The uneducated attack on woke in education
“You don’t know what you are talking about, and you do not belong in this class.” That was some of the first feedback I received as a new student at New College of Florida, which is currently being subjected to top-down radical change as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attack on educational institutions that are “hostile to academic freedom.” With no sense of irony, he plans to strip these institutions of such freedom, eliminating content related to diversity, equity and inclusion and imposing mandated coursework on Western civilization (which is already available to students).
New College is the latest target of Gov. DeSantis’s war on “woke.” The school has an established record of integrating academic rigor with creative experimentation, consistently earning high ratings among national organizations such as U.S. News & World Report that rank colleges. Its reputation as a haven for marginalized students and progressive culture is what has made it a target; the governor’s solution to this “problem” was to appoint a conservative majority to the Board of Trustees and task them with the implementation of his unconstitutional “Stop Woke” agenda at the roughly 700-student college.
As a first-year student at New College, I enrolled in an upper-level sociology course that sounded interesting. I had a long history of performing “above my grade” and telling teachers what they wanted to hear without working very hard — I was overconfident. At the free-thinking, design-your-own-education Honors College of the Florida State University System, I was no longer the smartest kid in the room. It stung, but it was true.
New College gives narrative evaluations rather than letter grades — on every assignment, course, independent study project, and thesis defense. This has been leveled as a criticism of the college for decades
— it does make interpretation of transcripts challenging for graduate schools and potential employers — but current research supports what was once a radical idea: letter grades are stifling to the educational process. My narrative evaluation of that first sociology assignment told me a lot more than a simple F would have; I withdrew and enrolled instead in a more appropriate introductory course.
The first stinging lesson in my early days at New College was that you could not skate along pretending to know and understand things without doing the work. Unfortunately, it seems that some of the new members appointed to New College’s Board of Trustees by Gov. DeSantis never learned that lesson.
At their first official board meeting on Jan. 31, new board members made it clear that they had not done the homework. They tried to postpone votes on simple, procedural measures and tabled others, arguing that they had not been given time to review relevant materials (they had). However, when it came time for the agenda items they themselves had submitted, they pushed for votes on sweeping changes without awareness of their implications. For example, their proposed vote to eliminate the office of “Outreach and Inclusive Excellence” (and fire all its employees) was postponed to next month’s meeting when it became clear they knew very little about what that office actually does.
What is worse than pretending to know and understand things without doing the work is being deliberately disingenuous about them. DeSantis and his newly-appointed board members would have you believe that New College’s low enrollment is because of its “woke” culture; one of their first acts was to oust the New College president, who over the course of her short, 19-month tenure, substantially increased enrollment during a time of overall state university enrollment decline.
At a recent public meet and greet, one of the new board members stated that rather than his own personal doctrine, he wanted to see “a Marxist professor debating a libertarian Professor debating a Christian professor.” Said someone in the audience, “Then come to New College!”
As a proud alum, I say to those charged with implementing the transformation of New College who have not done the homework and read from uninformed scripts: “You don’t know what you are talking about, and you do not belong in this class.”