\n<\/p>\n
Amy Reid spent more than 30 years at New College of Florida, where she served as a professor of French and the founder and director of the gender studies program. Her relatively secure employment as a tenured professor emboldened her to become one of the most outspoken critics of the conservative effort to transform NCF into a \u201cHillsdale College of the South,\u201d led by then-interim president Richard Corcoran, who was hired by a swath of conservative trustees installed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023.<\/p>\n
That same year, Reid was elected to serve as faculty representative on the Board of Trustees; she voted against Corcoran\u2019s appointment to be the college\u2019s permanent president and pushed back against numerous policies, including an effort by the administration to use the faculty to help enforce gendered bathroom laws. <\/p>\n
Last month, Corcoran denied a recommendation from the New College provost that Reid be granted emerita status at the college, citing Reid\u2019s advocacy for faculty and academic freedom, which he described as \u201chyperbolic alarmism and needless obstruction.\u201d In response, the New College Alumni Association Board of Directors made Reid an honorary alum.<\/p>\n
Since taking unpaid leave in August 2024 and then retiring a year later, Reid has brought her talents and penchant for advocacy to PEN America, a nonprofit focused on fighting education censorship and protecting press freedom. <\/p>\n
Inside Higher Ed<\/em> spoke with Reid over Zoom about her experience as the faculty representative on the New College Board of Trustees, the transformation of the public liberal arts college and expanding efforts by Florida conservatives to censor faculty speech.<\/p>\n The interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n Q: Before you became faculty representative on the Board of Trustees at New College, the previous representative quit in protest. What motivated you to pursue the role and what were you hoping to do with\u00a0it?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> Things had been contentious on campus. Frankly, that\u2019s an understatement. When the new board members were appointed that January [2023], they described their arrival on campus as a \u201csiege\u201d\u2014using military language. So I began organizing with other faculty members and providing support to students so that they could respond to the rapid changes on campus, changes that included the immediate firing of our president [Patricia Okker], and then, over the coming weeks, a number of key leaders; the censoring of student speech and chalking on campus; the denial of tenure to a number of very qualified faculty.<\/p>\n I started holding weekly teas for students, providing them a place to ask questions and to be heard and also to have cookies. So working with my colleagues and providing support for students were the two things that I\u00a0really wanted to do. <\/p>\n As a senior member of the faculty and as the leader of the gender studies program, I felt like I had a particular responsibility to speak up on campus. I\u00a0knew that colleagues of mine who were not tenured couldn\u2019t necessarily do that, so I tried to speak up for my community. And after Matt Lipinski resigned from the Board of Trustees and from his faculty position [after the board denied tenure to five professors], he actually reached out and asked me to stand for election as chair of the faculty, because I\u2019d been both working in collaboration with others through the union and also because of my outspokenness as director of the gender studies program. So after talking with other colleagues, I agreed to stand for election in collaboration with two other colleagues.<\/p>\n Q: What was the initial reception from the board when you joined?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> What I really remember, actually, was the real support that I had from colleagues and students and alums. So yes, there was a certain amount of tension with certain members of the Board of Trustees. There were people on the board who did reach out in friendly and professional ways\u2014greeting me at meetings, things like that\u2014but really I had strong support from faculty, alums and students, and that\u2019s what mattered.<\/p>\n Q: Do you think you were successful in the faculty representative role?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> That\u2019s really a challenging question, and it depends on what metrics you want to use. I think I did a good job of raising serious questions and concerns in the trustee meetings, even if my votes were not often on the winning side. I always brought my integrity with me, and as an educator, that was really important to me. I think I was able to help rally faculty around various policy proposals that we put forth, because my job wasn\u2019t just in the Board of Trustees, it was also in the management of the faculty, which meant multiple meetings every week about budgets and other administrative issues.<\/p>\n There was a lot of work there behind the scenes to support faculty, to support the curriculum and also to advocate for students in a number of ways. I know that students and faculty and alums felt that they could reach out to me about their concerns, that they knew I would listen and respond. When people spoke at Board of Trustees meetings, I paid attention and took notes on all of the people who came to speak. In that way, I think I was effective, but frankly, the votes on the board were stacked.<\/p>\n Q: When you resigned, you said that the \u201cNew College where you once taught no longer existed.\u201d Was there a specific moment that tanked your faith in New College leadership?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> It\u2019s really not about a loss of faith in the new leadership. Richard Corcoran came in with a set of ideas about how he wanted to change the campus, to change what one trustee called the \u201chormonal and political balance on campus.\u201d And Corcoran followed through on that. I can point first to the firing of valuable and dedicated campus leaders, including President Patricia Okker, the dean of diversity, the campus research librarian. [I can also point to] the denial of tenure to six very qualified and effective faculty, the chasing away of over 30\u00a0percent of the faculty and about 100 students\u2014and that\u2019s a real record for the first eight months of this administration. <\/p>\n Then you have the painting over of student art on campus, the replacement of grass with Astroturf and the plowing down of hundreds of trees along the bay front. You have the wasting of millions of dollars of state funds on bloated administrative salaries and portable dorms that were uninhabitable within three months due to mold. You have the abolishing of the gender studies program in the summer of 2023, the erasure of our budget, our eviction from our campus office in December of 2023. The imposition of a rigid and limited core curriculum in spring of 2024. The withholding of diplomas from a cohort of students in May 2024, the wholesale destruction of the student-led gender and diversity center in August 2024. That was a student-led space with a collection of books that had been curated by students for over 30 years, all thrown in the dumpster. <\/p>\n So not one moment, but a lot. But what I still have faith in, even today, is the determination of students and alums to pursue an education that embodies academic freedom, which I understand is the right of students to pursue an education free from government censorship. And also, I have great faith in those faculty who are remaining, who support the New College academic mission and who are doing their best day in and day out to support our students.<\/p>\n Q: Were you surprised when Corcoran denied the dean\u2019s recommendation to grant you emerita status?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: <\/strong>Not really. I\u2019d say it\u2019s par for the course, but I was surprised that he was so up front about his reasons. In his statement, he noted that despite my record of achievement as a teacher and a researcher, it was my advocacy for the college\u2014my opposition to him\u2014that was the problem. So now he\u2019s on the record explicitly as punishing speech, and that is stunning.<\/p>\n What happened to me is just one small thing, but it reflects a pattern of censorship on the campus that needs to be called out. But more importantly at this moment, I really want to thank my colleagues who nominated me for emeritus status and the New College alums who adopted me as one of their own. That\u2019s meaningful, and I am very grateful.<\/p>\n Q: As a reporter, I spend a lot of time reading and writing bad news, but I\u2019m seeing the same types of attacks on faculty speech and academic freedom that happened at New College occur at other institutions, in Florida and elsewhere. Would you say these current attacks on faculty speech are unprecedented? <\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> A lot of people have talked about this as unprecedented, but what I see is the culmination of a pattern of censorship we\u2019ve seen playing out at state levels across the country. In Florida, in 2022, they passed House Bill 233, which allows or encourages students to surreptitiously record faculty if they intend to file a complaint against them.<\/p>\n Since then, really, the state has been tightening a gag around faculty speech in myriad ways. Just in the past couple of months, we\u2019ve seen a number of faculty sanctioned\u2014even one emeritus professor at [University of Florida] lost his status based on complaints about his social media posts. So what\u2019s happening now could be cast as unprecedented, but yet, it\u2019s part of this pattern we see playing out now, not just in Florida, but across the country, where some 50 faculty members have been sanctioned or fired because of their speech or social media posts since the start of September.<\/p>\n Since 2021, PEN America has been actively tracking efforts to censor speech in college and university classrooms across the country, and we\u2019ve seen a real rise in the number of bills introduced to censor speech\u00a0\u2026 and in the numbers that are being passed; 2025 was really a banner year for censorship in higher education in this country. There were a record number of gag orders passed across the country\u201410 of them, 10 bills that explicitly limit what can be said in college and university classrooms.<\/p>\n And then there are other restrictions designed to chill faculty speech\u2014restrictions on tenure or curricular control bills, and let\u2019s also remember the bills that were introduced or passed to limit student protests on campus. All of those things are designed to make people afraid to speak up and to question things on campus. That\u2019s not healthy for our education system, and it\u2019s not healthy for our democracy. Currently, about 40\u00a0percent of the U.S. population lives in a state that has at least one state-level law restricting classroom speech at the college and university level. Is that something we\u2019re OK with as a country? Do we really think that our First Amendment rights are that fungible?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amy Reid spent more than 30 years at New College of Florida, where she served as a professor of French and the founder and director of the gender studies program. Her relatively secure employment as a tenured professor emboldened her to become one of the most outspoken critics of the conservative effort to transform NCF<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[535,3649,96,6698],"class_list":{"0":"post-33007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-college","9":"tag-florida","10":"tag-lost","11":"tag-professor"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}