At DeSantis U., gender ideology out, jocks are in
In two weeks, the new school year will begin at Florida’s New College, the progressive public liberal arts school singled out by Gov. Ron DeSantis for cultural transformation. Returning students will find an institution that is increasingly unrecognizable.
Over one-third of the faculty members have left. Many of last year’s students are continuing their education elsewhere. Hampshire College, a small private liberal arts school in New England, has offered financial aid to New College students so they can transfer without tuition increases. Thirty-five plan to attend Hampshire this fall, and 30 more have inquired about doing so in the spring, a large number, given that last year New College had fewer than 700 students. Last week, New College’s leadership announced that it was moving to abolish the gender studies department. Chris Rufo, the culture warrior whom DeSantis put on New College’s board of trustees, boasted that it would be “the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.”
The dismantling of gender studies is striking because of how closely it follows a playbook for the ideological transformation of higher education pioneered by Hungary, which banned gender studies in 2018. Given that Rufo frames the New College takeover as a demonstration project to be repeated by red states nationwide, it’s worth paying attention not just to what is being destroyed but to what is being put in place.
Rufo speaks a lot about academic excellence and the virtues of a classical liberal education. But as Steven Walker of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported in a damning July story, the incoming class recruited by the new administration has lower average grades, SAT scores and ACT scores than last year’s class. “Much of the drop in average scores can be attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school’s $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships,” wrote Walker.
As of July, New College had 328 incoming students, a record for the school. Of the group, 115 are athletes, and 70 were recruited to play baseball, even though, as Walker reported, New College has no real sports facilities and has yet to be accepted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. By comparison, the University of Florida’s
far more established baseball team has 37 student-athletes.
The accommodations offered to New College’s new student-athletes will be better than those provided to many existing students. Walker reported that the incoming class will be housed in newer, apartment-style dorms that in the past were reserved for upperclass students. Returning students are being moved to older, more decrepit buildings, two of which recently were declared uninhabitable because of a mold problem. (New College has said it won’t put students in mold-affected rooms.)
Some new students may well end up immersing themselves in the great works of the Western canon. But last week, New College’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, a longtime Republican politician who served as DeSantis’ education commissioner, sent a memo to faculty members, proposing new majors in finance, communications and sports psychology, “which will appeal to many of our newly admitted athletes.” As Amy Reid, a New College professor of French who directs the gender studies department, said when I spoke to her last weekend, “Tell me how sports psychology, finance and communications fits with a classical liberal arts model.”
Rather than reviving some traditional model of academic excellence, then, it looks as though New College leaders are simply trying to replace a culture they find politically hostile with one meant to be more congenial. The end of gender studies and the special treatment given to incoming athletes are part of the same project, masculinizing a place that had been heavily feminist, artsy and queer. When I spoke to Rufo last weekend, he offered several explanations for New College’s new emphasis on sports. But an important part of the investment in athletics, he said, is that it is a way to make New College more male and, by extension, less left wing. In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.
Selective American colleges tend to have more female than male applicants; to maintain something approaching a gender balance, some have adopted lower standards for men. In other words, it often takes deliberate intervention — one might call it affirmative action — to create a student body in which women don’t predominate. New College isn’t jettisoning gender ideology. It’s just adopting a different one.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The Biden administration is transferring $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets in South Korea to an account in Qatar, which Iran will be able to access, in what appears to be an attempt to get Iran to release five imprisoned Americans.
National Security Communications Coordinator John Kirby offered this twisted explanation to Jake Tapper of CNN: “(This is) not a ransom.” Instead, Kirby claimed the account containing the money is one “that has not been made accessible” to Iran, and the administration is simply “making that one account that has been in existence for several years more accessible to the Iranians.”
Kirby claimed the money can only be used for “humanitarian purposes.” Does anyone believe that the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism will be using this money, or the $400 million in cash previously sent to Iran by the Obama administration on a cargo plane the same day Iran released four American prisoners and formally implemented the nuclear deal, for humanitarian purposes? Then, Republicans reacted by claiming that paying what they regarded as a ransom for the release of the U.S. citizens, “puts even more Americans at risk,” said thenSenator Mark Kirk (R-Ill). Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) echoed Kirk’s criticism, accusing Obama of paying “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for U.S. hostages.”
As with these and other payments dating back to the Carter administration, once the money has been received, there will be no way to retrieve it, no matter how the U.S. intends or wishes it to be used.
During the Reagan administration when arms were given to Iran in exchange for U.S. hostages, Democrats and the media were highly critical of the deal. Now with Biden, it’s crickets.
The latest transfer of frozen Iranian assets back to Tehran comes at a time when its rulers are moving closer to testing a nuclear weapons device and “has sought to obtain illicit technology for its active weapons program,” reports the Jerusalem Post.
The unfrozen assets are likely to speed up the process, allowing the ayatollahs to reach their goal more quickly.
People should be reminded of the recent history of the Iranian regime because we have such short memories. The Endowment for Middle East
Truth, a pro-Israel lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., has listed some of Iran’s most recent actions that we know about: The regime “has attempted to kidnap former American officials on US soil, such as (former) Ambassador John Bolton, (former) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, (former) diplomat Brian Hook, as well as some courageous Iranian expatriates such as journalist and blogger Masih Alinejad.”
Beyond that, notes EMET, the International Atomic Energy Administration reports that Iran has been enriching uranium at the 83.7 percent level, a very far cry from the 3.67 level that Iran had vowed to in the JCPOA of 2015, and is perilously close to the 90 percent of enrichment that is nuclear bomb capable.”
It should not come as a surprise that Islamic radicals, believing they are doing the will of Allah, continue to advance their earthly agenda, which includes destroying Israel and attacking America.
Any agreement made with Iran is supposed to be reviewed by Congress. That agreement restricts the president from unilaterally waving sanctions on Iran for 30 days so that Congress can decide whether to accept or reject it. That the administration is not doing so is a violation of law. Where are the howls from Congress and the media?
Not that long ago the American “doctrine” was never to pay ransom to terrorists for the reason former Sen. Kirk and others have said. Calling the $6 billion now headed for Iran something other than a ransom doesn’t change what it is.
Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Content Agency, LLC.