
Florida College Discards Gender Studies Books Ahead Of New School Year
HuffPost
The tiny state-run college endured a hostile takeover by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.
When hundreds of books got hauled away in a dumpster from the library of the New College of Florida on Thursday, the tiny liberal arts college with a governing board dominated by appointees of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis once again found itself at the center of the state’s culture wars.
“We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash,” Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the Sarasota college’s governing board, posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter.
The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, condemned the college for “a brazen act of censorship.”
“These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history’s darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACU of Florida, said in a statement.
Both sides were responding to accounts spread through social media that officials at the campus of roughly 700 students had sent a large collection of books from the college’s recently shuttered gender studies program to a local landfill.