New College has been in the news the last few years, after Ron DeSantis decided to make an example of it. Famously left-leaning and quirky, yet unaccountably public, it was a ripe target to dismantle and rebuild in a conservative image. I’ve been seeing rumblings that the dismantling hasn’t been going so well, so I’ll throw in my two cents. Not on the dismantling: I have no special knowledge there. But on what New College was like between 2009-2013.
I’ll focus on stuff most relevant to the current talking points, so I won’t go deep into my personal experiences.
Politics
During my time there, New College was extremely progressive. With a student body of just about 800 students, the most intense political stuff tended to exist in even smaller social groups. There was always a contingent doing Food Not Bombs, and marching for disenfranchised tomato pickers elsewhere in the state, and otherwise generally promoting left wing causes. But this was like… 50 people, maybe? And they mostly hung out and drank their PBRs with each other. My main impression of them was that they were dedicated and impressive, and I was happy they were strenuous in their efforts toward their chosen philosophy. My secondary impression of them was that they were pretty annoying.
In person, political stuff didn’t come up that much; you either were in the hardcore left wing spaces (I wasn’t) or you were just sort of in the ambient general population, where the politics were the comfortably-left-of-center you’d expect from a high-average-SAT-score population with a 2:1 women to men sex ratio. But New College also had an opt-in listserv forum, where anybody could send emails to the entire student body. Near the end of my tenure at New College, I was the moderator of this forum. The forum was very political. In fact, the typical upperclassman had the sort of attitude about the forum that middle-aged disaffected dads sometimes have about politics more generally; “ah, yeah, I don’t mess around with that stuff.” Still, there were routinely threads with hundreds of posts debating the finer points of bell hooks not being progressive enough (I kid you not; she visited campus and was locally somewhat cancelled on this basis), or, under my moderator’s watch, the fact that David Duke’s godson was secretly a student in my class, and running a white nationalist radio show from his dorm. (You can’t make this shit up. Also, he later recanted, thanks in part to his experiences at New College.)
Other than keeping flame wars from burning too bright, I wasn’t that affected by New College’s politics per se. At one point there was some sort of campus shutdown because of microaggressions or something (I don’t remember the particulars), and lots of classes were cancelled, and people took turns speaking their truth. The highlight was when this guy talked about his struggles with persecution back home and the audience assumed he was talking about being gay; no, it was being an atheist, but my friends and I quietly enjoyed that particular ambiguity without outing (inning?) him.
Rigor and Cost
I’ve seen some brouhaha about the very high cost per student ratio at New College these days, after DeSantis’s overhaul. I’m sure that ratio is indeed out of control, and I buy that the average student quality has gone down. After all, who wants to attend a college where the upperclassmen are smart left-wingers and the underclassmen are jocks waitlisted elsewhere? But alas, the high cost per student has been a feature of New College forever. As a tiny school, New College never had the economies of scale that other state universities do. And actually, it gets worse; New College is (was?) unusually rigorous, and had a strong culture of self-directed study. People who needed any degree of handholding tended to drop out. This was a lot of people. If I think of all my friends in my first semester, a majority dropped out within two years. So New College has been a school that spent a fortune of public money per student, and then that student would likely drop out, forever.
So, uh, what was the upside? I do believe there was one! Because while some small fraction of New College students burnt out on drugs or meandered their way into unemployability otherwise (more on the drugs later), the high performers did really, really well. New College was a very strong feeder school to many top grad programs; the usual story was that some elite grad school would take a chance on a student from this weird college without grades, and then, when they saw what they’d gotten, would gobble up as many more as they could get like a one-year-old who has first tasted their birthday cake. Or, for a more particular metric, New College had the most Fulbright Scholars per capita of any school, period.
Also, New College was just very, very good if you wanted to learn for learning’s sake. I studied philosophy (and some math), and gave nary a thought to what my eventual job would be. College was, to me, for learning.1 And wow, what a place to learn! The business model of New College was to get the best possible professors, and to let them do whatever they wanted. So I could take a (grad school rigorous) philosophy course just titled Empathy, for example. Tons of the professors at New College were ex-ivies, who wanted to come down to Florida and teach whatever they wanted in a nice climate.
So basically, you had a school with really rigorous academics that weren’t particularly focused on employment prospects, where half the students dropped out but 10% of them went on to elite programs and did awesome, and another 10% did awesome by their own lights but in some kind of weird uninterpretable way invisible to metrics. For example, Rick Doblin, who founded MAPS.
It was always a bizarre machine that could be made to look awful on the metrics. But there was a gem of extreme, anomalously high achievement hiding in there. If the gem is gone, the metrics are as bleak as they seem.
Drugs
My own thoughts about the dismantling of New College have a lot to do, surprisingly, with this last point. New College, during my time there, had a lot of drug use. There were school-wide raves a few times a year, and while plenty of students abstained, plenty more didn’t. LSD and MDMA were consumed in copious quantities, and for reasons still mysterious to me, the powers that be looked the other way. Sex, too, was rather in-the-open. A longstanding tradition involved upperclassmen streaking en masse by new students during the first week, for example, and I was invited to at least one naked potluck in my first month (nobody had sex, to be clear, but everybody was, indeed, naked).
It’s hard to really describe the degree to which drugs were integrated into New College’s culture, back when I was a student there. One of my favorite New College memories, actually, was wandering in from the bacchanalia at one of the raves to a small classroom where some above-the-influence nerds were quietly playing board and video games in a reverie of their own. Just as I walked in, my roommate was at the far end of the room playing Pokemon Snap. “Now let’s score some points,” he said, as Professor Oak began to tally his score. A beautiful duality. Two wolves indeed.
Anyway, what does this have to do with DeSantis’s war on woke? Well, you may notice that I mentioned LSD and MDMA, two hallucinogens. These drugs aren’t without their risk, and in fact one girl who my (now) wife and I gave a tour of campus when she was a (very normal seeming) prospective student later tried them, went permanently crazy, and eventually died as an apparent consequence. But it’s hard to know whether the onset of schizoid symptoms in any particular case is caused by hallucinogens, accelerated by them, or just a coincidence, so who knows. But anyway, the popular drugs around New College (weed too, of course) didn’t tend to be physically addictive, or just kill you directly. And advice was always buzzing around campus around taking certain vitamins after a night with MDMA, or spacing trips out for a few months to give one’s brain time to recover. It was a drug culture, but a nerdy drug culture. Nobody was out there doing cocaine, let alone heroin.
This is plausibly apocryphal, and I cannot claim direct experience, but the legend at the time was that, during my first couple of years, there was a shadowy council of drug dealers, who would band together and stop any new enterprising student that tried to sell Bad drugs. Seems hard to believe such a thing was real, but anyway a certain friend group mostly got expelled for unrelated reasons later in my tenure, and shortly after, some students were obviously addicted to cocaine. Probably a coincidence! But who knows?
Anyway, my last year the careful drug culture where heavy use looked like “do MDMA every few months to protect your brain” was basically gone, and replaced with an everything goes culture where students were smart enough to use the Silk Road and stupid enough to get really nasty stuff on there. The transition was underway already when I left, but it evidently got worse, as a few years after I left I heard some students had died of fentanyl overdose.
That, to me, was when New College died. Not because drug use was essential to the project; indeed, my fellow math students were mostly de facto straight edge, and even some of my philosophy fellow travelers limited themselves to the odd existentialist cigarette. But because New College had always been a strange experiment, a high-risk, high-reward endeavor where the median outcome was dicey but the highs soared to the sky. I was okay with the price of that system being a steady stream of dropouts and burnouts, the libertine culture proving too tempting to ignore and too hot to handle for a sizable fraction of matriculants. But I wasn’t okay with the price of that system being dead teenagers.
So at the time I sighed, and said the refrain that was so often said during my tenure at New College, by jaded upperclassmen: “burn it to the ground.”
I didn’t mean it, I guess. And maybe things got better, in the intervening years. But I’ll tell you this: the whole four years I was there, New College never stopped feeling ethereal, immaterial, temporary. Like a beautiful fever dream. If I think on it all falling apart, I can make myself sad. But my main thought, looking back, is ecstatic wonder: how the fuck did that place stick around so long?
Okay, fine, and for having sex. I actually met my now-wife on my second night there, and we were dating within a couple of months.