Rufo’s Army are on their way

The DeSantis/Rufo plan to turn the New College into a far-right diploma mill with no remaining shred of academic freedom is well under way:

So when Rufo and another new trustee, Eddie Speir, the co-founder of a private Christian school called Inspiration Academy, arrived at New College for meetings with students and faculty, they were received with skepticism and hostility. But Lepinski, a computer science professor and the faculty representative on the board of trustees, was hopeful that they might figure out a way to work together, and he urged the school community to hear them out.

In the ensuing months, there was concern among Lepinski’s colleagues that he wasn’t doing enough to stand up to their new overlords. “Some of us had been a little frustrated with his willingness to try and play nice,” Amy Reid, a French professor and the head of New College’s gender studies program, told me. But Lepinski believed in dialogue and compromise. “I thought maybe there was a path forward with this board where we could focus on the things that unite us instead of the things that divide us,” he said.

That’s why it was so striking when, at the end of a combative three-hour meeting on Wednesday in which the trustees rejected five tenure applications, Lepinski quit. He’s not just leaving the board, but New College altogether. “I can no longer see a way that I can be effective here, given the current board of trustees,” he said at an impromptu news conference afterward.

[…]

Eliana Salzhauer, whose 17-year-old son is a New College economics student, compared the seemingly inexorable transformation of the school to Twitter under Elon Musk: It looked the same at first, even as it gradually degraded into a completely different experience. “They are turning a top-rated academic institution into a third-rate athletic facility,” she said.

Salzhauer was referring, in part, to the hiring of Mariano Jimenez, who previously worked at Speir’s Inspiration Academy, as athletic director and head baseball coach, even though there’s no baseball diamond on campus. In the past, New College hasn’t had traditional sports teams, but the administration is now recruiting student athletes, and Corcoran has said he wants to establish fraternities and sororities, likely creating a culture clash with New College’s artsy queer kids, activists and autodidacts. Before Wednesday’s board meeting, about 75 people held a protest outside. “We’re Nerds & Geeks, not Jocks & Greeks,” said one sign.

The War on Wokeness cannot tolerate organic chemistry professors having tenure, my friends. And the most important thing a liberal arts college can do, aside from demanding extensive knowledge of the works of George Gilder and Ayn Rand, is to field a fourth-tier baseball team.

And what would one of these stories be without a right-on-the-nose detail:

Rufo couldn’t attend Wednesday’s meeting in person, because he’d been delayed coming home from Hungary, where he had a fellowship at a right-wing think tank closely tied to Viktor Orban’s government. (This seemed fitting, since Orban’s Hungary created the template for Rufo and Desantis’s educational crusade.) Instead, he Zoomed in, his face projected on a movie screen behind the other trustees.

Rufo is so committed to anti-intellectual authoritarianism that it’s not enough to study the extensive examples at home, he also needs models from abroad.