What happens when a state decides to control one of its public colleges?
That question played out in 2023 at New College, a small college in Sarasota, Florida on the state's Gulf Coast. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced six members of the school's board of trustees with the stated purpose of “rooting out woke ideology" from the campus.
Within months, dozens of faculty and hundreds of students had left the college. The new board members promised an overhaul of the college's curriculum, denied tenure to certain faculty, planned for the construction of an athletic complex, touted new recruitment of conservative students, painted over student murals and replaced the school's mascot.
The takeover of New College and what it could mean for schools around the country is the subject of the film "First They Came For My College," which is showing at Milwaukee Film's Dialogues Documentary Film Festival. The film will screen at 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 25 at the Oriental Theater.
Film producer Harry Hanbury spoke with WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal about the changes at New College and how the film explores the takeover.
Here is their conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Katherine Kokal: This film does a good job of conveying how fast this was all happening. I was a reporter in Florida at the time and it felt like there was a new development at New College every day. What was it like to capture something that was happening so fast?
Harry Hanbury: Yeah, it was an adrenaline rush. As you said, every week there was something new, or every day there was some new outrage. I think that they very consciously adopted the sort of the strategy of shock and awe, which we've seen hasn't worked so well in other circumstances. And in fact, I think there's a complicated reality here, because it's true that they did a lot of things. They threw a lot of spaghetti against the wall to see what would stick. They did a lot of cruel and stupid things, things like painting over student murals, recently completed beautiful, apolitical student murals. They just painted over them with beige for no particular reason. They created new sports teams. They announced that they were going to be completely overhauling the curriculum. This elicited an immensely agitated response from the faculty and the students. And one student who's in the film, Grace Keenan, who was the student body president, was asked at a Q&A we did after screening the film in Boston what her big takeaways from the experience were. And she said, "We greatly overestimated them and they greatly underestimated us."
One of the things that this film does very well is blending sharing the facts of what happened and also capturing these moments of queer joy. I'm thinking about this striking sequence where the New College students do a performance of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show." How did you blend those interests when you were making this film?
Well, I think it helped that I'm queer and I came to New College as a very tightly-wound cadet from Catholic all-boys military school. I was the most conservative student from my military school and came to New College and experienced this intellectual awakening. And no one, by the way, ostracized me or condescended to me. I just was invited to talk. And in my second year, I came out of the closet. And that year, the biggest campus organization was Students for the Freedom of Sexual Expression. In the years since, there's been a lot of support from new college administration, except since the takeover, of course.
And anyway, as a queer alum I was able to sort of win some trust. And so we quickly found that when the administration went home, that there was still a lot of space where students could be themselves. And one of those was in this theater where they put on a performance of "Rocky Horror Picture Show," which, as you said, was this like amazing expression of queer joy and resistance because so much of the show is about gender bending and sexual liberation and it's very campy. So it was a real just utter delight to capture that. I have to say, being in the audience for that was the single most electric theatrical experience of my life. I've never been in an audience where there was such a high level of audience participation. And yeah, it's something really magical that we captured on film.
These events created very deep concern from people across the country in higher ed that this kind of takeover could be replicated. Now that we've had a few years since these changes, how do you think about that?
You know, we think of universities, colleges as places that especially in our democratic republic, foster the ethics of good citizenship and create good democratic voters and citizens. And I think what attracted the junta, as I like to call them, this cabal of people led by Richard Corcoran and Christopher Ruffo and others, was the fact that colleges and universities can actually be like little laboratories for autocracy, where in this case, the governor appoints board members who pick a crony who has no experience in higher ed, who makes well over $1,000,000 a year when his predecessor, Patricia Okker, was making $300,000 a year. They can treat the school as a big piggy bank, as a grift, and foist their views on students and faculty. I think it's a very autocratic model. And that's what they want for higher ed. That's what they want for the country.
Milwaukee Film is a financial supporter of WUWM.
For more information on the Dialogues Documentary Film Festival, visit the festival's website.
