As New College of Florida continues to move in a different ideological direction, former students and faculty members are building what they see as an educational resistance.
They have joined national and international free-speech and education groups to form “Alt New College,” a network of online courses for students who remain at the revamped New College and, as critics see it, face limits on what they can learn and say.
Alt New College is making a big splash on Monday with its first event: an online discussion between the philosopher Judith Butler and the writer Masha Gessen on “The Authoritarian Assault on Gender Studies.” The talk’s topic is no coincidence. New College’s Board of Trustees moved last month to start dismantling the public institution’s gender-studies program; the program’s only full-time gender-studies instructor also resigned.
All eyes have been on New College since last winter, when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, appointed a slate of conservative trustees to its board. At the time, a DeSantis aide said the goal was to turn New College into “the Hillsdale of the South,” referring to the Christian college in Michigan. Since then, the board has fired the institution’s president, denied five professors’ tenure bids amid protests, and eliminated the office that handled New College’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, along with targeting the gender-studies program. More than a third of New College’s faculty members did not return to campus this fall. Now some of those faculty members are working with Alt New College, whose website bills it as “an online institute to support the academic freedom of faculty and students following the hostile takeover of New College of Florida.”
New College’s new leaders believe their overhaul is a necessary corrective at an institution where enrollment was faltering and a progressive orthodoxy reigned supreme, stifling expression of certain viewpoints. Some New College students have joined a lawsuit to fight the recent changes. Others have been urged to transfer to more welcoming campuses, such as Hampshire College or Colorado College.
We’re offering education, which I think should not be a controversial thing.
Those involved with Alt New College, meanwhile, cast their project as a corrective to the corrective, opposing recent institutional changes that they feel have stifled expression. They explicitly see their work as a fight against autocracy modeled on efforts around the world to disseminate knowledge in countries where education is tightly controlled.
Alt New College will offer free and subsidized online talks as well as “miniclasses.” Its fall lineup includes Butler and Gessen; Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who will discuss critical race theory; and David Hogg, a cofounder of March for Our Lives, who will address youth involvement in the political process.
The network hopes eventually to add semester-long accredited courses through Bard College, in New York, credit for which could be transferred to New College or another institution.
Myanmar, Russia, and Florida
Also among Alt New College’s backers are PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group, and the Open Society University Network, an international collective with $1 billion in funding that aims to leverage teaching and research to solve the world’s biggest problems; Bard is a founding member of the latter. Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs at Bard, also holds a leadership role in the university network, known as OSUN. Becker first visited New College in the spring after concerned community members contacted OSUN.
Becker has written about what he describes as attacks on liberal-arts education, and has worked with OSUN member institutions abroad to combat them. In Myanmar, a coup by a military junta ousted the country’s democratic government in 2021, forcing Parami University, an OSUN member, into exile; the Hungarian government did the same to Central European University. The Russian government blacklisted Bard in 2021, saying its work — which included teaming up with OSUN’s Smolny College on dual degrees — “threatens the constitutional order and security of Russia.” And the American University of Afghanistan, also part of OSUN, had to take its operations outside the country when the Taliban seized control of the government, forcing students to flee.
“We see no radical difference between what’s gone on in Hungary or Russia or Afghanistan or Myanmar and what’s going on in Florida,” Becker said. “We decided to do what we’ve done in other places, which is try to provide a pathway for students and faculty to continue a rigorous liberal-arts-and-sciences education.”
OSUN has opened its online classes to current and former New College students as part of Alt New College, which mirrors its “Smolny Beyond Borders” program for displaced Russian students. There and in Florida, Becker said, “what we’re doing is what universities do.”
“We’re offering education, which I think should not be a controversial thing,” he said.
Sophia Brown, a 2023 New College graduate who now works for PEN America as a community-outreach consultant, hopes Alt New College will offer a refuge for students unhappy with New College’s direction.
“A lot of students sort of felt their options to pursue what they wanted to pursue academically were running out” at her alma mater, Brown said. “I see Alt New College as kind of giving that choice back to students, to say, ‘These opportunities are still available to you. There’s still space to pursue those topics and still space to use your freedom of expression in an academic setting.’”
Another former New College affiliate working on the project is Erik Wallenberg, whose contract at New College was not renewed after he and a colleague wrote an opinion essay criticizing DeSantis’s attempt to “force a conservative Christian model of education onto our public college.” Wallenberg, then a visiting professor and the sole specialist in American history on the New College faculty, will teach a short course through Alt New College in the spring.
