The battle for new college

Not a way to joke (the piece is paywalled; I am relying on Peter Schorsch and common sense for the characterization as bad humor)

 

This place sounds like a hell hole and a huge waste of money.
50.00 says they’ll try to be the first college to offer a course in history of drag queens.

 

Aaron Hillegas doesn't need the job. As a tech savvy entrepreneur he started his own dot.com business, later selling it, and likely making a great deal of money.



Screen shot of Hillegass's resignation letter. The image was prefaced by this notice:
"I was hired at New College of Florida (my alma mater) immediately before Governor Desantis replaced the trustees and president in an effort to make it "The Hillsdale of the South". I just gave notice."

 

DeSantis and his cronies are such trash.

 

More Hillegass tweets -


Easter is here. Can start to come together again as a nation today? We must find a middle ground. We have been pushed apart by people and organizations who profit off our outrage. Just walk away from them. Turn off Fox News. Turn off MSNBC. Laugh with someone you disagree with.

_____________



For the record: I would never burn a building down. Nor should anyone else. That was a poetic flourish that sounded cool until it showed up in the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
_______________________



I have been getting some requests for clarification, so I will give those in this thread. 1) The line about burning buildings is pretty mild. It says “I’m not going to burn down any buildings. I’m just going to walk away.” I believe that no one should burn down any buildings.

 

I'm a strong supporter diverse perspectives. At UF I took two courses in Marxism and in graduate school I did a Constitutional History course with an extremely left wing Professor who talked about nothing but impeaching Bush. But in retrospect, I actually learned a lot.

I do think liberal arts eduction may include view points that are opposed to the individualistic, objective, empiricist, model that is celebrated in the US. Take courses in Marx, post-modernism/critical theory, existentialism, Freud, and black/feminist/LGBTQ studies. Question everything. And naturally those courses will be taught by professors sympathetic those perspectives and that is fine.

That said, this Professor sounds like an idiot. Glad to hear that New College doesn't trash the classics, or that that qualification is somehow necessary. But here is one thing about the classics: they are much bigger than any single professor. This is why Plato will still be here in a 1000 years while the convoluted crap this professor teaches will be regaled to the waste bins of history. And here is another thing about the classics: They actually take quite a bit of time to learn and digest. They aren't the sort of thing you can blithely "not worship" your first day of class. I listened to many lectures for real courses at Yale and Cal Berkeley and nearly the entire class was spent teaching, contextualizing, and clarifying; and very little comparing and debating (which I presume happened in their sections). I presume the students in attendance were at least on par with the students at New College. Somehow I question whether there was a lot of understanding going on at New College.

It looks like New College and Desantis deserve each other.

 

The guy you're quoting isn't a professor at New College. He's an alum. And your response doesn't make much sense in light of what he said.

 

He's an alum reporting on his experience as an undergraduate. And if my response
doesn't make sense I can't help that without knowing where I went wrong.

 

He wrote about how they learned at New College, and you seem to be reading a lot into a single line about neither trashing nor worshipping the classics. My takeaway from the line is that he was arguing that the school encouraged critical thinking and examination.

 

And they do. Far more than other schools I am familiar with.

 

I think the main point of studying the classics is not critical thinking but mind expansion: seeing the world in a different way by studying ideas and methods that, in theory, transcend time and place. Where critical thinking comes is in applying what you learn in different contexts, not critiquing the work itself from your own limited perspective.

A statement like "we didn’t worship them – instead we understood, compared, and debated them" seems to me truncated, instrumental, and ugly. I do believe it's motivated by a desire to weaken a white male eurocentric paradign, particularly considering the professor's area of study.

And no studying the classics aren't needed to become a doctor or a lawyer or learning to write or argue. I don't know if they matter or not, period. But if you are going to learn, you would hope to get instruction from someone with deference and enthusiasm for the material. A perfect example of that is legendary Professor Hubert Dreyfus from Berkeley, a liberal at an extremely liberal institution who still inspired a sense of awe and reverance in the material.

 

Looks like the new New College administration has denied tenure to five professors after the faculty and previous administration voted to grant tenure to them. All the new DeSantis-approved members appear to have voted as a block to gain the majority in each vote.

DeSantis-backed New College board scraps 5 professors tenure

This is a disturbing early development of this takeover, as it’s not common for upper administration to overturn the votes of faculty in tenure matters. Unfortunately, it seems this group will not be satisfied to stick to established norms and will readily exercise their new powers in faculty affairs.

 

They needed to stop those woke professors from teaching students chemistry.

 

Agreed. Certainly faculty can make bad decisions, but the question is who can make better ones? If there are explicit guidelines, eg publish one paper per year, and none of these faculty did so, I would be firmly on the board’s side. Of course, why didn’t the faculty follow this rule?

What is troubling here is that it appears that there wasn’t a single dissenter in the mix on five different cases approved by the faculty. That suggests to me 1) they have agreed upon a common set of criteria amongst themselves and 2) these criteria differ than the ones the university faculty understand to be in place. This could be mistaken, but it doesn’t look good at first blush.

 

The chemistry part is interesting, as there indeed isn’t usually much political significance in that curriculum. We will see if the board is transparent and provides justifications for their decisions. I would be interested in seeing them.

 

As a New College alum, I think you would be well served to educate yourself about the school. My professors there were engaging and passionate about the material and that we actually learned. It is a rigorous educational environment that very much aligns with the ideals you seem to espouse. Don’t believe DeSantis’ bullshit. There’s a reason New College is ranked No. 5 among national public liberal arts colleges, though I doubt that ranking will endure.

 

I’ll take that bet.

History of drag, role of television subject of unique class - South Florida Media Network

New School, a university in Manhattan, already has a course that “explores the history of drag and the culture of reality television.”

You lose. Will you pay or are you like Lindell, all mouth and no honor?

 

Lol, we all lose! America is one giant flaming dumpster.
But I do appreciate you looking that up. It’s very interesting and it’s nice to know schools my children will never attend.

 

The Hillsdale "classic" curriculum largely designifies and writes out the impact of the Jesuits' Ratio Studorium as too Catholic. Some versions pervert it to forcefit