process. This is an incredibly inspiring view! Reality itself is productive, creative, full of potential, and therefore always ready to surpass itself and surprise its earlier productions, such as us. This is, to me, a particularly deep form of spirituality - one that does not project human notions of hierarchy and authority on to God or Nature.
I guess that makes me closer to Spinoza than Leibniz... sorry to intrude!!
Fwiw, Spinoza has been a constant interlocutor for me, and I do think that my own question of whether to side with him or Leibniz is in the background of the essay.
Alexandria Brown is a violent terf who publicly states that trans women are men who pretend to be women in order to gain "preferential treatment" and who recorded a hideous transphobic online hate video titled "Feminazi."
Thanks for writing this, Chris. I'm sorry about your experience at New College, but I'm grateful you shared it. I wish you the best of luck wherever you land next. I especially appreciate how you position the takeover in the broader context of right-wing politics and connect it to the revival of Great Books. I've also been thinking about that connection recently as I've watched the growing popularity of K-12 schools that promote "classical education" and watched "canonical" books like Moby Dick flood my Notes feed. It definitely feels like the vibe has shifted. Your piece made me think about how Gender Studies not only questions gender constructs, but it's also a discipline rooted in skepticism and relativism. It critiques power structures and historical narratives, arguing for modes of thought beyond rationalism and dualism. Along with its disciplinary partner literary studies, it destabilizes the idea of a Western canon, asserting the relevance of other voices and art forms. Beyond the obvious DEI stuff, this is what's really incompatible with the Hillsdale model.
One small thing, though it matters to this Floridian: For nearly 60 years, New College was possible in Florida, until a group of mostly outsiders decided to colonize an existing community and impose their vision--something that's unfortunately all too common in Florida's 500-year history. I remember watching the takeover in despair here in Orlando while many outside the state dismissed it as simply "Florida being Florida," even though Rufo was clear New College was just an experiment to test out this model of educational capture. A few years later, we're watching Trump siege the Ivy League, and all I can say is I'm not surprised. New College was the canary and some chose not to heed its dying call.
Thank you, Liz. And yes, as you may be aware, one of our slogans in 2023 was "your campus is next." Fully agreed on what you write re: "skepticism" and "relativism." New College Trustee Bauerlein in particular has argued that the humanities/liberal arts should not be centered on "critical thinking."
Chris, I had not heard about that from Bauerlein. That is completely astonishing. It seems to me that with that attitude, the notion of populations as biopolitical resources to be managed (and considered replaceable, and expendable) risks coming to fruition at the College.
I'm terribly sorry, but I began this and found I couldn't read very far. I am a Floridian. New College was a Florida spring, out of which flowed spirit rather than water. It is our eternal shame what we did to it. I hope you land on your feet -- I hope you have landed on your feet -- Chris. But, more than that, I hope New College is returned to us someday, shimmering in the sun.
I don't believe in eternal shame.
As a graduate of Reed College, I was disappointed when my son declined admission with a full scholarship to New College of Florida back in 2009 because I felt it was the closest institution of higher education to Reed that he got into. Between the kind of ideologically driven censorship and curricula bludgeoning you describe and the general view that higher education is a commodity whose only worth is the promise of obtaining a higher salary, what liberal arts college has a chance these days? Reed is trying. But, unlike New College of Florida, it is a private college and the state of Oregon can't directly interfere with its governance. Yours is such a sad tale. It's the first "insider" account I've read about what happened to New College. Painful. I wish you all the best in a new job where you have secure academic freedom.
Thank you for your kind note, Mira. It will likely come as no surprise that there were lots of connections to Reed amongst the New College faculty. One of my former colleagues, in fact, has recently found a new home there.
Ah. Good for him or her or them. It’s very different than when I was there in the 1970s, but it’s still an excellent college. I really hope you find a good new home too.
Thank you so much for writing this. I attended New College from 2000-2003 as a philosophy and religion double concentration, and was an avid student and admirer of both April Flakne and Doug Langston. I was also lucky enough to learn just a bit from Mike Michalson as well through Varieties of Religious Existentialism and then a Kant tutorial. It's wonderful to read about someone like yourself continuing and really expanding the education they provided - the ideas behind New College are truly such a treasure. I would not be who I am today were it not for the spectacular education I received at New College. So of course it breaks my heart to see the school fall apart under fascism. I hold onto the community that remains between all of us and the resistance that continues to teach me so much about how to respond to what is happening in the world now.
Thank you, Robin.
I suppose that if anyone reading this is curious, I can share this write-up of a history of philosophy course that I taught at New College (and which I believe represents a good example of what was possible there). It is also, let's say, my alternative to the class that I write about in the article (also has a guest appearance by JSR):
https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/03/15/syllabus-showcase-what-is-philosophy-global-perspectives-on-philosophical-history-christopher-p-noble/
I thank you for this thorough and heartwarming/heartbreaking piece.
Class of 1996
Thank you for allowing this Novocollegian (‘69-‘73) to peer under the hood of ‘What DeSantis Did’ to my alma mater. When I arrived there was a Freshman Core Curriculum surveying Aesthetics as a way to break the ice of rigid High School thinking. Existentialism was big, God was Dead, and students were indeed responsible for shaping their education. The sunsets and thunderheads and waterspouts were incredible.
Thanks! I did not know about the Aesthetics course!
Bravo, Chris. Thanks for pulling back the curtain and letting us have a look not just at the demise of a wonderful school but also at the thought leaders (can they even be called leaders?) crashing their way through a narrow minded worldview.
My parents attended the University of Chicago under Hutchins, and were molded by that experience to become active in many liberal causes. They approved of my choice of New College because some of the New College curriculum emulated UofC. In the early days there was a core curriculum for first year students. When I matriculated in 1969 only the humanities core was available. It was fantastic- a firehose of philosophy, literature, art and history of Western Civilization. In spite of this classical emphasis we were still weird. To this day I consider New College as the formative influence on my life. Indeed it taught me how think.
Thank you so much for the comment, and for the info about the early days.
Despite the "tensions" I describe in the piece, I should be clear that I do appreciate the "Great Books"--when done responsibly in a non-partisan way that neither dismisses the value of specialized scholarship nor closes itself off from the wider world.
Nice piece. You might want to fix this typo (a sentence fragment, perhaps at the end of a paragraph):
It is good, in other words, when the mind For Schlueter, modern philosophy is largely bad because,
Thank you. Hyperbolic optimism is intriguing.
Nothing says pursuit of "the good, the true, and the beautiful" quite like replacing a nature preserve with a volleyball court.
On the nose. Heartwarming to see.
I was struck by how the story of New College maps onto the broader crisis Horton et al. (2025) describe in Trust in Science (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1643081/full): credibility treated as a credential rather than a relationship, trust assumed to flow automatically among insiders. What the Florida case exposes to me is that "teaching people how to think" still too often happens in sealed rooms—among those who can afford the time and psychic space to ponder "the good, the true, and the beautiful."
But trust in science, like trust in education, doesn't come from transcendence; it comes from contact. It grows through consistent engagement with everyone—not just those who have the luxury of debating first principles, but also the service workers, parents, adjuncts, and overextended contract staff who keep the whole system running while trying to hold a life together and who, according to recent research, don't trust the increasingly transactional systems, individuals, and institutions that steward social good.
I love working with academics; I share their hopes for clarity and coherence. Yet as an administrative assistant and working mother juggling contracts who grew up in red, working-class America, I feel the widening distance between the thinkers, the stinkers, and the drinkers—the few who shape narratives of reason, the many who labor within them, and the rest of us who absorb the fallout. The "thinkers" often speak of public trust as if it were a communications problem—a matter of better messaging—when it is really a structural one: too little reciprocity, too few porous boundaries.
Westerlund's idea of identity on credit fits painfully well here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr5hGHOV15M). Within academia, once trust is earned among peers, it is treated as permanent collateral—proof of credibility that travels unchecked. Outside that circle, however, those of us living on rolling deadlines and borrowed time experience something closer to ressentiment: watching trust circulate where access and security already exist.
I think you are right that trust in science cannot be maintained by citing virtue or invoking "objective value." It requires humility—the kind Noble ends with when he writes that New College's greatness lay in the trust it placed in students, its belief that "every student is responsible for his or her own education." That principle must extend beyond campus gates, and for too many higher education institutes this extension has been failing for a while now (and I don't think the current approach is fixing that - it feels like angry backlash, as The Hinternet's 'A World-Historical Upgrade from March suggested to me, at least.) Until the scientific community practices the same distributed trust—engaging not only its peers but the whole social ecology that sustains inquiry—appeals to "truth" will keep sounding like privilege rehearsed as principle to far too many. I think there are some interesting moves to be more truly inclusive—see the work by Owen R. Thornton at UNC: https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/articles/j9602g974.
Thank you, Professor Noble, for your insightful essay. I have worked in the Save New College movement since the Board of Trustees meeting in which Dr. Okker was dismissed. In all this time, your essay is the first I have read that articulates the dogmatic reality behind the sloganeering that has characterized the hostile takeover of New College. Your account of Schlueter's online course and the whole Hillsdale approach to education is especially helpful. It explains how the "Teach-them-how-to-think-not-what-to-think" mantra that has been repeated on campus ad nauseam is self-contradictory. The campaign to promote "free speech and civil discourse" and eliminate "woke indoctrination" aims to establish exactly the kind of stifling orthodoxy it claims to abolish. The project is Orwellian, albeit with a much gentler touch than anything Orwell himself contemplated.
Rodrigo Díaz
New College alumnus
Class of 1991
PS: my contract sponsor was Douglas Langston, Duns Scotus scholar you mentioned.
Thank you, and yes, Douglas Langston, RIP. I did not know Professor Langston well, but he did still come into the office some after his retirement. He gifted me copies of both "God's Willing Knowledge" and his edition of Boethius. I hope that I was able to do justice to his legacy in my time at New College.
What I find most ironic here, is that the Leibnizian view you explain, in which God "surveys all the possible forms the world can take, [and] then chooses the best world", reads to me like the very epitome of a top-down worldview, where the universe is centrally ordered and controlled, from its origins all the way down to its smallest detail. Even if one were to abstract away the God of classical theism, the picture still reads extremely top-down.
At the farthest zoom level, that doesn't sound all that different from the kind of top-down view that the College's new and sad mission statement wants to impart! It's almost like a top-quality vs a shoddy version of the same basic thing.
For me, the beauty of the scientific revolution, and philosophy informed by it, is not to "reduce" all of reality to some elusive physical principles (that never really worked), but to shift the entire perspective, from top-down to bottom-up. Order and complexity emerge from the bottom up, from the interactions of simpler components, without anything resembling a central plan or a preordained design, in an evolutionary, chaotic process. This is an incredibly inspiring view! Reality itself is productive, creative, full of potential, and therefore always ready to surpass itself and surprise its earlier productions, such as us. This is, to me, a particularly deep form of spirituality - one that does not project human notions of hierarchy and authority on to God or Nature.
I guess that makes me closer to Spinoza than Leibniz... sorry to intrude!!
Thank you, and no need to apologize!
Fwiw, Spinoza has been a constant interlocutor for me, and I do think that my own question of whether to side with him or Leibniz is in the background of the essay.
"Tropically Storming The Ivory Tower" is an essay I first wrote July 9th, 2023. : )
https://alexandriafanellabrown.substack.com/p/tropically-storming-the-ivory-tower
Alexandria Brown is a violent terf who publicly states that trans women are men who pretend to be women in order to gain "preferential treatment" and who recorded a hideous transphobic online hate video titled "Feminazi."