\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>t took a half century to build New College into a sanctuary of independent thought and less than a year to destroy it. In 2023 the beloved Florida liberal arts school became state governor Ron DeSantis\u2019s latest target in his so-called war on woke. DeSantis decimated the school\u2019s trustee board and installed a cabal of rightwing cronies, aiming to transform it into a conservative institution modeled after Michigan\u2019s evangelical Hillsdale College.<\/p>\n Library shelves were stripped, with books from Black and Indigenous authors and the shuttered gender studies department tossed into dumpsters. Frat boys arrived in droves and the campus was transformed into a meathead\u2019s playground where queer couples stopped holding hands for fear of homophobic slurs. In a move ripped from the playbook of a spiteful cartoon villain, the community garden with its koi pond and roosting barn owls was bulldozed to make way for a baseball stadium.<\/p>\n Students found themselves fighting for the soul of the school. \u201cThe confusion was palpable,\u201d says former student Gaby Batista, a protest leader and former editor in chief of the campus newspaper the Catalyst. \u201cAs a student at a public university, you don\u2019t know your board of trustees. No one anticipates having to learn their names and have their business become so directly involved in your business.\u201d<\/p>\n The gripping new documentary First They Came For My College documents how this tiny school of just 700 students became a battleground in the Trump administration\u2019s assault on higher education. After ousting former board president Patricia Okker in January 2023, DeSantis installed a gruesome line-up of new trustees who aimed to strip the school of \u201cwoke ideology\u201d and abolished DEI programs and critical race theory. The new board included characters like openly racist former Florida house speaker Richard Corcoran and Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who fueled Trump\u2019s attack on diversity.<\/p>\n \u201cI found out about the takeover and was immediately very worried,\u201d says documentary producer and New College album Harry W Hanbury. \u201cThese Christian nationalists posed a real threat.\u201d After linking up with director Patrick Bresnan in Orlando in spring, the pair drove to New College\u2019s Sarasota campus. Approaching the Mediterranean-style buildings of the campus, Hanbury was overcome with emotion. \u201cI just started crying,\u201d he said. \u201cNew College was like where I was born. To see it taken over by these people who are conquistadors \u2013 the junta, as I like to call them \u2013 was really painful, but also galvanizing.\u201d<\/p>\n On a Zoom call a few weeks before First They Came To College\u2019s premiere at Missouri\u2019s True\/False documentary festival, Bresnan, Hanbury and Batista are sparky conversationalists who light up when talking about New College in its heyday. The school \u201csaved my life\u201d, says Hanbury, who arrived at New College in the late 80s as a \u201cvery closeted queer kid\u201d from a military Catholic school. \u201cThere was an intense intellectual curiosity which made it so distinctive and set it apart from every other school in Florida, and really in the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cI knew what I was signing up for,\u201d says Batista about her enrollment. She describes the school as a \u201cqueer utopia\u201d and recalls visiting as a prospective student to find that her campus tour guide was a student with shaved eyebrows and eyeliner-drawn stars on their face. \u201cMy dad was bewildered, but I was like, \u2018This place is fucking awesome.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n That kind of self-expression was exactly what DeSantis and co wanted to eliminate. When Bresnan and Hanbury arrived in April 2023 they found a campus at war. To build trust with a student body who had already been harangued by \u201cfishy\u201d reporters, Bresnan invested the money that would have normally gone on kitting out a big production team into getting to know them. \u201cI hate having crews, I hate lighting and I hate expensive equipment,\u201d the director says. \u201cI took all of that budget and spent it on taking the kids out to dinner.\u201d The show of faith worked. As Batista puts it: \u201cOnce we knew we were on the same wavelength, we were like, \u2018Let\u2019s do the damn thing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Bresnan\u2019s ethos included making sure that the students played an active role in shaping the documentary, and handed out camera phones to five students to film protests and planning meetings, as well as introspective moments of downtime. As well as a practical solution to filming across the 110-acre campus, the student camera operators help to collapse the hierarchy between film-maker and subject that is a feature of the documentary genre. \u201cI really saw my role as facilitating their ability to storytell,\u201d says Bresnan.<\/p>\n As well as underlining the film\u2019s community values, the bricolage footage gives the film texture and oomph. iPhone footage is especially impactful, showing DeSantis and team\u2019s surprise arrival on campus, where they are greeted by crowds of angry students chanting \u201cOnly Nazis ban books\u201d and \u201cFascists fuck off\u201d. Seemingly unfazed, DeSantis doubles down in an address at the campus college hall. \u201cWe are eliminating DEI,\u201d the governor says before ceremonially signing a bill that banned diversity, equality and inclusion programs in Florida public schools. \u201cIf you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkley,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was spitting in our faces,\u201d says former student Batista. \u201cThey were signing one of the worst bills we could possibly see on our campus, that would impact higher education very harshly.\u201d But after months of feeling like they and their values were under attack, it felt good to let their frustrations out. \u201cIt was sort of a morale boost for students to get that anger out and just scream a little.\u201d<\/p>\n As there became fewer places to turn for protection (the school\u2019s Title IX office was shuttered), the students looked to each other for community, as well as to let off a little steam. \u201cWe have to bring back the queer traditions back,\u201d one student says. They come back roaring with an exuberant drag performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and parties with Beyonc\u00e9 on the soundsystem. Resistance can take many forms.<\/p>\n <\/span>New College students get ready for Rocky Horror night.<\/span> Photograph: Patrick Bresnan<\/p>\n First They Came for My College also shows students reckoning with the same questions that Bresnan and Hanbury would like audiences to grapple with. \u201cWhat are universities for?\u201d asks one student. \u201cAre they businesses to extract wealth from people, or are they places where we not only expand consciousness but also gain skillsets to improve humanity?\u201d<\/p>\n In the three years that the film-makers have been working on the documentary, the attack on higher education has escalated. The Trump administration has now cut billions of dollars of funding to universities who refuse to kowtow to his agenda, leading to dozens of gender studies departments closing and continued pressure to end teaching \u201cdivisive concepts\u201d such as race. Last year, a study by the student advocacy group Scholars at Risk said that the Trump administration has turned the US into a \u201cmodel for how to dismantle\u201d academic freedom. In October, New College became the first college to sign an agreement with Trump committing to uphold \u201cstrict definitions of gender\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were the canary in the coalmine,\u201d says Batista. \u201cNew College was their little political playground.\u201d<\/p>\n The film-makers see First They Came for My College as a cautionary tale. Even its title has the ominous ring of a historic political siege. \u201cThis is fascism,\u201d says Bresnan, unequivocally. \u201cAt a certain point, the film became very serious in documenting our country\u2019s turn toward these fascist practices.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, we will hopefully look back on First They Came For My College like we do on civil rights era films or Vietnam-era films and we say, \u2018I can\u2019t believe that\u2019s who we were,\u2019\u201d Bresnan continues. \u201c\u2018I can\u2019t believe that\u2019s what we did to our greatest professors. I can\u2019t believe that\u2019s what we did to college students.\u2019 What kept me going is the need to finish this document so that we can remember this period and so it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It took a half century to build New College into a sanctuary of independent thought and less than a year to destroy it. In 2023 the beloved Florida liberal arts school became state governor Ron DeSantis\u2019s latest target in his so-called war on woke. DeSantis decimated the school\u2019s trustee board and installed a cabal of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[163,1001,1929,496,7865,1930,23599,495,23598,678,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-46031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-ban","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-documentary","11":"tag-education","12":"tag-fighting","13":"tag-films","14":"tag-frontlines","15":"tag-higher","16":"tag-nazis","17":"tag-students","18":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46031","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=46031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}