In Florida, the fate of abortion access lies in the hands of seven state Supreme Court justices. They’re deciding two cases: One, which the court heard Wednesday, will determine whether Floridians can vote directly this November on a measure that would explicitly protect the right to an abortion in their state constitution. The other — a challenge to the legality of Florida’s current 15-week ban…
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A December bill introduced by state Rep. Wyman Duggan could soon eliminate police oversight committees in Florida. The House version, HB 601, titled “Complaints Against Law Enforcement and Correctional Officers,” has since advanced through multiple panels and is now with the Judiciary Committee. The House version outlaws investigations and public review of police officers, or public discussions of…
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The NAACP has made a formal request to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate a series of deaths that have occurred in the jail system of Broward County, Florida. Twenty-one people, primarily people of color, have died in Broward County jails since 2019. In a letter sent directly to Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the DOJ, the NAACP states that an…
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Flanked by several dozen uniformed members of Florida’s State Guard and standing behind a podium displaying the words “Stop the Invasion,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday announced a plan to send the civilian force and other resources to Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration has been embroiled in a standoff with the White House over the U.S-Mexico border. DeSantis said the State…
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According to a letter submitted by an anonymous source on Monday, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has rescinded the policy that allowed transgender individuals to update the gender marker on their driver’s licenses. The letter, written by Deputy Executive Director Dave Kerner, states that gender will be interpreted as “biological sex.” Furthermore…
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On May 19, 2023, Virgilio Aguilar Méndez, an 18-year-old Indigenous-Maya farmworker, was eating and talking to his mother on the phone outside of his Super 8 motel room in St. Augustine, Florida, where he was staying with three other farmworkers. He was working to send money to his family in Guatemala. St. Johns County police Sergeant Michael Kunovich approached Aguilar Méndez and described him to…
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A plan spearheaded by some Florida Republicans to use taxpayer funds to assist former President Donald Trump in covering fees tied to his numerous legal woes was ditched after Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would veto the proposal, per Politico. The bill was filed earlier this month by Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Fla., for this year’s legislative session, and could allow Florida to give Trump up to $5…
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The worst presidential campaign in recent history has come to a completely predictable end. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ended his quixotic run for the White House two days before the New Hampshire primary and just a week after failing to win any of the 99 counties in Iowa, losing to Donald Trump by over 30 points. He announced it on social media and quickly endorsed Trump. An ABC news story…
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Last summer, Reveal host Al Letson returned home to Jacksonville, Florida, to find a changed state. The Republican Legislature had passed a slate of laws targeting minority groups. Educators could now face criminal penalties over the material they teach regarding gender and sexuality, and schools across the state were banning books about queer families, transgender youth and Black history. There were also repeated instances of racist and anti-Semitic speech, including Nazis waving swastikas in front of Disney World. All of this contributed to the NAACP issuing a rare travel advisory stating that “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.” Then on Aug. 26, a White supremacist killed three Black people at a Dollar General in Jacksonville.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attended a vigil for the victims, he was met with boos and mourners shouting, “Your policies caused this.”
In this episode, Letson digs into the policies DeSantis and the Legislature have passed in recent years and their effects on Black Floridians and other people of color. He speaks with a history teacher who says the new laws have made it harder to educate students, as well as a mother who describes books being removed from her daughter’s classroom and rules barring students from sharing books with friends at school. Letson also interviews state Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican who championed many of the new policies, including the Stop WOKE Act, which restricts how racism and history are taught in schools.
In the final segment, Letson examines redistricting in the state. In 2022, DeSantis vetoed maps drawn by the Republican Legislature, and the governor’s office instead drew new maps that got rid of two Black-dominated districts and increased the number of Republican-leaning districts. Those maps, which were subsequently passed by lawmakers, are now being battled over in both state and federal court. To understand the debate, Letson speaks with reporter Andrew Pantazi of the Jacksonville news organization The Tributary, as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Fine defends the new maps, saying they’re designed to challenge Florida’s Constitution, which he argues requires “racial gerrymandering.” Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon says the new maps violate Florida’s constitutional protections of racial minorities and their ability to “elect representatives of their choice.”
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Florida State Sen. Jason Brodeur (R) recently introduced a bill that would revoke certain privileges from journalists in the state, including the right to keep sources anonymous. The bill would also make accusing someone of racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia defamatory, even if the accusation is based on a person’s “scientific or religious beliefs.” “More attempts to chill free speech in…
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Dictionaries and encyclopedias are among the more than 2,800 books that a Florida school district has pulled from library shelves in an effort to comply with a law that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last year. Judd Legum, author of the Popular Information newsletter, reported Wednesday that the Escambia County School District said the books that have been banned pending further investigation…
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On Monday, Florida state Rep. David Borrero (R) introduced a bill, HB1519, that seeks not only to implement a near-total abortion ban in the state but also classifies performing an abortion as a third-degree felony. The proposed penalty includes a potential imprisonment term of up to 10 years, a fine of up to $100,000, or both. HB1519 defines a “person” as “including an unborn child beginning at…
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Floridians Protecting Freedom, a campaign advocating for the inclusion of the right to abortion on the 2024 ballot, has successfully gathered 910,946 verified signatures in favor of the initiative, surpassing the number of signatures required for the measure to be included on the ballot. “Today is a big day for all Floridians! The Division of Elections is reporting that #
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In one of the most extreme acts of the last decade targeting transgender individuals, a new bill introduced on Thursday afternoon in Florida seeks to end all legal recognition of transgender people and mandates mass biological sex affidavits for both transgender and cisgender Floridians. These affidavits would be necessary at the DMV for license renewals, enabling the state to gather records of…
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Orange County school district pulled 673 books from classrooms this year in fear of violating Florida’s far right laws banning materials that supposedly include “sexual conduct” from schools, according to analysis by the Florida Freedom to Read Project. These laws, HB 1069 and HB 1467, require media specialists, or teachers with library training, to review and approve books in classrooms and…
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New legislation offered by a Republican lawmaker in Florida could bar local governments and their offices from flying LGBTQ Pride Flags. House Bill 901, authored by far right Rep. David Borrero (R), does not directly state that it is targeting Pride Flags in particular, but critics have pointed out that Borrero and other GOP lawmakers attempted to pass similar legislation earlier this year…
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To understand the problems with Florida’s oversight of anti-abortion pregnancy centers, you don’t have to look much further than Mary’s Pregnancy Resource Center, north of Miami. The crisis pregnancy center in Broward County steered women away from abortion while providing free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and parenting classes. Founded by Yohanka Reyes and her husband, its mission was rooted in…
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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering a new approval for a pesticide that would be used on Florida oranges and grapefruits despite the fact that agency scientists have repeatedly found the chemical does not meet safety standards designed to protect children’s health, internal agency records show. EPA emails suggest that persistent pressure from chemical industry lobbyists…
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This article was published in partnership with the Miami Herald.
To understand the problems with Florida’s oversight of anti-abortion pregnancy centers, you don’t have to look much further than Mary’s Pregnancy Resource Center, north of Miami.
The crisis pregnancy center in Broward County steered women away from abortion while providing free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and parenting classes. Founded by Yohanka Reyes and her husband, its mission was rooted in Reyes’ own horrific history: The first time she became pregnant after she was sexually assaulted as a young girl, she had an abortion. The second time, she decided to carry her baby to term – as it turned out, the only child she would give birth to.
Mary’s “has been the greatest blessing in the world,” Reyes declared in an interview with a Spanish-language Catholic TV channel. “To be able to tell my story and to be able to save so many lives and be able to reach their souls with the word of Jesus.”
For years, Mary’s was one of the crown jewels of the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, the little-known nonprofit that administers the state-funded “alternatives to abortion” program. In April, the network’s profile grew tremendously after the Legislature approved a fivefold funding increase to $25 million a year. In October, state support grew once again after the state Department of Health quietly increased the contract to up to $29.4 million.
This year’s funding nearly matches that of the entire last decade, when the state handed out $32.5 million in taxpayer money to the anti-abortion initiative. Mary’s has been one of its biggest beneficiaries, taking in more than $2.2 million in that period.
Yet Mary’s was floundering financially for much of that time, sending up numerous red flags that the network didn’t seem to notice. For at least three years, the pregnancy center failed to file its federal Form 990s, the tax forms required for nonprofits, and other required paperwork, leading the Internal Revenue Service and the state to temporarily revoke its tax-exempt status. That should have disqualified it from receiving any public money, according to the state program’s compliance manual. But during this period, the network gave Mary’s $622,000.
The Florida Pregnancy Care Network was planning to award another $275,000 to Mary’s this year, according to documents obtained through a public records request – until journalists from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Miami Herald began asking questions.
Now Mary’s has dropped out of the network and faces nearly $170,000 in federal tax liens. In November, an eviction notice was posted on the front door of its two-story building alongside a sign that said, “We are moving.”
Reyes declined requests for an interview, complaining that journalists were treating her unfairly. “Why don’t you accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and that way you stop hurting people that are really trying to help others?” she wrote in an email.
A Reveal/Herald review of Florida Pregnancy Care Network records from the last three years shows that the oversight deficiencies that allowed Mary’s to collect state funds are endemic in the alternatives-to-abortion program. The network hasn’t been conducting regular reviews of nonprofit tax filings or checking for federal tax debt. Centers didn’t need to apply for funding every year because their contracts had been automatically renewed. The network isn’t required by the state to conduct frequent site visits of the crisis pregnancy centers it’s funding; it visited fewer than half of the centers it funded last year. Network employees met with Mary’s staff just twice over 18 months, once in person and once online.
And because the Florida Pregnancy Care Network is a nonprofit, it isn’t subject to the same kind of transparency required of public agencies, shielding the program from the scrutiny lawmakers and public officials would otherwise give when millions in taxpayer dollars are spent. Funneling millions in taxpayer money through a nonprofit “creates a cloud over freedom of information,” said Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani of Orlando. “We should have the ability to know exactly what these public dollars are doing in our state.”
Fixing the network’s oversight gaps is more urgent than ever, given its rapid state-funded growth. Republican state Rep. Jennifer Canady from Polk County, who co-sponsored the funding bill, said she contacted the Florida Pregnancy Care Network’s executive director to “ensure taxpayer dollars are used effectively” after our reporters told her about problems at Mary’s.
“There are pregnancy care centers around the state doing incredible work and doing things for women,” Canady said. “But any that are not following the rules should not be receiving state funds.”
In a written statement, Rita Gagliano, the network’s executive director, called the Mary’s situation “an isolated incident,” adding: “We do not believe the allegations made involving this one center are representative of the program, how it runs or how it will continue to run.”
The network has put in place new requirements that centers share federal tax returns, end-of-year financial reports or any information about tax debt, and annual audits will be required of any nonprofit that receives $750,000 or more in public funding. Next fiscal year, they’ll have a new contract renewal process.
But those monitoring measures are still “the very minimum,” Eskamani said.
If the state doesn’t significantly strengthen how it monitors the program and mandate that the Florida Pregnancy Care Network be more transparent about its processes, serious financial problems are bound to continue, lawmakers and experts said.
“Transparency reduces corruption,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. Problems like the ones at Mary’s “happen all the time when you have a system shrouded in secrecy.”
***
Florida’s alternatives-to-abortion program dates back to Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration in 2005. The goal, said then-Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, was to support women through pregnancies they might otherwise be tempted to terminate: “We want them to know that they do have a choice.” Last year, about 50 nonprofits received state money, including pregnancy centers, adoption agencies and maternity homes.
The Florida Department of Health sets the basic rules for the program. But since the beginning, responsibility for running it has been outsourced to the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, whose ties to anti-abortion conservatives and religious groups run deep. One of its founders, Tampa OB-GYN Dr. Rufus S. Armstrong, led a failed 2012 ballot campaign that sought to remove state constitutional protections for abortion.
The alternatives-to-abortion program had its first major growth spurt in 2016, when lawmakers increased funding from $2 million to $4 million a year. In 2018, they codified the network’s role as the sole conduit for distributing the taxpayer money.
The biggest chunk of that funding has gone toward parenting classes and counseling “with the goal of childbirth.” Other covered services include pregnancy tests, pregnancy loss counseling, parenting classes, testing for sexually transmitted infections and medical exams for the uninsured.
This year’s expansion was far more sweeping, and it came as Florida’s Republican lawmakers reacted to the demise of Roe v. Wade by restricting abortions. The state law banning abortion after six weeks is on hold pending a ruling from the Florida Supreme Court.
The rising profile of pregnancy centers reflects a trend that can be seen in other conservative states in the post-Roe era. For decades, the crisis pregnancy center movement concentrated on persuading “abortion vulnerable” women to choose parenting or adoption instead. Now, in conservative states with restrictive abortion laws, crisis pregnancy centers are revamping their mission – trying to fill growing gaps in access to reproductive health care by providing women’s wellness exams, sexually transmitted infection testing and even some prenatal care.
With so much new money flowing into the Florida program, many anti-abortion pregnancy centers are receiving double – and even triple – the amount of funds they received in previous years. The state is also reimbursing more for specific services – for example, reimbursement for counseling doubled to $2.50 per minute. Much of that money will go toward rent and salaries, records show.
Some of this year’s largest contracts went to Catholic dioceses that run crisis pregnancy centers.
The Catholic Charities arm of the Diocese of St. Petersburg will receive up to $800,000 this fiscal year, including for its four Foundations of Life crisis pregnancy centers in the Tampa Bay area. That’s more than triple its contract last year, and according to the operating budget it submitted to the state, the funds could nearly cover the entire budget. Foundations of Life director Laura Ramos said the new money will go toward promoting two part-time employees to full time and adding one more ultrasound technician.
“We live in a world where women are told constantly what to do, right? They tell us we cannot have children and go to school. They tell us we cannot hold jobs and have children,” Ramos said. “We are here to tell them that whatever decision they make, we will walk with them.”
The Archdiocese of Miami has seen its latest contract more than double to $350,000, enough to cover 75% of its submitted budget this year. In an interview with the Herald last spring, Angela Curatalo, director of the archdiocese’s three pregnancy centers, said volunteers, many from local churches, encourage women in state-funded counseling sessions to keep their pregnancies.
“It’s not professional counseling,” she told a Herald reporter in April. “We don’t pretend that it is.”
They tell women about services like Medicaid and food stamps, free ultrasounds and adoption. They use plastic models of first-trimester fetuses and warn about alleged long-term effects of abortion, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, and alcohol or drug abuse – information that is not supported by sound medical research.
“We let them know you don’t have to go down that route,” Curatalo said.
The Florida Pregnancy Care Network also saw a big bump in its own state funding for operational expenses, including $1 million for marketing. This type of spending is a sore point with program opponents, including Eskamani, the state representative from the Orlando area.
“Part of this $29.4 million is literally going to go towards (advertising), boosting anti-abortion rhetoric and anti-abortion stigma,” she said. “I think there should be a complete prohibition on that.”
An additional $100,000 will fund an Option Line call center run by Heartbeat International, one of the largest anti-abortion organizations in the country, to give referrals to pregnancy centers.
***
Florida health authorities have been given virtually no power to regulate pregnancy centers. That means the Florida Pregnancy Care Network is the only agency with a true window into the operations of pregnancy centers in the state. But that doesn’t mean it’s offering oversight.
Gagliano said the network monitors only services “that are billable to the program.” “We expect members to independently and properly maintain and keep current all other business aspects of their organizations,” she wrote, as they are “completely independent of (the network).”
The state requires pregnancy centers to have policies for addressing client complaints, file monthly invoices detailing the number of clients served and the total number of minutes spent providing services, and do background checks on employees and volunteers, according to the program’s compliance manual. The network is also required to conduct an “on-site review” of centers “in person or by Zoom every other year.” And centers must also complete training, though the manual doesn’t specify what training is required.
Once a year, pregnancy centers are also required to go through “monitoring,” a process that includes a financial audit. But the Florida Pregnancy Care Network audits information for only one month and a single financial quarter – and gives program participants 30 days’ notice about which time periods it plans to review.
Then, if a group is in compliance with these rules, the network has more or less rubber-stamped its continued participation in the program, Reveal and the Herald found.
“We need to have people visiting these centers,” said state Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, who represents parts of Broward County, including where Mary’s was located. “People should be looking at, ‘What is our return on investment?’ ”
The state also requires that the network ensure that centers are providing “accurate and current” medical information to clients. Yet Reveal found that about a third of state-funded centers in Florida last year have posted misleading or inaccurate medical information on their websites, such as inaccurate claims about abortion causing infertility, anxiety attacks and suicidal ideation.
In October, Book filed legislation for the upcoming session that would require the Health Department to conduct annual inspections at state-funded centers and fine those distributing medical misinformation to clients.
“Your files should be up to date,” Book said. “You should be paying taxes. You should be doing all of the things that everybody else is having to do. You shouldn’t just get a free pass because you’re providing, quote, crisis pregnancy services.”
***
With a system that allows a nonprofit the power to distribute state money to private centers, much about the Florida Pregnancy Care Network and its operations remains hidden from the public.
Cuillier, the freedom of information expert, said outsourcing the alternatives-to-abortion program’s operations creates barriers around the public’s ability to scrutinize how taxpayer funds are spent – a practice he equated to “laundering public information through a nonprofit.” “This is kind of a gimmick used around the country to hide information,” he said. “It’s really just a blatant workaround (to promote) secrecy.”
If the Florida Department of Health directly contracted with the centers receiving state funds, individual contracts with centers and any audits would be publicly available. Currently, the only network document that’s posted online is the state’s contract with the Florida Pregnancy Care Network.
At least 17 other states award taxpayer funds to pregnancy centers and other organizations that work to deter people from having abortions. Last year, states handed out $89 million to crisis pregnancy centers and other anti-abortion organizations across the country – and that amount has been growing since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Other states that have used the same nonprofit model have discovered problems, from a Texas pregnancy center using taxpayer money to pay for vacations to a state audit that found Oklahoma’s program spent more on administrative costs and salaries than on aid to pregnant women.
Book was among a small contingent of Democratic lawmakers who publicly opposed the Legislature’s proposal for $25 million in funding to the network this year. The lawmakers proposed reallocating the money toward other services, such as resources for domestic violence and sexual assault victims and telehealth services for a minority maternal care pilot program. Those amendments ultimately failed.
“You know how much $25 million could do for the child welfare system right now? It blows my mind,” Book said. “We talked a lot about that during the time when this bill was coming up on the floor. OK, you’re gonna give (families) bottles and cribs and car seats? Great. But that’s not child care. People can’t afford child care.”
This story was edited by Nina Martin, Kate Howard and Casey Frank and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org, and Clara-Sophia Daly can be reached at csdaly@miamiherald.com. Follow them on X, formerly known as Twitter: @lauracmorel and @clarasophiadaly.
ABOUT THE REPORTING
To conduct this investigation, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Miami Herald examined Florida Pregnancy Care Network contracts, compliance manuals, center agreements and other documents for the last three fiscal years obtained through public records requests with the Florida Department of Health. Reporters also reviewed publicly available IRS Form 990 filings filed by the Florida Pregnancy Care Network and dozens of crisis pregnancy centers since 2014.
How Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers in Florida Get Taxpayer Funds With Almost No Oversight is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
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During the past three years, the country has seen a dramatic increase in book bans at public and K-12 school libraries and in rightwing pro-censorship activism, usually targeting books that address race, gender identity, or sexuality.
In Texas, Suzette Baker was fired from her job as director of a rural public library for refusing to withdraw books about racial justice and the lives of LGBTQ people from circulation. A mob of neo-fascist Proud Boys descended on a Downers Grove, Illinois, school board meeting to demand that school libraries under the district’s control remove Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel that explores non-binary gender identity. In Florida, a member of Moms For Liberty, the group behind many recent book challenges, actually reported a school librarian to the police for distributing a popular young adult novel the Moms for Liberty activist claimed was “child pornography.” Meanwhile, in Virginia, one woman, Jennifer Peterson, has filed challenges against some 71 books held by her school district’s school libraries on the grounds that they contain “sexually explicit” passages; Peterson has succeeded in getting 36 titles removed, including Toni Morrison’s classic Beloved and Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. And all over the country, school librarians have received death threats and school libraries have been shut down by bomb threats over books deemed objectionable by conservative fanatics.
According to PEN America’s September 2023 report, School Book Bans: The Mounting Pressure to Censor, during the 2022-23 school year there were 3,362 reported instances of book censorship in K-12 schools impacting 1,557 different titles. As PEN America noted, this represents a 33 percent increase over the 2021-22 school year and a dramatic increase from the last time the organization issued a comprehensive report on school book bans in 2016. (The American Library Association, which also tracks challenges to books at public and school libraries, says that library book challenges this year have risen to the highest level since the organization began tracking them more than twenty years ago.) Books that featured LGBTQ+ characters or themes related to gender identity or queer sexuality—including Fun Home, Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, And Tango Makes Three, and I Am Jazz—were singled out as the target of some 36 percent of the book bans from 2021-2023 investigated by PEN America. Roughly 37 percent of the challenges targeted books that “discussed race and racism.”
The majority of these bans have occurred in Republican-controlled states—like Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas—which have passed laws that restrict teaching about race, gender, and sexuality or that empower parents to challenge school library books about such topics. This, in turn, has encouraged school districts to often preemptively purge their libraries of books and other materials that might be seen as controversial. Indeed, PEN America reports that more than 40 percent of all book bans last year occurred in GOP-dominated Florida, with 1406 bans, followed by Texas with 625 and Missouri with 333.
Florida: A Gulag for Young Minds
Because Florida is by far the worst offender against K-12 students’ freedom to read, it is worth examining the legislation the state has adopted that facilitates this censorship. Although Florida governor Ron DeSantis dismisses news about book bans in his state as “a nasty hoax,” he has signed several pieces of legislation that directly contribute to censorship in his state.
In March 2022, DeSantis famously signed HB 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Act, popularly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, that bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender from kindergarten through third grade. The Act requires that any teaching about these topics in older grades be “age appropriate” and in accordance with state standards. It also specifies that any teacher found to have violated the Act will have their teaching license revoked. Confusion about whether this legislation applied to school libraries led districts across the state to purge books addressing sexual orientation or gender from their collections simply as a precaution.
Just one month later, DeSantis signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, HB 7, which among other things bans teaching in schools about what it calls “divisive concepts”—principally related to race and the history of race relations in the United States—that might make a student feel “guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” because of their race, gender, sex, or national origin. The law specifically bans the teaching of so-called “critical race theory.” Tellingly, since HB 7 became law, one Florida school district banned a graphic novel, The Little Rock Nine, which details a well-known episode in the civil rights movement’s struggle against segregation, on the grounds that “its subject matter is ‘difficult for elementary school students to comprehend.’”
In July 2022, DeSantis signed HB 1467 into law. This legislation requires every elementary school in the state to “publish on its website, in a searchable format… a list of all materials maintained in the school library media center or required as part of a school or grade-level reading list.” It orders school librarians to certify that books in their collections do not “contain pornography or material deemed harmful to minors” without spelling out clear standards for what exactly counts as “harmful to minors.” It orders districts to develop a policy and a process for resolving any “objection by a parent or a resident of the county” to any library material and mandates that schools report all objections to the Department of Education. The law mandates that all meetings “convened for the purpose of ranking, eliminating, or selecting instructional materials for recommendation to the district school board must be noticed and open to the public,” and that “any committees convened for such purpose must include parents.”
Finally, just this past May, DeSantis ratified HB 1069, a law that makes it even easier to ban books in Florida schools. The law extends the prohibition on instruction about sexuality and gender established by HB 1557 to eighth grade. It would prevent students below the ninth grade from accessing any books through school libraries that contain “sexual conduct.” It also modifies HB 1467 by specifying that “parents shall have the right to read [out loud] passages from any material that is subject to an objection” at a school board meeting and requires that if a school board denies someone the right to read a passage due to its indecent or inappropriate content, “the school district shall discontinue the use of the material.”
This recent law has many librarians, educators, and opponents of censorship particularly concerned. It could, conceivably, be used to ban from K-8 school libraries the works of William Shakespeare or Toni Morrison. The notion of “sexual conduct” as articulated in the law is so extremely vague and broad that commonly assigned middle school books like The Diary of Anne Frank could be prohibited under its auspices. HB 1069 certainly has had an oppressive impact on the Sunshine State’s school librarians, forcing them to meticulously screen as many as a million books for any material that might be objectionable to a parent or resident.
Moms For Liberty
In Florida and elsewhere, ultraconservative “parent groups,” such as Moms for Liberty, have exploited these laws to force school boards and individual school administrators to remove hundreds of books that conservative censors frame as divisive or obscene. Founded in Florida in 2021 by a former school board member, Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Bridget Ziegler, wife of the Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler, the organization was originally formed to protest school and library mask mandates and other public health regulations affecting K-12 education during the COVID crisis. Since then, the group has turned its focus to fighting inclusive curriculum and allegedly “inappropriate” library materials. They claim to have 285 chapters in 45 states and over 100,000 members. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Moms for Liberty an extremist hate group and noted its many ties with fascist and white supremacist groups, including the Proud Boys.
Moms for Liberty has been training its members to bombard school boards and administrations with complaints about lengthy lists of books. Unlike in the past, when most complaints fielded by schools concerned individual titles or series (such as the Harry Potter or Twilight series), today conservative activists turn up at meetings and demand that lists of a hundred or more titles be expunged. In fact, according to the ALA, last year eleven states recorded complaints about a hundred or more titles, up from six in 2022 and zero in 2021. The explosion of mass challenges to school library books is best understood as a direct result of the rise of Moms for Liberty and other such groups.
Lawsuits, Anti-Book-Banning Laws, Book Sanctuaries, and Other Signs of Resistance
The good news is that defenders of intellectual freedom are fighting back.
Earlier this year PEN America, Penguin Random House, five authors of banned books, and two parents with children affected by school book bans in Florida’s Escambia County brought a federal lawsuit claiming that by removing several books from school libraries—including young adult books with LGBTQ characters, such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower—the country’s schools were attempting to ”prescribe an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendments.” In Lake County, Florida, the authors of And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins who adopt and raise a chick, brought a suit contesting the county school board’s ban on the book for kindergarten through third-grade students, charging that the board’s actions were unconstitutional viewpoint and content discrimination.
Beyond these isolated legal actions, state legislatures across the country have begun passing laws designed to make the sort of mass book challenges promoted by Moms for Liberty impossible. Illinois has led the way with a law signed in June by Governor J. B. Pritzker that withholds funding for any public library that restricts or bans materials for “partisan or doctrinal” reasons. It also mandates that Illinois public libraries adhere to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which requires that they “challenge censorship” and resist the exclusion of materials because of the “origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.” In September, California followed suit, with a law that imposes fines on schools that “block textbooks and school library books for discriminatory reasons.”
Libraries and librarians are resisting the right’s current clampdown on the right to read. In September 2022, the Chicago Public Library system declared itself a “book sanctuary” to make heavily censored books available to the public at all 81 of their branch libraries. There are now similar sanctuary libraries across the country, including in “red” states such as Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Ohio.
Educators and teachers unions have staged mass rallies to protest book bans in states like Florida. Civic groups have also battled book bans in often creative ways. For instance, in the summer of 2023, progressive activist group MoveOn launched a “banned bookmobile” that visited states across the South and the Midwest where bans have been enacted or attempted, distributing copies of some of the most frequently challenged books. In July 2023, the Digital Public Library of America launched the Banned Book Club, an app that allows users to freely access books that have been banned in their area. In November 2023, the popular singer Pink distributed thousands of banned or challenged books at concerts she performed in Miami and Sunrise, Florida.
But perhaps the most inspiring sign of resistance to the assault on young people’s right to read has been the activism of young people themselves. Students are taking the lead in organizing against restrictions on books about race, the LGBTQ+ community, and other subjects abhorred by conservatives. In Texas, for example, Da’Taeveyon Daniels and other high school students led the battle against censorship of school books as part of a new organization Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT). (For more on teens’ role in the battle against censorship, see Da’Taeveyon Daniels’s Project Censored Dispatch, The Rising Political Battle over Censorship). Across the country, students have formed “banned book” reading groups in one high school after another.
The efforts of groups like SEAT, the ALA, PEN America, and other champions of intellectual freedom like the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Civil Liberties Union deserve our support. The culture warriors of the right know that their toxic strain of hate-filled politics thrives on ignorance, bigotry, and cultural chauvinism. To defeat them, we should do all we can to promote critical thinking, deep cross-cultural knowledge, and tolerance that is best cultivated through the reading of exactly the sorts of books they seek to suppress.
First published at Project Censored.
The post The Attack Against the Freedom to Read and What to Do About It first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The state of Florida has submitted an amicus brief in a federal lawsuit regarding a school district’s library book bans, alleging that libraries exist only to promote local and state governments’ interests — a claim that has been roundly condemned by librarians. This past summer, speech rights group PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House and a group of authors jointly filed a lawsuit against…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Next week Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will head to Alabama to square off in yet another contest between the four GOP presidential hopefuls. While none of them are within easy striking distance of former President Donald Trump, over the past few weeks, momentum has shifted noticeably…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A Florida lawmaker has introduced a constitutional amendment that would forbid any state or local government from being able to distribute reparation payments to descendants of people who were enslaved in the U.S. prior to the end of the Civil War. The joint resolution, authored by Republican state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, would need to pass both houses of the state legislature by 60 percent votes…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A new bill just introduced in Florida aims to expand “Don’t Say Gay Or Trans” provisions to a broad range of workplaces. Targeting government employees, contractors, and nonprofits, the bill sets forth restrictions and bans on policies relating to pronouns, gender identity, and sexuality. Specifically, it would prohibit state and local government employees as well as any contractors engaged with…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A pro-Palestinian student group in Florida is suing Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other state officials over a decision last month to “deactivate” the organization, in violation of students’ First Amendment speech and assembly rights. The University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (UF-SJP), a student-led organization that advocates for an end to the Israeli occupation of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A proposed bill in Florida, HB-395, would punish cities for removing existing historical monuments and memorials, and would retroactively apply to removals that took place up to five years ago. If passed, the bill would also grant governors the power to remove any local official from office if they voted to remove a monument. The proposal was introduced on Thursday by state Rep. Dean Black (R…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
An abortion rights group in Florida, seeking to put an amendment measure on a statewide ballot next year, has filed a response brief to complaints from the Republican state attorney general, who alleges that the wording of the proposal is too confusing for voters. Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group pushing for the initiative, has collected more than 490,000 of the roughly 892,000…
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s war on education has been a major pillar of his administration, and the tiny liberal New College of Florida is now a laboratory for his political agenda. Dave Zirin speaks with Mike Sanderson of the “Save the New College of Florida” movement on the right-wing takeover underway, and the role of sports in making it happen.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
(singing)
Speaker 2:
Thanks for having me, Dave.
Speaker 3:
Awesome. So let’s get started. Speaking broadly, what has Ron DeSantis done to the New College of Florida? That’s so terrible.
Speaker 2:
Well, in January without any warning or consultation, he announced the appointment of new trustees in a batch. He hadn’t made any appointments in his first term, and basically immediately giving him a governing majority on the board, and announced these sweeping changes with a lot of sort of false statements about what new college was, a lot of stereotypes, a lot of off the shelf cookie cutter propaganda that was just not true, and announced the intention to remake the school. Sort of broadly, the term that was used over and over was Hillsdale of the South, referring to the extremely conservative private school of Michigan. In fact, one of the trustees appointed was a dean at Hillsdale. And a part of that, they immediately fired the college’s president who had been in office for 18 months and was well-respected and was starting to show results. And they immediately made… They hired the former Republican speaker of the house who had no academic qualifications to be president and proceeded to try to drive students away. They eliminated diversity and equity inclusion area.
They immediately changed bathroom signs on campus. It was like their first priority. And they denied tenure to trustees, and created just generally an environment of uncertainty and hostility that is still being worked out. And as part of that… So that’s the overall aspect of what they’ve been doing and why so many people of students and faculty and alumni and community supporters have been fighting hard to, in some cases, try to work with these people to see what their goals are, but it’s just so… It’s been so disruptive and so destructive to especially the students and faculty in the current community. And we’re trying to stand up for the institution and say what’s happening there is wrong.
Speaker 3:
And then just to give people a visual picture, it’s a school of just 700 students, right?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so it has about 700, 800 students. It’s in Sarasota, Florida. Yeah, it’s a small liberal arts school. It’s the smallest in the state system by a large margin. It was founded as a private liberal arts school in around 1960 and was acquired by the state in 1975. It’s been independent inside the state since 2001, has a very rigorous academic system. So it was founded to be a rigorous academic college, and it has a unique academic system, actually, in which we didn’t get grades, but received narrative evaluations and had to… You have to be very self-motivated to go there. So it acquired a reputation as a school that’s very quirky and individualistic, but also very academically rigorous, as seen by results of the number of students who go on to get PhDs or have other received prestigious fellowships like Fulbrights. Many years, New College had the only students get Fulbright scholarships in the entire state of Florida.
So it did have a good reputation. It did have problems with enrollment over the years. They’ve been trying to grow that number. It was hit very hard by the pandemic. But the school was coming back, and then you just had this hostile takeover, which was part of this broader agenda against higher education in Florida in which New College was just seen as sort of a small fish that could be sort of plucked out.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, or the opening shot of a much larger agenda where they point-
Speaker 2:
Yeah, the opening-
Speaker 3:
… to the New College of Florida.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely. This is something they said directly when Christopher Rufo, the conservative ideologue, was appointed to the board, said pretty directly that this was something they were going to try to replicate throughout. And in fact, they eliminated the DEI in Florida in February, and then they proceeded to eliminate DEI in the state legislature, and they’re going to be implementing that in November throughout the state public university system. So it is really something we’re trying to get the word out. Because something like this at New College, they eliminated diversity, equity, inclusion in February and there wasn’t a groundswell. There weren’t consequences by the other institutions reacting to that. So the message really was, okay, you can do this and it’s not going to cause problems with your accreditation or with your membership and associations or whatnot. And that’s a very disturbing message that’s come out of this because it’s more than just the school itself.
Speaker 3:
Now, you spoke about it being about 7, 800 students. Can you speak to how sports are being used to change the composition and perhaps even politics of the campus?
Speaker 2:
When they started this in January, February, there was some talk by people like Rufo of recruiting mission aligned students, like the Hillsdale of the South language was in that regard. But really, they drove so many students away so quickly, who just decided that the hostility and the uncertainty of it really just came about numbers that they decided to create these sports programs, as I can see it, just to start recruiting students. And they basically hired these coaches to recruit students and get students replaced. The ones they were driving away, the coaches they hired have all very specific backgrounds. Aside from being underqualified, two of the coaches came from Bob Jones University, one directly. The other had worked there for years. Others, they all came from either attended or worked at Christian colleges or high schools. So it was very clear ideologically, who they were going to get.
There’s also allegations, the director of admissions told employees to recruit Christian students, which he later may have changed to the right students, wink wink. But another point is just because New College had struggled with enrollment trying to get bigger, it was very academically rigorous. And one of the things they did was just incredibly lower the standards, as well as put the recruitment of athletes outside the normal admissions process. And you saw that in the New York Times article that ran, I think last month, where the admissions on the record said that they got an essay that was just grammatically and it was just a mess. It was a screenshot of cell phone notes and just said, “I want to play ball.” And that athlete was admitted. So it’s on one hand, a cultural thing, but it’s on another thing, it’s just a way to bring in students to replace the ones that they’re trying to drive away as part of their effort, which is partially ideological and partially just mismanagement in terms of they are running a college as difficult and they have not done a very good job of it.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. I want to get the numbers right because they’re kind of astounding to me. So you’ve got seven to 800 students. They’ve recruited and given scholarships to over 100 athletes. Am I getting that right? And 70 baseball players, 70?
Speaker 2:
70. That number’s pretty eye popping. And I think they just got the recruitment pipeline going. And it wasn’t about building a team, it was just about bringing in students, so they didn’t stop. So we knew the Richard Corker, the interim president, wanted to hit this enrollment number, and so it was just all comers. So yeah, they tried to recruit an incoming class, which as of the summer, it was something like 150. The numbers change every time they report them. So I know you want to get the numbers correct, but they change every time. And over the summer, it was about 150 student athletes and 70 of them being baseball players. And the athletic director they hired, who was the former employee of one of the trustees, was who they decided to hire, was a baseball coach. And so that was part of the reason that trustee had a Christian high school with a baseball program, and several of his students immediately were accepted into New College.
So it was just there were baseball people in the start, and it was just about driving up the numbers, not trying to build a sustainable program. And that’s how you get these absurd laughable results of 70 baseball players. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that should be a scandal. I believe, I think it was you who pointed out to me that the number of baseball players at the University of Florida is, what, like 25?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think someone who was a… One of the local reporters was previously a reporter.
Speaker 3:
That’s right.
Speaker 2:
[inaudible 00:09:12] paper, The Alligator. They have a good journalism program there, well-known journalism program there. And yeah, he said that he knows the program. There has 36 baseball players, right? And there’s nine players on a team. So 70 players, if they got 20 more, they could field 10 baseball teams. Every position could have its own team.
Speaker 3:
It’s also 1/10th of the school is now baseball players.
Speaker 2:
1/10th of the school. They don’t even have a baseball field on campus. They’re going to be renting facilities. It shows you this is not a legitimate effort to build a sports program. It’s not a legitimate effort to build a sustainable New College. It’s just about putting a bunch of numbers on the board that are bigger than the previous numbers, say, “See, look, we fixed the school,” and count on the political fog to not ask questions. And then presumably when the thing falls apart in a few years, the people responsible will have moved on to other things and can blame someone else for the failure of it. It’s really… It should be a bigger scan. It’s going to be one of the biggest scandals in, I think, Florida history. If people come to grips with what’s actually happening here, just the waste and the destruction and the personal enrichment of President Corcoran, who is negotiating a salary that’s over $1 million for a school of 700 people, which is coming out of the school’s foundation that was raised over decades.
People have compared it to a bust out. If you know the term bust out from the Sopranos, it’s not stealing money from the register. It’s you take a functioning business, and then you just load it up with debt. You order whatever stuff on credit. And then you sell it, liquidate it, and then other people are holding the bag. It’s really analogous, and it’s really just… It’s why so many people are involved. It’s not about classical education. That’s one area where people are having productive conversations. People are not digging in against a expanded core curriculum that people are ready to talk about that. But it’s just the mismanagement, the inconfidence, and the joke of an athletics program is really where you see the lack of seriousness and the harm and destructiveness that’s happening there.
Speaker 3:
Well, it seems pretty clear that we’re talking about the use of sports as a way to enact an ideological cleansing of what was the student body, which is a scandal unto itself.
Speaker 2:
It’s really unprecedented, and a lot of people have trouble getting your minds around the fact that the college would put administration in that basically… That students going about their own business in their first, second, third year of college, it’s January, and they’re going to come in and say, “Okay, this school isn’t for you anymore. We’re now going to hit… We’re going to take the housing contracts that you had.” This happened over the summer. These people had housing contracts, they signed them, they were moving into dorms, and say, “No, you can’t live there anymore. We’re giving those dorms to athletes.” And they ended up not just giving them to athletes, but also to all the incoming freshmen that they recruited, but they specifically told them that they’re giving it to athletes, which definitely was a way to… It is not what you would do if you’re trying to build a new culture. It’s what you do when you’re trying to drive people away. But they don’t have dorms for those athletes when they come back in the second year.
They recruit the same number of students. So those students, they’re not expecting those students to return in large numbers either. It’s just going to keep a shell game, going [inaudible 00:12:50] keep the overall number up. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
What we know about the politics and vision of the school’s athletic director, Mario Jimenez?
Speaker 2:
He was the former employee of one of the trustees, Eddie Spear. Eddie Spear was the owner of Inspiration Academy in Bradenton, a private, Christian middle and high school with a big baseball program. Trustee Spear was actually not confirmed by the state of Florida legislature, which to not get through the Florida legislature, that’s a pretty high bar to clear, or maybe a low bar. But Jimenez did stay on. I don’t know much about his politics, but we just do know who he hired, the resumes of the people he hired. These coaches are seriously underqualified. Only one had ever been a college head coach before. Several of them had only been assistant coaches, one for less than a year. One had never been a college coach at all and just totally underqualified.
And they knew very little about the school when they went out and started to recruit students. So we have these student athletes coming in who don’t know anything about the school. For Jimenez, he was the director of a high school baseball program and a high school athletics program, which makes me marginally qualified to work as a college athletic director, nevermind set up a program from scratch.
Speaker 3:
And that’s important from scratch because they didn’t have one before this hostile takeover, right?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly. There were intermural programs. There was certainly athletics and recreation. The school had a sailing team that competed at intercollegiate, as well as a power lifting team. It was more ad hoc by sport, but they did not have an intercollegiate athletics program before. And they’re setting up from scratch, and it’s just in a rush. And it’s clear. It’s not sustainable. I’m not an expert in college athletics’ finances, but how does a program like this sustain itself? And I think it’s not supposed to. It’s just supposed to replace the existing students. They have this big pot of money from the legislature this past season, this past session, and they’re going to drive out the existing students, say, “See, we’ve got, we drove out the existing students and the numbers are still up.” And then that was the plan, and that’s what they’re going to do and hope that no one looks too closely at either the numbers in detail or how things play out in a few years.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. I’m glad you pointed out about this money coming from the legislature because these are Floridian tax dollars that are going towards a political and ideological hostile takeover of a university, and that in and of itself should be a national scandal. What about this membership in the NAIA? They were just admitted to the NAIA. That’s a sort of secondary athletic conference to the NCAA, but with its own proud history, it just seems absurd on the face that such a ramshackle program would be admitted very quickly and very easily. Can you discuss how that was able to come about?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. I was working on this since the spring, and I read in the newspaper that New College was planning to join the NAIA, and I thought, “Oh, well, what’s this?” I looked into it. And you go to the NAI site, it’s all about character-based athletics. It’s about core values of respect and integrity and sportsmanship, and it’s about support for DEI. And I thought, oh, the NAIA is going to want nothing to do with this. Of course, they will. Just send them a letter and that’ll be the end of it. And we started a petition actually in May, and they respond, “Well, New College has not applied, and we will not evaluate the situation.” I thought, okay, well, that’s fine. But as the months went on, it became more and more suspicious. We found that some of these coaches in recruiting students were citing that New College already was part of the NAIA. They were telling students this in one case in social media posts. And we brought this to their intention, and got the NAIA’s attention and got no response, which was odd. We then got the college’s application to the NAIA in July.
We got it in response to a Florida public records request. So we got it through the college. And it was a mess. It was handwritten, it had math errors, had grammatical errors. It had a faculty athletic rep was signed by the VP of government relations. The athletic handbook had been copy pasted from Inspiration Academy, which I mentioned earlier was Jimenez’s his former school. We know because it made references to IA faculty and IA campus, IA being Inspiration Academy. It was clearly copy pasted. There was no planning whatsoever. And the NIA continued to move forward with the application. And we eventually found, through researching who was running the NAIA, and who was in some news reports saying that New College would be joining the NAIA, were some very close political allies of DeSantis in Florida who were involved in the Sun Conference, which is one of the conferences of the NAIA. And just these people, in addition to running the Sun Conference, also run a political advocacy group for private colleges that had business in the legislature to increase these private college vouchers, which were increasing that semester.
And while they were running the group as business before the legislature, they were also making media statements saying New College would be joining the Sun Conference before New College had even applied. It’s just a brazen conflict of interest, and we could show that the NAI statements were coordinated with the political organization because the political organization tweeted out the article less than 90 minutes after it was published. So clearly, we did a whole report. We presented all this to NAIA. And this was in July, and their response was… We said, “We would like this to be handled under your ethics policy.” They have a code of ethics, character, core values, code of ethics. “And send it to your ethics committee.” And the NAIA’s response was, “Well, since New College is not yet a member of NAIA, there’s not an avenue to send it to the ethics committee,” which makes no sense whatsoever.
It suggests the code of ethics doesn’t apply. They gave this in writing. They sent us an email of this. And then they can proceeded to move forward with membership through the site visit through everything else. It’s just despite all the red flags, despite everything involved in this, it was clear the fix was in, that they-
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
And they suspended their code… They said their code of ethics doesn’t apply to this decision. And so the NCAA at least has a conflict of interest, Paul. You have to be really bad to make the NCAA look ethical in comparison. I think you have to be really… That’s almost impressive-
Speaker 3:
Amen.
Speaker 2:
… that [inaudible 00:19:52] managed to do that. And again, it’s not everything that happened New College, the hostile takeover, eliminating DEI, the hostility, the fact that it didn’t interfere with their ability to join this organization. Other schools, they need to look at this to say, “Hey, are we enabling this? What’s happening?” They’re going to go for other schools next. And the message that’s coming out is, it’s fine. You can do what you’re trying to do at New College, and it’s not going to affect your ability to join other organizations, institutions. I think that’s a very disturbing message that is coming out of this, but that’s what it is.
Speaker 3:
Now, just a couple more questions. You’re with the Save New College of Florida Movement. Do you have a perspective? Does your organization have a perspective about perhaps reaching out to some of these student athletes to see if it’s possible to engage them in organizing, or do you think that’s just a non-starter given where they’re recruiting these athletes from?
Speaker 2:
That’s a great question. And I think a lot of us… I’m an alum. We’ve left it to the returning students to engage their fellow students on campus. I think in some cases it’s possible to overstate ideologically the new students because that was… Well, that was sort of the top line of Christopher Rufo’s sort of idea of going out and finding hundreds of young conservatives to fill the ranks. That’s not really… I don’t know if those people really exist in the numbers they want, but it’s more just they’re getting scholarships. They were recruited by these coaches. In this cycle, a lot of them were recruited in… Well, they were all recruited after March, so many of them, April, May, June, July. “Hey, do you want to come to the Honors College of Florida and get a scholarship and play on play in the NAIA,” which they were telling people directly.
And so a lot of them feel that they personally got a lot of benefit out of it, that to come and tell them, “Oh, well, you’re doing something wrong by being here,” is not really a message. I think that… And it’s not for them personally. They’re being used as pawns in this, and we’re given some pretty materially valuable incentives. And the only thing I would say to them regarding the elimination of DEI is that there are more black and Hispanic students in the incoming class, which is great. That’s great. But it’s also like, do they know they’re being held up as being examples of, “Oh, we eliminate DEI and now we have more black and Hispanic students. See, it’s good you eliminate DEI.” They’re making that argument very explicitly. In some cases, their spokesman, Rufo, and others. And that’s sort of my main takeaway. That’s what I would say to the student athletes. But we’re trying to not put pressure on them who are-
Speaker 3:
Sure.
Speaker 2:
… personally… I’m not ascribing it to ideology. It’s just a very difficult position for them, having them recruited.
Speaker 3:
Sure.
Speaker 2:
Some of them were also… We know they were lied to. They were lied to about NAIA membership, which even though the fix was in, it still would tell them that the school had a certain level of organization and coherence, that they’re already in the NAIA that they did not have because they had not even applied. And we also know some of them were lied to about what programs were offered, or the coaches were just ignorant. Some of them came thinking they could major in business or sports medicine, which don’t exist. Several of them thought they could major in programs that did exist, but the faculty have left, and now their transfer students are having to change. So for some of them, it’s not about ideology, but for some of them it’s apparently not working out. And some of them just also, we’ve heard, just want to get some playtime before they transfer to division one schools. Some of them know [inaudible 00:23:36]
Speaker 3:
They want to get some tape.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Some of them also know what they’re doing, which puts a point to, or they have a plan that’s consistent with what’s going on, which again, puts the focus back on Corcoran at the administration who said, New College, it was not doing well, and then they destroyed the school. And then they’re saying, “Look, we’re fixing it,” but it’s not a sustainable fix.
Speaker 3:
It would be interesting though, if there was one athlete who had a petition that was called Athletes for DEI or Athletes for Gender Studies, and not so much this massive rebellion against the board of trustees or Corcoran, but just a basic like, “Hey, you eliminated this. We want it back as athletes. And since you’re holding us up as a new era, we want some of that old era in here too.”
Speaker 2:
I think a lot of us in the… We’ve let returning students engage with athletes. Some of them are hostile. We’ve heard some bad things there, but a lot of them are also just doing the best they can, like everybody.
Speaker 3:
Sure.
Speaker 2:
And so it’s an unprecedented situation for a lot of people, which is to say, to have a college to try to do the kind of ideological takeover and to put students, to have them come in and say, “By coming here, you’re supporting this political agenda. Just by showing up, we’re going to cite you as a support.” That’s a lot of people, I think… That’s sort of a big thing to put on someone who’s 18, 19 years old.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. No, totally agree about that. Although I do want to point out that people like Christopher Rufo, in addition to being a pseudo intellectual gas bag, is a profound hypocrite to hold up diversity numbers when they’ve done whatever they could to attack even the concept of getting data about diversity.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
And now they’re like, “Look how diverse we are.” And yeah, it boggles the mind, the shamelessness. One last question for you, Mike. You’ve been so generous with your time. People are watching this. How can people best support the movement to save New College of Florida?
Speaker 2:
One thing we’re trying to do is we’re trying to educate people who are in other NAIA institutions in particular in that regard. So while the NAIA has a large number of private Christian schools in it does have some public schools, especially out west. We found UC Merced, University of California, Merced is a member of the NAIA, and we’ve reached out to some people there to try to talk to them. It’s kind of strange to say, okay, to save New College, we’re going to go to the Central Valley of California, but here we are. And it’s a big ask for them too, to say, “Hey, your school is in this organization, and this organization that’s done something disreputable. We’re going to bring a lot of disruption to your campus.” You’re talking about how this organization is wrong, but also we’re trying to not do that. We’re trying to start the conversation.
But especially people at the University of California system, especially UC Merced, California State University Maritime, Evergreen State College in Washington State, also Oregon Tech, these are public schools that are in the NAIA. If you know those people, that’s what we’re trying to do. More generally, the Department of Education has a complaint, so we’re trying to look at that. But I’m working still… I’m still on Twitter and we’re working under the name Team Snowflake because New College Snowflakes was one of the mascot ideas floated. It was not taken. I think that was great. That they imposed a new mascot on the school as also one of the many other terrible things that they’ve done. It’s not about the mascot, but about the process of imposing a new one. But yeah, I’m working on the Twitter account, NCF Snowflakes. So that’s where we get some information. And yeah, team Snowflake. And we’re just trying to get word about what’s happened there, is really what we’re trying to do, especially for people out of Florida and at other institutions.
Speaker 3:
And the new name, I believe, is the Banyan, which is a tree or something like that? Is that-
Speaker 2:
Their campus has some banyan trees on it that are very nice. And it’s the Mighty Banyans, which the Mighty [inaudible 00:27:46]
Speaker 3:
The Mighty Banyans.
Speaker 2:
Mighty Banyan, yes. So the mascot was sort of a placeholder, but a lot… It was the empty set. It shows up on some funny mascot lists. But they wanted a new mascot. They did a survey. They then ignored the survey results, and President Corcoran picked this idea privately, apparently, and put it to the board, which voted on it 20 minutes later, which is just very typical for the whole process. So they have the team, the Mighty Banyans. And then we in opposition who are looking at our team Snowflake. So it’s NCF Snowflake, twitter.com NCF Snowflake, and also ncfsnowflakes.com.
Speaker 3:
Mike, I’ve seen sports used for nefarious purposes in my time. This tops the list, the idea of using sports, something that can be beautiful, something that can create community. Seeing it used for the purposes of an ideological takeover is… It boggles the mind. I really appreciate you and everybody with Save New College of Florida, the work you’re all doing on this. And if there’s anything else that we can do, that I can do, please let us know.
Speaker 2:
Thanks so much, Dave. I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 4:
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A federal judge heard arguments on Monday challenging the state of Florida’s newly passed law that forbids institutions of higher learning from implementing programs to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, often abbreviated to DEI, or allowing discussion about DEI in the classrooms. The lawsuit was brought by professors and students at New College of Florida, which would be detrimentally…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republican attorneys general and legal representatives from 19 states have submitted an amicus brief in a Florida case, Dekker v. Weida, which currently mandates that transgender individuals in Florida continue to be offered coverage under Medicaid. In 2022, the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration introduced a “standard of care,” declaring that transgender care, irrespective of age…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.