Free New College from the shackles of DeSantis’ crass political agenda
You could never get away with that at New College.” This comes to mind as dismayed professors sound the alarm over students using
Chat GPT, an artificial-intelligence program, to write papers.
The rigorous educational model at New College stands in stark contrast to concerns over students using technology to coast through their education. The number of one-on-one or small-group interactions with academic all-star professors at New College — in which students analyze and critique academic topics — would quickly reveal the lie in any AIaided essays.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently appointed six members to New College’s board of trustees, with the stated aim of turning the college into the “Hillsdale College of the South.” Some of the new trustees have manufactured a story about New College as part of this politically motivated campaign.
The gap between New College and Hillsdale is vast, raising concerns that DeSantis will sacrifice a valued institution of public education for a crass political agenda. Hillsdale College is a private, Christian college with an annual tuition more than four times that of New College. It represents an extreme version of private education, declining all federal funding and even prohibiting its students from receiving federal financial aid in order to avoid standard oversight, such as reporting the racial makeup of its student body.
At New College, a public honors college, personalized education, critical thinking and rigorous academics are central pillars of the experience. Primary texts are favored over textbooks. Narrative evaluations or other more in-depth metrics are preferred over multiple-choice tests, for example. Students must complete a senior capstone project or senior thesis based on their coursework. Undergraduates defend their projects to an audience of professors and peers to get their degrees. New College makes an Ivy League-level education accessible to many students in Florida.
We attended New College at various times during the past 40 years. The common thread in our education was the focus on academic rigor and critical thinking. Among us are a marketing communications executive and entrepreneur, an editor, a lawyer, an ESL teacher and a doctor. For several of us, New College’s undergraduate demands matched or exceeded the difficulty of achieving a master’s degree.
Another common thread was being allowed the flexibility to develop our passions and points of view. Trina Sargalski got small business experience as part of a team creating the initial business plan for the Four Winds Coffeehouse.
Lexi Allen valued traveling to Guatemala to produce a documentary on indigenous art during her time at New College. Later, she worked with her academic sponsor to design her own course centered around editing, translating and framing this documentary.
Anne-Laure Grignon defended two theses in her separate tracks of study: biology and French. The double major allowed her to be more balanced and, as a doctor, she focuses on ALS research at the University of Miami.
At a recent meeting at the New College campus for students and faculty, the trustees were wellspoken but provided little information. One, Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute propagandist, recently mentioned improvements he’d like to make, including returning the school to a “classical liberal model.” What is more classically liberal than studying Latin with primary texts? Than having open and analytical discussions across disciplines with no agenda beyond finding the truth?
The trustees’ manufactured political campaign threatens to upend the lives of New College students and faculty, and dismantle a uniquely successful model of higher education. We should all care — this is an attack on public and liberal-arts education.
We want our own kids to have the freedom to learn, to be themselves and to grow up healthy and safe. We want them to have access to quality public education that is accessible to a diverse group of students across Florida. But a handful of politicians are stoking Floridians’ fears, putting their desire for political power over students’ futures.
Floridians must speak up and take action to protect Floridians’ access to public education unfettered by political agendas.
Sofia Ali Khan (1992), Lexi Allen (2011), Grant Balfour (1986), Anne-Laure Grignon (2005) and Trina Sargalski (1995) are alums of New College of Florida. Learn more at @savenewcollege on Instagram and Twitter.
On Jan. 5, the Biden administration announced a series of new border enforcement actions that, according to immigration experts, amount to a transit asylum ban.
Biden created an opportunity for up to 30,000 people per month from Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba to apply for parole back in their home country as a diversion from ending asylum at the border, but this means that refugees fleeing a deadly situation will have to return to it. Furthermore, the Cuban dictatorship has a history of prohibiting dissidents from traveling.
Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan dissidents persecuted by their respective governments for reasons of conscience are refugees, as are Haitians fleeing political turmoil. The Biden administration is denying them the right to apply for asylum in the United States.
The president’s policy contradicts the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, which recognize a refugee’s right to seek asylum outside their home country if they have a credible fear of persecution if they return, and which the United States signed and ratified.
Cubans have well-founded fears of persecution. In 1959, a communist dictatorship emerged that demonized those who tried to leave as counter-revolutionaries, “worms” and “scum.”
Since the Castro regime eliminated independent mass media in Cuba, outlawed human-rights groups and banned international humanrights organizations, including Amnesty International, from the island, the full scope of human-rights violations, including torture and extrajudicial killings, remains undocumented. The International Committee of the Red
Cross has not had access to Cuban prisons since 1989, and only for one year beginning in 1988. It had been barred from entering them since 1959.
Despite the regime’s best efforts, however, some atrocities have been revealed.
Over six decades, Ministry of Transportation vessels committed numerous acts of brutality against Cubans attempting to flee the island on boats or on rafts. Castro regime agents shot at Cubans trying to swim to the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base, their bodies pulled from the sea with gaff hooks used for sport fishing.
The most recent massacre took place on Oct. 28, 2022.
How many other refugees in the Americas are targeted by their own government’s coast guard or regime vessels ramming and sinking boatloads of refugees?
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Havana reconstituted itself domestically with Beijing’s assistance, and internationally through the establishment of the Sao Paulo Forum, achieving long-held strategic goals: Hugo Chavez’s takeover of Venezuela in 1999 and Daniel Ortega’s return to power in Nicaragua in 2006.
Cuban soldiers and intelligence officers are torturing nationals in Nicaragua and Venezuela after successfully exporting their model of repression, which is one of the factors driving many to flee those countries.
Now, the regimes in these three countries are coordinating the weaponization of migration to gain concessions from the United States, while also profiting from trafficking their nationals and causing chaos on the U.S.-Mexico border.
It has been compounded with the breakdown of law and order in Haiti following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and an explosion in street violence leading many Haitians to seek refuge in the United States.
The refugees fleeing persecution are not to blame for the breakdown in border control. The Biden administration’s new policy punishes them while rewarding dictatorships for weaponizing migration by increasing their control over who can leave.
John Suarez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.