Posted on 07/21/2024 1:13:31 PM PDT by karpov
The decision by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 to oust the radicals controlling the state’s tiny liberal-arts college, New College of Florida, has elicited frenzied reactions from the global Left. The effort by a democratically elected government to bring political balance, educational excellence, and fiscal sanity to a failed public institution of 800 students is seen as nothing less than a collegiate March on Rome. The reaction has rather proven the point: The leftist control of higher education has become so totalitarian that even the slightest hint of deviance is viewed as a mortal threat to the revolutionary project.
I will be spending my 2024-25 sabbatical as presidential scholar-in-residence at New College. My own experience since President Richard Corcoran announced the appointment in February confirms the desperate need for such measures. The announcement has so far brought a hit piece in Inside Higher Ed and a flurry of records requests to my home institution from The Guardian newspaper.
Most telling for me, however, was a little exchange I had on X with one Eric Nemarich, a doctoral student in history at Harvard who taught a class at New College in fall 2023 on the medieval Mediterranean. Nemarich posted a reply to an essay I wrote on my New College plans, titled “Why I Am Joining the Reconquista.”
A little history. The archetype of a reconquista (literally, “reconquest”) was the Christian retaking of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim armies that had conquered it between 711 and 718. The reconquest battles began almost immediately but accelerated after the so-called Al-Andalus became an independent Islamic caliphate in 929, cut off from international support. After the caliphate collapsed in 1031, the Christian kingdoms of the north mustered. The first major victory came in 1064.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
From the article, “scholars to deploy logic and evidence, not character assassination, I noted.
“Can you even hear yourself?,” I asked”
My spouse has acquaintances that taught at New College and all decried that bastard DeSanntis’ efforts. “Free thinkers won’t be allowed to think freely ” was their most common phrase echo chambered.
De Santis is making New College…which is a very interesting school in its origins…a truly remarkable intellectual environment. It reminds one of the universities of old (I mean pre-1968, lol).
I LOL at the misery of your wife’s acquaintances.
I have to ask, do they Actually listen to what they say?
I say nothing, because i do have to sleep at some point.
do they Actually listen to what they say?
Only to agree and circle echo erroneous information…”Yeah, that’s right “.
I discovered that a bit of Scotch is a great ally .
And the end of the Caliphate resulted in the discovery of the New World in 1492.
My oldest daughter went to Thomas More College in New Hampshire, a tiny Catholic College that taught an old time Liberal Arts curriculum, Latin, Greek, Philosophy, Theology, Classic Literature, etc. Thence she went to LSU which gave her scholarships and a job working in the Credit Union. Her T.M. background prepared her well for her grad school and MBA.
Actually it was pretty much simultaneous.
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