The Education of Ron DeSantis – By Lauren Camera (US News) / May 19, 2023
The Florida governor, backed by a cadre of culture warriors, has used education as a lever for rolling back social change. His critics fear that as president he would ‘export this blueprint of authoritarianism to the rest of the country.’
Three weeks before graduation, on May 1, as students streamed in and out of the campus library at Florida’s New College in Sarasota beginning to cram for end-of-semester exams and scour its archives and research material to bolster independent projects and theses, the interim provost called one of the head librarians into a conference room and terminated her employment.
Helene Gold, who was the associate dean of academic engagement for the library and had been working at New College for nearly five years, was given two hours to pack up her office and vacate the campus.
“Who fires a librarian three weeks before the end of the semester?” she asks. “I provide leadership to create an effective library program, to teach research, to support students, and suddenly this is no longer a priority? And to do it three weeks before the end of the semester is either incredibly cruel or incredibly ill-conceived.”
The timing of the termination, which Gold was told was due to a reorganization at the college, would seem like a bungled administrative decision at any institution nearing the end of the academic year, when demand for library services peaks, but an especially shortsighted one for New College – a small, public liberal arts college where students design individual courses of study based on their intellectual interests that culminate in a senior year capstone project.
