[Christopher F. Rufo] The Arc of Reform: New College of Florida votes to abolish its gender studies program.

Tonight, the New College of Florida board of trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university’s gender studies program, becoming the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.

The decision, sure to elicit a fierce response from left-wing critics, is part of a broader transformation. In January, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the New College board of trustees. He tasked us with a challenging mission: to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford.

From the beginning, we knew that this assignment would involve more than a “rebranding” campaign; it would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs. In our first months as a board, we initiated significant changes to the central administration, firing the president, replacing the provost, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as our interim president. We got pushback—student protests, media condemnation, a disapproving visit from California governor Gavin Newsom—but we patiently continued the work, deliberating over questions of governance and making hard choices about the college’s future.

These changes have already borne fruit. Interim President Corcoran has secured millions in new funding from the state legislature, launched an ambitious campus-renovation plan, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history, putting the school on its strongest financial footing in decades. Simultaneously, Corcoran has recruited a new team that is busy rebuilding the institutional capacity of the college, which had atrophied significantly under previous administrations, and designing a new core curriculum, which will begin with an immersive first-year study of Homer’s Odyssey and continue to provide a foundation based in logos (the cultivation of human reason) and techne (the cultivation of the applied arts).

The faculty has changed, too. Through a combination of cultural incentives and good fortune, many of the most ideological, left-wing faculty members, who presided over the old orthodoxy and expressed strong opposition to the classical liberal arts, have left the university. Aaron Hillegass, a professor who said that he would “burn the college’s buildings to the ground” if he were “more patriotic,” resigned. Nicolas Delon, a professor who justified a violent protest against the new administration, left the college. Liz Leininger, a professor who spread baseless accusations of “McCarthyism” at New College, departed on her own accord.