Faculty, ACLU raise alarm over tossed books
New College of Florida tossed hundreds of books on gender, sexuality, and religious studies this week.
A video and photos taken by a Herald-Tribune reporter Tuesday show books from the school’s Gender and Diversity Center filling a dumpster outside the Jane Bancroft Cook Library. The newspaper reported that students were not given the option to buy the books before they were discarded, the newspaper reported.
The college tossed books such as “Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate,” “The War of the Worlds,” and “When I Knew,” which tells the stories of individuals realizing their sexual orientation.
The Sarasota institution released a statement Thursday clarifying the incident.
“Gender Studies has been discontinued as an area of concentration at New College, and the books are not part of any official college collection or inventory,” it stated.
“When the books were not claimed for pickup from the room, they were moved to a book drop location by the library where they were later claimed by individuals planning to donate the books locally,” the statement reads.
Amy Reid, the faculty chair and representative to the Board of Trustees, appeared “visibly shocked” Thursday when she was informed about the tossed books. “She said when you throw away books, you also throw away democracy,” the Herald-Tribune reported.
Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, also criticized the incident in a news release Thursday.
“This is not merely an administrative oversight; it is an intentional act of censorship that strikes at the heart of our democratic values and the very purpose of education,” Jackson stated.
This incident comes in the wake of the Board of Trustees’ decision last year to eliminate the school’s gender studies program, as previously reported by The College Fix.
Chris Rufo, a trustee of New College, wrote in City Journal that the move made the school “the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.”
Rufo applauded the change, writing in the 2023 article, “The mission of New College of Florida is to restore classical liberal education and to revive the pursuit of transcendent truth—a mission ultimately incompatible with the disciplines of gender studies and queer theory, which are explicitly opposed to the classical conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful.”
Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave an update on education reforms at New College and other higher education institutions in the state, The Fix reported. Speaking to The Gathering conference in Atlanta, DeSantis said the reforms at New College “turned [the institution] from a ‘Marxist commune’ into a classical, liberal arts school,” The Daily Signal reported.
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