Novo Collegiate Resistance

. Jinx Ashforth

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Hello. Welcome to the Novo Collegiate Resistance! Please visit and subscribe to our battlefronts: http://novocollegian.org, https://ncffreedom.org/, https://oldschoolcatalyst.com/, https://www.altliberalarts.org/, https://tinyurl.com/PalmCourtPodcastThen keep current with our fight each time it is (Frequently! Increasingly!) mentioned in the news: https://tinyurl.com/NewCollNews. And please take to heart: we're just the beachhead. They came to New College first; now they're coming for all of us. Your college is next!So join us and RESIST!

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Novo Collegiate Resistance

SARASOTA, Florida 34243

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New College of Florida is now the beachhead of the war for education in the United States. The single square mile campus formerly housed the Honors College of the state of Florida. However, one year into its overthrow, NCF is now Ground Zero of the battle for progressive vs. regressive education (a jihad, now spread even to Congress and Ivy League, universities).So says Jeremy Young, Program Director of the Freedom to Learn initiative at PEN America, the 102-year institution which “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.” Until invited by the professors’ union (the AAUP, or American Association of University Professors) of New College of Florida in April 2023 to address a faculty suddenly frightened for their future, Mr. Young stated he had been unaware of New College and its outsize laurels (e.g. as the highest producer of Fulbright scholars and ongoing PhDs per capita; consistently leading the best value colleges in the nation, prominent among “Colleges That Change Lives”, and ranked #5 among the “best liberal arts colleges in America”, an achievement most impressive for being outdone (at the time) only by the United States’ four military academies). Yet after touring NCF, then delivering his keynote on “The Defense of Higher Education, Mr. Young immediately returned to his institution to enlist emergency aid against the ideological blitzkrieg he had stumbled into: one redolent, to historians, of the fall of the gem of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s Frankfurt University, in 1933; as well as the more recent overthrow and forced migration of the Central European University of Hungary.Besides capturing the focus of Jeremy Young, PEN America, and their colleagues at the Open Society University Network (OSUN)’s flagship institution Bard College (now hosting (“NCF in Exile”), the ongoing Attack on New College has already been a subject of five documentaries to date (most recently by the Dutch public news outlet NTR), video news programs nationally and abroad, and thousands of media mentions locally, internationally, across wire services, and in professional journals of education and organization.A database of this exponential proliferation of global interest is maintained by the “Save New College” resistance movement as one of their ongoing, increasing scope of projects dedicated to: preserving and advancing the original mission of New College of Florida; protecting its cultural and academic heritage; and supporting and defending its community of specifically targeted, particularly vulnerable individuals and populations. Comprised initially of thousands of alumni of the college (historically an unusually active and engaged body), this Resistance was quickly joined in early days by an equally unusually engaged parent group, vociferous and activist faculty and union members, as well as the originally deposed Trustees. Now a year in, the movement has since formalized into two (to date) nonprofits serving as watchdogs on the falsely appointed insurrectionist administration, while providing aid to their victims. (Blow-by-blow coverage by these two NGO’s, “The NovoCollegian Alliance” and “NCF Freedom,” can be followed here and here.) In parallel/overlap arose a student movement that has become the target of politically motivated nuisance lawsuits, addressed the United Nations regarding civil rights abuses suffered by students at the hands of the new administration, and then largely decamped to similarly composed Hampshire College, at the latter institution’s fervent invitation (and unprecedented offer of reducing their tuition by 90% for “NCF defectors” to match the ousted students’ previous, much lower tuition at New College). The big question is Why? Why would thousands organize a Resistance around a tiny experimental undergraduate institution in Southwest Florida? Why would multiple other higher education institutions mobilize so quickly to“rescue” (or poach,) New College “refugees” and – in the case of the Open Society University Network/Bard College – create a whole new subsidiary and board for deposed NCF Trustees to program and advise? What “spirit” of freedom does New College of Florida represent, that PEN America so eager to “defend”? To answer those “whys” would require a dissertation-length inquiry to thoroughly investigate and report on the rise of Christian Nationalism and its war on freedom of thought, the sharp recent trend for college campuses to become prominent arenas in “cancel culture” combat, and a rash of other activisms and academic proxy wars which, taken together, might map out how America’s political radical right wing could come to feel so threatened by a bucolic bayside institution of under 1,000 undergraduates, and barely 100 professors. Happily this researcher, herself an alumna of NCF, has just been accepted to undertake precisely such a dissertation. Expect many interim publications forthcoming meanwhile. The academic experience of this researcher vis a vis matriculation at her alma mater from 2001-2005, as well as her participation in the Resistance as a natural outgrowth of still residing in NCF’s same town of Sarasota, also permits her to speak from experience regarding the irreducible, irreproducible campus culture of inspired inquiry, environment of expected excellence, and egalitarian nature of a institution with personalized performance evaluations each term, in lieu of numerical grades. Few are the postsecondary institutions staffed by faculty who, by and large, have left behind lucrative positions in industry, or higher-profile teaching jobs at better-known institutions, specifically to work one-on-one with driven, if largely divergent, young students within an academic model wherein: courses are designed by collaboration between professor and student; a Masters-worthy thesis is required; and academic “contracts”, or personalized maps of study, are developed per student each semester (in tandem with a mentor) in the expectation that 1-2 undertakings (of 4-5 per contract) will be abject failures. That encouragement to push one’s boundaries in service of exploring one’s passions is the “experiment” of this 1960’s-founded experimental college. Students are encouraged to fail in the “Silicon Valley” sense of rapid prototyping (“fail faster; recover faster”), because the goal of NCF is entrepreneurial: for each student to dedicate themselves to tailoring learning, to produce knowledge that has never existed, and could not have been done elsewhere or otherwise.In short, New College of Florida trains – requires – students to think for themselves; to develop and practice critical thought: that very mental inoculant which prevents fascism from rooting. NCF’s demand that each student take responsibility for their own ideas (and back them up) has led at least one particularly famous former White Nationalist to recant his hate, when conversational encounters with the groups he had been taught to hate, revealed that his trained bigotry had no basis in fact. In fact, it could not withstand exposure to the peoples in question. Very likely these attributes contribute to the eagerness of an aspiring fascist Governor to obliterate such a plucky institution; as afraid of sharp minds as his forebaears were of Frankfurt.The methods by which he has managed to effect his destruction are also worthy of investigation: the “How?” to the “Why?” above. In partial answer, the Resistance has created a timeline of major events to facilitate understanding. A synopsis appears below:In an educational coup intentionally executed on 6th January 2023 (the second anniversary of the Insurrection on the American Capitol by radical elements of America’s political right), former national presidential hopeful Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida exploited the public nature of New College by summarily dismissing those 7 College Trustees who served at his pleasure. These 7 seats (6 conventional seats and the Chair position, together comprising the majority of the total Board of 13 Directors) were then filled by his appointed political operatives, as notable for their lack of expertise in the field of higher education as for their past political service to DeSantis, their adherence to insurrectionist strains of Christian Nationalism, and/or their affiliation with the for-profit Hillsdale College, an ideological headquarters of radical right thought production located in the city of Hillsdale in Michigan. Within a month of the takeover of the Trustee Board, the highly capable and recently carefully recruited President of New College, Dr. Patricia Okker, was deposed after her single year in office. This professional intellectual, under whose guidance the intentionally funding-starved school was finally beginning to rally, was replaced (at nearly triple the salary) with a lawyer of no educational credentials, but a history of loyalism to DeSantis as his former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives of Florida: Mr. Richard Corcoran. Arbitrarily appointed after his Speakership as that same Governor’s Secretary of Education, Mr. Corcoran’s most notable “achievement” as the education leader of all Florida had been the diversion of funds from public schools in Jefferson County (State Capitol county), into his own hands. by means of contracting his own privately-held “charter school” education corporations to receive public funds; a crime for which he and DeSantis are now being federally investigated. In conclusion: the largest shock to academians local to the New College of Florida (besides how few colleagues are cognizant of the Resistance Movement), may be this: The best strategy to protecting future schools from similar takeovers may well have been to allow the criminals to achieve their objectives, and demonstrate their own incompetence.