Cover your dog's ears! Wrecking Ball Rufo at the New College open mic

chief institutions-underminer Christopher Rufo has released a "mission statement" for besieged New College of Florida

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I have to interrupt my Retelling Richmond series to comment on another step in the hostile refashioning of New College of Florida, a harbinger of the danger to higher ed in the culture wars. Here I look at Christopher Rufo’s proposed mission statement for the public college Governor Ron DeSantis has allowed him to infiltrate. This story connects with the book I’m trying to write on far right revisions of the American narrative, where I look more deeply at the reinsertion of white supremacy in the schools under the banner of a spurious “Western Civilization” curriculum and explore some of the online classes offered by Hillsdale College. I’ll post some of that research in a follow-up to this one.

As I think is fairly well-known by now, last year Florida Governor Ron DeSantis effected a hostile takeover of New College of Florida, part of the state’s public university system. This falls within DeSantis’s “where woke goes to die” agenda for the state.

Early last year, when he appointed a group of Christian conservatives to the board, DeSantis appointed the energetic young far-right operative Christopher F. Rufo the chair. Rufo’s own comments about his new charge included phrases like “landing team,” “recapture,” and “we are over the walls.” The board appointments were made, surely not by coincidence, on January 6th.

Last year, apparently having gathered every black and brown face willing to stand behind him, DeSantis continued making his filthy promises to tear down public education and see that no one ever mentions the trouble this nation has taken to restrict and remove people just like themselves. Disinformation Ministry Undersecretary Rufo—standing back and standing by—may look a little stiff in the new jackboots, but he’s always ready to kick up some culture confusion.

Rufo’s cocky, combative personality and the response from parents and students at New College with protests and spraypaint saying “Fuck Rufo” was documented in a great story from Politico’s Michael Kruse. A source described DeSantis’s connection to the useful, button-pushing Rufo “like using a person . . . as a dog-whistle.”

Last week, on a Substack I read from another dimension, Rufo posted a story called “The Purpose of Higher Education”—it contains a draft of his new mission statement for the school and asks his readers, “What do you think?” Is he asking if the dog whistles are audible enough?

I won’t directly engage in Rufo’s comment thread or link to his column, but here’s a preliminary version of what I might like to get off my chest before beginning to unpack his mission statement and setting up the broader conversation about Rufo’s agenda:

I think you’re an arrogant shit pretending to care about the public education system you're set on destroying. Here I see you preen and try on some kind of high-minded language—even obscenely signaling a connection to Oxford University without acknowledging the ways your new agenda directly contradicts Oxford’s commitment to DEI. In your mission statement, I see a concatenation of the far-right’s favorite themes designed to shore up the white Christian nationalist agenda shared by your employers, your co-conspirators, and dangerously undemocratic public officials up the line like MAGA Mike Johnson.

In Rufo’s short commentary before the proposed mission statement, he tried to make fun of American college administrators who, he opines, would either have no idea what a college education is for or would “would wax about diversity, inclusion, and social justice.” But, Rufo assures his readers, at the college DeSantis has entrusted to this new board, “we are charting a different path.” And the grand task these happy warriors confront on all our behalf? It’s “nothing less than revitalizing the classical liberal arts tradition.”

Here’s Rufo’s February 27th proposal. I’ve put some terms in bold to think about here or later.

At New College of Florida, our mission is to revive the great tradition of the classical liberal arts and to cultivate good citizens, artists, academics, entrepreneurs, and statesmen.

The founders of New College envisioned a community of scholars, modeled on the University of Oxford, that would provide students with a “classical liberal arts education” and pass down “the learning of our civilization in the classical tradition.” In our era of stifling academic orthodoxy, this task is more urgent than ever.

At New College, our unwavering commitment is to rediscover the deepest purpose of education and to give students a foundation of logos, human reason, and techne, the applied arts. Our distinguished faculty and student body, while advancing a diversity of opinions, hold a shared commitment to liberal principles—free speech, open debate, colorblind equality—all oriented to the pursuit of the highest good.

Let us be unapologetic: We are a public university, open to all, in which exceptional students of any background can participate in the great tradition of the West. Our calling is to provide a liberal arts education befitting free men and women, and a free society. While others are caught in the fray of ideology, we look up: to the true, the good, and the beautiful.

We create students who will move the Earth.

Geez Louise, these boys have some big britches to fill. Move the Earth! That comes from an Archimedes quote also used in a new 3-minute promotional video (featuring commentary from Elon Musk and Bill Maher) on the front page of the NCF website: “Give me a firm place to stand, and I’ll move the earth.” Under this revised mission, so the narrative goes, New College will be such a “firm place”; but in fact, it’s been thrown into the hands of someone who specializes in destabilizing public education by causing confusion and sowing suspicion.

images from a promo video for post-takeover New College, posted on their vimeo page (https://vimeo.com/910798389)

The statement obviously makes a culture wars type of argument. These are my first thoughts on how it operates. The much hated “ideology” is a catch-all for concepts that do not reassure us that “the great tradition of the West” is the only tradition that matters. People who buy into such “ideologies” are not “free,” and their existence in turn threatens the “free society.” (But look, ladies! it says “and women,” so this is actually going to be great!)

And of course one of the most noticeable, pitched words in the new mission statement is “colorblind.” So much has been written to establish the unprogressive and racist impact of this term that was supposed to lull the public into thinking racism is over (whew!) that I don’t need to say more here. He’s gone post-whistle with that one. Over the top, boys! The grandeur of the whole thing. “Let us be unapologetic,” indeed. Unapologetically what? Anyhoo, I guess we’ll all have plenty of time for that apology in hell.

Yet Rufo claims, in his post asking for our thoughts, that his mission statement intends “to move beyond the platitudes and bromides of our competitors.” For comparison then, here’s the current New College mission statement. This appears to have been adopted in 2014 and still appears on the college’s website at the time of writing, but perhaps not for much longer.

It’s not a very exciting statement—worlds have not been moved, alas—but it’s reassuringly free of promises to roll back progress. “Classical” does not delimit “liberal arts education.” Dated language apparently in the original 1960s statement was dropped along the way and replaced with the current statement’s emphasis on both “established” and “new knowledge and values.” The very suggestion of “new values” surely drives a character like Rufo up the wall. Rufo would remove all those phrases and restore the old “learning of our civilization in the classical tradition.”

What’s gone missing represents a modern way of thinking about education that is wholly rejected by the likes of Rufo. The current statement expresses a care for “the student’s intellectual and personal potential.” In Rufo’s proposal, such language signaling a student-centered approach is supplanted by a promise to impose more externally-anchored—and, to be sure, narrowly interpreted—traditional concepts about “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” More open language such as “the individual’s effective relationship with society” is replaced by the code words “free men and women” and “free society” commonly bandied around by a slate of problematic groups ranging from the denizens of libertarian think-tanks to the dingbats of MAGA caravans.

A primary model for this new-old look is a private, anti-government, far right conservative Christian education center in Michigan called Hillsdale College, where Rufo is also employed. A DeSantis staffer described the administration’s “hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.” Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn participated in developing the 1776 Curriculum, and many of the country’s growing number of so-called classical education schools are using versions of the Hillsdale curriculum under the moniker Barney Charter School Initiative.

These connections can’t be repeated often enough. Our public charter schools and public colleges are being infiltrated by curricula and leaders from institutions that expressly disavow all forms of public funding in order to avoid cooperating with anything that looks like a post civil rights era equity measure. Hillsdale’s rejection of the government extends to student loans and grants for its students. While this ironically limits the number of people who can afford to be exposed to their distortions, the narrative distribution picks up at the other end through publicly-funded charter schools, unaccredited church schools propped up by the voucher system, and now one of the Florida’s public colleges.

the famous 1882 American cartoon entitled "Devilfish in the Egyptian Waters" Image courtesy of Archives of History, LLC

On the higher education front of the conservative culture wars, Hillsdale is looking like the metropole of an empire-style spread, equated here with the British Empire from the famous 1882 American cartoon “Devilfish in the Egyptian Waters.” We’re not there yet, but I think seeing Hillsdale this way is at least somewhat fitting because of the one-way importation of its purported values into the K-12 system and now into colleges; because of its centrality as either the origin or the destination for so many of the people teaching at or attending the country’s other ultra conservative and socially regressive institutions; and because of the self-righteousness with which it spreads its paternalistic version of white Christian democracy under the guise of saving a civilization too corrupt to know it needs saving.

As we all need to know, what happens at New College is not intended to stay at New College. This early takeover portends a spread across American education if it isn’t stopped. Speaking to the New York Times, Rufo said that the “top-down restructuring” of New College was the beginning of a plan to “reconquer public institutions all over the United States.”

In a 2022 essay published in the Hillsdale-backed newsletter Imprimis, Rufo published a call for “laying siege to the institutions” and destroying the public schools by sowing distrust and putting all the money in the hands of parents with “universal choice.” In an earlier story, I wrote a little about Rufo’s desire to undermine public education through the same choice, charter, and voucher programs supported by anti-democratic far right libertarian interests after I attended the Freedom to Teach conference in St. Augustine, Florida to hear Nancy Maclean speak about her book Democracy in Chains.

Rufo brags about his success in quickly getting the nation focused on a mischaracterized, demonized, runaway bogeyman version of Critical Race Theory. Like his other intentional efforts to destabilize education, Rufo’s public deception about CRT is based in propaganda tactics he has openly described, the method being to produce a confusing array of racist and race-related issues under the same banner until the term becomes, as he calls it, “toxic.” From there, almost anything the far right wants to get rid of simply needs to be branded CRT. So it works a lot like other terms a portion of the populace has been trained to fear by the right, such as “socialism” and “welfare.”

It’s largely thanks to Rufo that the last few years have seen so much public discourse and absurd legislation based on the premise that elementary school teachers are indoctrinating students with a graduate-level theory developed for use in law schools. Rufo’s intention—shared by a spectrum of bad actors—includes preventing teaching accurate histories of American slavery, Jim Crow laws, de jure segregation, systemic racism, redlining, and more. Some aspects of American history are so easy to document in terms of both intent and impact that they simply must be considered true.

But truth is now one of the most embattled words we have. “The true” is one of several cornerstone values employed not only in this new mission statement but also by Hillsdale College and the K-12 classical education schools spawning across the country using versions of their curriculum. It’s part of an education triumvirate used in various contexts across the centuries, but in the hands of the Hillsdale-Claremont team, it works more as a Trojan Horse to bring in a host of unsavory, illiberal plans.

As special as Christopher Rufo is (and isn’t he just?), he doesn’t come alone. What we’ve seen from Rufo and DeSantis is connected to a larger and longer movement to roll American education back to a pre-civil rights era “Western” curriculum. My next post will share some content from the book I’m developing and take a look at another of DeSantis’s New College board members, former Emory professor and author of The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein. Bauerlein has been involved in various conservative education reform efforts and reveals his agenda in an interview with Classic Learning Test founder Jeremy Tate. Finally (well, it’s never finally, because they will.not.stop) I’ll connect all of this to what’s currently being imposed on public colleges across the state of Florida with the passage of SB 266, a bill designed to undermine higher education in all sorts of ways, including a shockingly long yet dangerously vague list of concepts no longer permitted in core Gen Ed courses.