The right’s mission to eradicate public education is in many ways inseparable from their accelerating attacks on LGBTQ rights and racial justice. Perhaps there is no better symbol of that intersection than Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who has boasted about writing the playbook: moving from using critical race theory as a rallying cry for white grievance against schools, then similarly promoting accusations that LGBTQ-inclusive schools are “grooming” young people. Rufo revels in “laying siege to the institutions” as strategy, as he said in a 2022 speech at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. “We go in there and we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”
In January, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis installed Rufo as a member of the board of trustees of New College in Sarasota, a public liberal arts college and frequent right-wing scapegoat. Rufo was charged with remaking the school—and making an example of it. In May, DeSantis pointedly chose New College as where he would sign a law that banned the state’s public colleges and universities from using public funds to “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.” New College lost more than a third of its faculty ahead of the fall semester, thanks to moves by Rufo. DeSantis hailed the “replacement of far-left faculty with new professors aligned with the university’s mission.”
New College is hardly alone. Around the same time, the board of governors of West Virginia University became the symbol for attacks on higher ed pitched as simply remaking the university. The board ultimately voted to cut 28 majors and 10 minors, along with hundreds of faculty and staff positions. The humanities bore the brunt, but students in many other areas of study will lose access to resources as a result. Unsurprisingly, university president E. Gordon Gee attempted to downplay such cuts. He claimed that the university must explore “modern ways of delivering content” to students, like partnering with a for-profit language learning app. But as one undergraduate student who said she came to WVU for its Chinese department commented, “They’re not just destroying education, they’re destroying a community.”