SARASOTA, FLORIDA — New College of Florida’s board of trustees is trashing the university’s “gender studies” degree program.
High school seniors will now have to look to other public universities to credential themselves as experts in queer theory and gender confusion, the board determined on Thursday.
Board member and conservative journalist Chris Rufo announced the news on Twitter and shared additional commentary regarding the move in an article for City Journal.
BREAKING: The New College of Florida board of trustees has directed the administration to abolish its Gender Studies program. We are the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of queer theory and gender pseudoscience into academic life.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 10, 2023
Rufo declared the “explosive decision” was “part of a broader transformation.”
“[Governor Ron DeSantis] tasked us with a challenging mission: to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford,” Rufo wrote.
“We knew that this assignment would involve more than a rebranding; campaign; it would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs.”
Rufo explained that the program – which he called a “non-scholarly vessel for partisan activism” – held “affiliations with more than one-third of all faculty” and “served as the centerpiece of academic life.”
SOCIAL MEDIA REACTIONS
Not surprisingly, many academics on the Left decried the news as a harbinger of conservative fascism.
Former American Sociological Association president Joe Feagin accused Rufo of “trying to take us back to the extreme anti-democratic McCarthyism era.”
Jeremy Young, a program director for PEN America, called it “a scandal and disgrace,” declaring: “Academic freedom at New College is dead.”
Rufo and his supporters scoffed at the hand-wringing and accusations of “authoritarianism.”
One influencer tweeted: “Most of the foolish academics attacking @realchrisrufo couldn’t even save their own Twitter bios from pronouns for fear of being cancelled by their own students, fellow colleagues, and administrators. Yet they claim they can defend academia—that’s genuinely laughable.”
“Ideologues who believe that ‘men can get pregnant’ and ‘women can become men’ should not be running academic departments in public universities,” Rufo tweeted. “It's not scholarship; it's left-wing nihilism that is antithetical to human reason and the classical liberal arts tradition.”
