One of the moves by Florida governor Ron DeSantis that most angered the Left was his appointing of a new and clearly conservative board to run one of the state’s colleges, the New College. It had fallen under the control of “progressives,” and DeSantis changed that.

In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Bruce Gilley (also hated by the Left) explains why it had to be done:

The decision by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 to oust the radicals controlling the state’s tiny liberal-arts college, New College of Florida, has elicited frenzied reactions from the global Left. The effort by a democratically elected government to bring political balance, educational excellence, and fiscal sanity to a failed public institution of 800 students is seen as nothing less than a collegiate March on Rome. The reaction has rather proven the point: The leftist control of higher education has become so totalitarian that even the slightest hint of deviance is viewed as a mortal threat to the revolutionary project.

Gilley then recounts an exchange he had with an unpleasant doctoral student which helps make the case that the college had become a swamp of leftism that needed draining.

He adds:

If students in Nemarich’s classroom knew they would be met with a barrage of “I’m a Harvard graduate student, I know there is only one Truth here!” they would almost certainly zip their mouths and write course essays pandering to Nemarich’s Menocalian viewpoint. Surely, turning our young people into calculating sycophants of their professor’s ideological bias is the saddest spectacle of all.