Five Years Later: Ethnic Studies as Renewal in an Age of Structured Forgetting, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Five Years Later: Ethnic Studies as Renewal in an Age of Structured Forgetting*

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 29, 2025

Five years ago, I stood at Teachers College, Columbia University, as the Edmond W. Gordon Lecturer, invited to speak on “Liberating Ways of Knowing: The Struggle for Ethnic Studies and the Educators We Need.” Time has passed,but the message has not aged. If anything, it has sharpened—because what was already a struggle over curriculum has become, unmistakably, a struggle over free speech, academic freedom, and democracy itself.

I began that day with land, because land is truth we too often treat as optional. We are never not on Native land. To acknowledge that is not to check a box; it is to practice another relationship to knowledge—one that insists history lives beneath us, not behind us. I've always said that "if there isn't dirt under your fingernails, you're not grassroots enough."

From there, I shared floricanto—meaning flower and song—because education, at its best, is not merely transmission. It is renewal. It is the restoration of spirit, connection, and belonging. We named the feelings the song “Agua de Estrellas” evoked—peace, tenderness, longing, hope—and I remember thinking: these are not “extras.” These are educational indicators and outcomes of a just and worthy education.

What I offered then was not simply an argument for Ethnic Studies as a course. It was an invitation to recognize Ethnic Studies as a different orientation—a framework that refuses the isolated, objectifying logic at the heart of so much assimilationist schooling. 

The Cartesian “I” that stands alone, producing knowledge as if the world were merely an object to be measured, ranked, and managed, is precisely the mindset that makes it possible to treat communities as problems, children as data points, and histories as inconveniences. Ethnic Studies pushes back—not only by adding content, but by challenging the deeper rules: whose knowledge counts, whose humanity is centered, and what education is ultimately for. 

Ethnic Studies pushes back against the Cartesian ego by insisting that learning is not an individual accomplishment detached from context, but a collective practice shaped by memory, power, and care. It recenters the body, spirit, and lived experience as legitimate sources of insight. It affirms that students do not arrive in classrooms as empty vessels, but as carriers of language, culture, ancestral knowledge, and moral imagination. And it asks educators to see themselves not as neutral technicians, but as ethical actors whose work either reproduces or resists injustice.

In this sense, Ethnic Studies is not simply about representation. It is about reorientation. It refuses the idea that schooling should prepare students only to compete, comply, or perform for systems that were never designed with them in mind. Instead, it calls for an education that prepares young people to belong, to think critically, to care deeply, and to act responsibly in a pluralistic democracy.

This is why Ethnic Studies cannot be reduced to a unit, a month, or a box to be checked. Its power lies in its ability to unsettle the assumptions that structure schooling itself—to interrupt the logics of ranking, sorting, and disposability that have long governed public education. And it is precisely this unsettling force that makes Ethnic Studies both transformative and threatening in our current moment.

At a time when Ethnic Studies and DEI initiatives are under sustained political attack—framed as divisive, ideological, or dangerous—the deeper truth is this: what is being resisted is not “identity,” but relational ways of doing, knowing, and being in the world. What is being feared is not history, but the possibility that students might learn to see themselves as fully human, fully entitled to voice, and fully capable of naming the structures that shape their lives.

This is why I shared the work of Academia Cuauhtli (meaning "Eagle Academy" in Nahuatl)—our Saturday academy grounded in bilingual learning, co-constructed curriculum, and community partnership. 

One lesson from that work has stayed with me because it continues to prove true: if you anchor an initiative only in the university, you risk losing it to faculty mobility and institutional drift; if you anchor it only in the district, you risk losing it to organizational restructuring and political turnover. Anchored in the community—the holders of memory, consequence, and continuity—the work sustains.

When I look back now, what feels most enduring from that lecture is not any single policy detail, but a posture: the insistence that education must be a site of relationship rather than extraction; of truth rather than avoidance; of renewal rather than punishment. Five years ago, the urgency was clear. Today, the consequences of ignoring it are unavoidable.

Ethnic Studies pushes back against the Cartesian ego—and against the isolation, erasure, and moral indifference it produces—by offering something far more demanding and far more hopeful: an education rooted in connection and the shared work of becoming fully human together.

Like I always say, "Some day, Ethnic Studies will simply be called 'a good education.'"

Reference

*I draw from Trouillot (1995) who first expressed this concept of "structured forgetting."

Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.

"The Vision of the Vanquished": Knowledge Europe Destroyed—and that the U.S. Power Structure Still Fears, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

"The Vision of the Vanquished": Knowledge Europe Destroyed—and that the U.S. Power Structure Still Fears

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 24, 2025

You may view and listen to this blog here also posted below.

There is a great deal to ponder when we sit with the historical record not from the conqueror’s pen, but from the voices of those who survived conquest.

One learns of some of these communities through Miguel León-Portilla’s landmark work, The Broken Spears (Visión de los vencidos). Drawn from original Nahuatl sources written in the 1500s and published in 1959, the book offers the closest account we have of the invasion of Tenochtitlan—today’s Mexico City—from the perspective of the invaded. 

León-Portilla’s contribution was not to interpret these voices into comfort, but to preserve them as testimony, gathered and preserved across numerous archives by the children of survivors, allowing the vanquished to speak in their own words (León-Portilla, 1959/2006).

This fullest surviving account reveals not only the great cultural and linguistic diversity within and around Tenochtitlan, but also its extraordinary sophistication. At the time of the Spanish invasion, Tenochtitlan was a meticulously planned metropolis with engineered causeways, freshwater aqueducts, regulated markets, and sanitation systems that surpassed those of most European cities. 

It practiced chinampa agriculture—one of the most productive and sustainable farming systems ever developed—and maintained universal education through formal schools for both elites and commoners (León-Portilla, 1959/2006; Mann, 2005). While much of Europe struggled with overcrowding, open sewers, and periodic famine, Tenochtitlan functioned as a clean, ordered, ecologically attuned urban center.

See 3-D digital reconstruction of Tenochtitlan by Thomas Kole (2017)

Perhaps the most revealing evidence of Tenochtitlan’s advancement comes from Spanish eyewitnesses themselves. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a conquistador who participated in the invasion, wrote in astonishment:

“We were amazed… at the great cities and towns built on the water… it all seemed like an enchantment from a book of chivalry” (Díaz del Castillo, 1632/2012, Book II, chap. 88)

Díaz del Castillo compared Tenochtitlan to Venice, widely regarded as Europe’s most advanced city at the time—a comparison that carries extraordinary weight precisely because it comes from a hostile witness (Díaz del Castillo, 1967). This was not a primitive settlement encountered by Europeans bringing “civilization.” It was a civilization Europe encountered and chose to destroy.

The devastation was led by Hernán Cortés, whose actions would today be unambiguously described as war crimes. The violence was so severe that even Spain eventually distanced itself from him. Yet colonial narratives have long recast this annihilation of an advanced society as discovery or progress.

One of the most haunting statements preserved in The Broken Spears comes from an Indigenous eyewitness, paraphrased but searing in its clarity: they came, they conquered, and they never once asked what our cosmovision was (León-Portilla, 1959/2006). This sentence names colonial violence at its deepest level—not only the theft of land and life, but the refusal to recognize another way of knowing the world.

León-Portilla does not attempt to resolve this wound. Aside from his methodological introduction, the book remains an anthology of voices. That restraint matters. It resists the colonial impulse to narrate devastation into closure or to translate loss into lessons that absolve the conqueror.

The destruction of Tenochtitlan was not the result of cultural inferiority, but of a refusal to recognize another civilization as worthy of study, much less of existing. That refusal did not end in the sixteenth century. Today, it reappears in more bureaucratic and sanitized form—in the backlash against Ethnic Studies, in the dismantling of DEI initiatives, and in policies that treat minoritized knowledge as dangerous, divisive, or expendable.

Once again, majorities move through institutions without asking the descendants of this same history what they know—or what might be redemptive about their ways of knowing, doing, and being in the world. Ethnic Studies does precisely what conquest refused to do: it asks whose cosmovisions were silenced, what knowledge survived anyway, and how those knowledge systems might offer more humane, truthful, and sustainable ways forward. That is precisely why it is being targeted.

The attack on Ethnic Studies and DEI is not about rigor, neutrality, or free inquiry. It is about control—about preserving institutions that still cannot bear to ask what minoritized communities know, remember, value, or imagine beyond the colonial frame. Visión de los vencidos reminds us that dismantling does not always arrive with swords or cannons; sometimes it comes as legislation, budget cuts, appeals to “neutrality,” and so-called program “consolidations” that quietly strip resources, power, and voice—once again refusing to listen.

Until we recognize these attacks for what they are—today’s version of institutional dismantling or "conquest"—we will continue to mistake erasure for "balance" and domination for "progress."

None of this has to be feared. Asking what was never asked—listening to the descendants of conquest and recognizing the redemptive possibilities of their ways of knowing, doing, and being—does not weaken institutions; it humanizes them. What threatens democratic life is not Ethnic Studies or DEI, but the continued refusal to listen and know.

References

Díaz del Castillo, B. (1967). The true history of the conquest of New Spain (Vol. 3). Lulu. com.

Kole, T. (2017). Tenochtitlan: 3-D digital reconstruction of the Aztec capital [Digital reconstruction]. Independent project. https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/

León-Portilla, M. (1959/2006). The broken spears: The Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico. Beacon Press.

Visit my Youtube Vlog here.

Women’s Unpaid Labor Is a Policy and Practice Issue—Bogotá Shows Us How By Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Women’s Unpaid Labor Is a Policy and Practice Issue—Bogotá Shows Us How

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 23, 2026

Rachel Cohen’s December 5, 2025 Vox piece makes something unmistakably clear: women’s unpaid labor is not simply a feminist concern—it is a policy failure. In Bogotá, Colombia, city leaders are doing what few governments have dared to do: naming care work, measuring it, and building public infrastructure around it.

Women in Bogotá perform more than 35 billion hours of unpaid care work each year, labor worth over one-fifth of Colombia’s GDP. Nearly 1.2 million women dedicate ten or more hours a day to caring for children, elders, and family members—often after long commutes to paid care jobs. This is not a marginal issue. It is the hidden engine of the economy.

Bogotá’s response has been bold. Through manzanas del cuidado—neighborhood care blocks—women can access job training, legal aid, health services, laundry facilities, and even rest, while their loved ones receive care on site. The goal is not charity. It is time: time to heal, learn, work, or simply breathe.

What makes this model transformative is that it centers caregivers, not just care recipients. Care is treated as shared responsibility—across families, communities, employers, and the state. As one sign in a care block declares: Cuidar no es ayudar, es corresponsabilidad. To care is not to help; it is co-responsibility.

This didn’t happen by accident. Colombia legally required the state to measure unpaid labor. Women’s movements—often forged through grief, resistance, and collective survival—created the political will to act. When Bogotá’s feminist mayor, Claudia López, launched the care system, she embedded it deeply enough that even her centrist successor expanded it.

The system is not perfect. Funding gaps remain, and many women still struggle to access services. But Bogotá has done something rare: it has made women’s invisible labor visible—and treated it as a public obligation.

In the United States, we continue to privatize care while praising women’s “resilience.” Families are expected to manage impossible burdens alone, even as public supports are stripped away. Bogotá reminds us that exhaustion is not a personal failure—it is a policy and practice choice.

Women’s unpaid labor has always sustained society. Bogotá simply had the courage to build policy around that truth. I love all the smiles in the photos.😊

What happens when a city takes women’s unpaid work seriously?
Rachel Cohen | Box
Fri, December 5, 2025 at 5:00 AM CST


Blanca Liliana Rodríguez and her sons, Zoran Andrey Vargas and Sergio Paolo Vargas Granada.

In Bogotá’s historic downtown, a modest government building sits in the shadow of a gilded statue of Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator who freed much of South America from Spanish rule. Inside, on the fourth floor, a manzana del cuidado, or care block, pulses with a different kind of revolution.

On a bright October morning, a circle of small children sat around a turquoise table, wide-eyed as their teacher read a Halloween story. In another room, a group of mothers and grandmothers bent over glass jars and wicks, learning to turn used containers into candles during a recycling workshop led by an official from the city’s environmental division. In the main hall, a half dozen women in sneakers and leggings followed an instructor’s aerobics routine, laughing as they stretched and lunged.


Elizabeth Arias reads to a table of children. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

This space is one of 25 neighborhood hubs that have opened across Colombia’s capital since 2020, all part of an ambitious citywide effort to tackle “time poverty” — the lack of time for anything beyond the crushing, invisible burden of unpaid care work that falls overwhelmingly on women.

In Bogotá, a city of 8 million people, nearly 4 million women do some form of unpaid care work, and about 1.2 million dedicate most of their time to it, meaning 10 hours a day or more. Many commute for hours to reach paid care jobs, only to return home and do more unpaid care.

Key takeaways

Women in Bogotá provide over 35 billion hours of unpaid care work annually — totaling more than one-fifth of Colombia’s GDP.

Partly to address this, Bogotá is pioneering “care blocks,” neighborhood hubs where women can access free laundry, legal aid, job training, mental health services, and more while their children or elderly relatives receive care on site. The city has opened 25 care blocks since 2020.

The model is spreading globally. A US city is expected to join in 2026.

At a care block, a woman can access a variety of services while the person she cares for is looked after by teachers and staff nearby. She can hand off her laundry to an attendant, finish her schooling, meet with a lawyer, consult a psychologist, or learn job skills. The scope of activities is not limited to errands, either: she can also read a novel, catch up with friends, or just get some rest. And the system extends beyond the physical blocks — mobile buses bring comprehensive services to rural areas, and an at-home program targets caregivers who support those with severe disabilities and therefore cannot leave their houses.

Bogotá is trying to do something tricky: elevate both care work and caregivers, while also saying, “You shouldn’t have to be doing this so much — you deserve a full life beyond caring for kids, for aging relatives, for your partner.“


A multi-use building which includes a care block and laundromat for caregivers. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

Understanding how Bogotá built its care system — and the challenges it faces — offers a template for other cities. And indeed, what started as a local experiment is now gaining traction internationally. Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, expects to open its first care block by this year’s end. Guadalajara in Mexico approved funding for several “care communities” earlier this summer, and care blocks are already operating in Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. Activists and public health officials in England are trying to adapt the model, and a funder is even seeking to pilot care blocks in an American city in 2026.

The novel idea is putting caregivers — not just care recipients — at the center of policy, says Ai-jen Poo, a leading voice in the US care work movement and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Poo traveled to Bogotá in 2023 to learn more and said the program “blew her mind.” Before the pandemic, she added, most people didn’t identify as caregivers per se — even if they saw themselves as moms, parents, children.

“What could be the next big breakthrough is cities putting the idea of a caregiver and intergenerational care at the center of how you design access to services,” Poo said. “That’s the future.”

Behind Bogotá’s care revolution is a women’s movement with teeth.

In 2010, Colombia became the first country to legally require that its government quantify how much unpaid work was being done and by whom. The initial time-use survey, conducted in 2012, found that caregivers provided more than 35 billion hours of labor each year, amounting to more than one-fifth of the country’s GDP. Women did 80 percent of that work.The political will to do something about those statistics started to build. One movement bolstering women in the city was the Mothers of False Positives, led by women whose sons had been killed by the military in the mid-2000s; the military then falsely presented these men as guerrilla fighters to inflate its own body counts. The mothers transformed their grief into a public reckoning, marching, testifying, and demanding justice — reframing the work of motherhood itself as a form of political resistance.

Bogotá’s social landscape made space for that kind of organizing. Decades of civil war and displacement had reshaped the city, creating an openness to more fluid household structures. Extended families are common, with grandmothers, aunts, and sisters raising children together, often out of necessity. Single mothers aren’t whispered about as moral failures like they sometimes are in the US.


Iglesia San Ignacio (Church of Saint Ignatius) in the historic La Candelaria district of Bogotá, Colombia.

All these factors paved the way for Claudia López’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Lopez had already built a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader who unapologetically centered gender equity. The then-49-year-old ran as an openly gay woman in a Catholic country, aiming to become both Bogotá’s first female and its first LGBTQ mayor — and won with 35 percent of the vote in a tight four-way race.

“The women’s vote was crucial in setting the stage for this,” Ai-jen Poo recalled. “And they were ready with their economic priorities and gave the mayor a mandate, if not the actual solution.”Care blocks, the signature policy of López’s administration, are built around the “3 Rs”: recognize, redistribute, and reduce. Recognize that care work is real work that sustains society. Redistribute it — not just between women and men, but to care recipients when able, and to the state, employers, and communities. And reduce the overall burden so individual caregivers aren’t consumed by it.


Ana Maryory Franco, a beneficiary at the Santa Fé Care Block’s Reading Hall. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

López launched this District of Care System in 2020 through an executive decree, which gave her the authority to create the programs but also meant any future mayor could undo them just as easily. The initiative was allocated 5.2 trillion pesos (about US $1.3 billion) in the city’s 2020–24 development plan — much of it from reallocating existing service budgets and cost savings from turning single-use public facilities into new multi-purpose hubs. López’s administration later helped pass a law through the city council requiring different agencies to fund and run the care system. Unlike a decree, the law couldn’t be undone by a future mayor alone.

Colombia bars mayors from running for consecutive re-election, so as Lopez’s term neared its end, no one knew whether the next leader would continue her signature policy.

Her successor, Carlos Fernando Galán, couldn’t have been more different. The son of Luis Carlos Galán — a presidential candidate assassinated in 1989 for confronting narco-politics and corruption — the younger Galán billed himself as a centrist technocrat focused on fiscal responsibility and data-driven governance. In 2023, he won on a platform of public safety and restoring trust in government, far from Lopez’s more liberal and feminist message.


Carlos Fernando Galán, mayor of Bogotá, Colombia.

Galán could have pushed to end the care blocks. But the system had momentum, having earned international attention from the United Nations, funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies for its at-home assistance component, and praise from leaders around the world. All this made it easy for Galán to ride the goodwill and claim credit for the accolades his city kept earning for running programs in spaces most people would never expect.

For 14 years, El Castillo was one of Bogotá’s most notorious brothels—a place where businessmen, mobsters, and foreign clients paid for access to its VIP floors. Its ties to drug trafficking networks made it the target of a 2017 raid, after which the building sat abandoned for three years.

In 2020, the city converted the facility into the Castillo de las Artes — the Castle of the Arts — a cultural hub and care block.

Lebeb Infante, the care block’s director, was matter-of-fact about Castillo’s history and unapologetic about its current clients. “This neighborhood has the highest concentration of sex workers in the locality,” she said. “Many of them are caregivers — they have children, they’re supporting families. We also have a huge migrant population, people fleeing violence in Venezuela and rural Colombia. So the services here have to work differently.”


Elizabeth Arias and her class walk through the lobby of the Santa Fé Care Block. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

Offerings must account not only for gender, but for immigration status, which means helping people navigate bureaucracy when they don’t have papers or IDs and need to get certified for work or enroll in school. This particular block has two laundromats instead of one, plus a free clothing closet. “If someone needs pants to go to a job interview, we give them pants,” Infante explained.

El Castillo is also home to an El Arte de Cuidarte, or Art of Care center — the child care component that exists in every care block across the city.

On the day I visited, children’s voices rang out from behind an arched doorway. Streamers in purple and green — Halloween decorations — hung from the ceiling. Like any preschool classroom, it was bright and chaotic, with walls covered in artwork and educational posters.





The Art of Care programs serve a wider age range than traditional daycare, welcoming children from 11 months to 11 years old. Bogotá already has a robust public daycare system: free centers have existed since 1968, managed by the national child welfare agency and the city’s social integration office. These care block programs have a more specific purpose: free up time for caregivers so they can prioritize services, both for long-term goals and their immediate needs.

Parents don’t just drop off their children and leave to run errands all across the city. Many of the errands can be completed right there on site. One of the key challenges for caregivers dealing with “time poverty” is finding space in their day for anything else — their own health concerns or new credentials that could put them on a more secure financial footing. The Art of Care tries to eliminate some of that friction.


Juliana Martínez Londoño, the deputy secretary of Bogotá’s Women’s Secretariat.

Juliana Martínez Londoño, the deputy secretary of Bogotá’s Women’s Secretariat, emphasized that the Art of Care was not meant to compete with the city’s existing daycare infrastructure.“But the Art of Care is much more flexible,” she said. “It can be mobile, it can adapt to different schedules, it can go where caregivers are.”

An even more ambitious vision for the future of child care comes from Camila Gómez, the director of Bogotá’s citywide care initiative. She imagines 24-hour mobile child care centers for women who work night shifts, like bus drivers or recyclers who sort trash before dawn. The service could be more widely available, coming to a university student on exam day, or an employee whose company would pay for the service and get a tax break in return. “The goal is to not limit the Art of Care to people who are taking services at the care block,” Gómez said. “We want to make it for anybody who needs it.”


Camila Gómez, the director of Bogotá’s citywide care initiative. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

My trip overlapped with a citywide graduation ceremony for women who had completed month-long trainings in topics such as digital literacy, entrepreneurship, or professional caregiving.

The auditorium was packed with caregivers in purple graduation gowns and caps. Some had brought their children, who squirmed in seats or played quietly in the aisles. Others had wanted to come but couldn’t make it work, still home caring for someone who needed them.

One hundred and twenty-seven women were graduating that day. Many were over 65. For some, this was the first time they’d ever graduated from anything. The crowd sang along to the city’s anthem — “Bogotá! Bogotá! Bogotá!” — and women smiled proudly as they walked across the stage to receive their certificates.


Maria Diana Vergel Ramirez, Gladys Cecilia Bastidas Chavarro, Blanca Lilia Aguirre Morales, and Diana Janneth Diaz Rugeles all graduating with vocational training certificates.

The mayor and many of his high-ranking staff had come to congratulate the women. “You have to bet on their autonomy,” Laura Tami, the city’s Women’s Secretariat, said from the stage. Galán also laid out the administration’s strategy: freeing more women from violence, including economic violence, by giving them the tools to become more independent. It was a notably feminist message from a mayor who had run as a centrist technocrat.


Maria Isabel Gonzalez Zuñiga at the graduation ceremony.


Nohora Esperanza Giglioli Bernal just before graduating.


Laura Tami, the city’s Women’s Secretariat, and Carlos Fernando Galán, the mayor of Bogotá, cheer in front of the new graduates. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

The ceremony was moving, but it also raised real questions about scale. Over 3,500 women have completed these 30-day training programs, and the city hopes to increase that number to 9,000. This would be progress, but it’s a small fraction of Bogotá’s 1.2 million full-time caregivers.

Plus, my conversations at different care blocks surfaced the same challenge over and over. Many caregivers just didn’t know that these supports existed. And plenty who did didn’t trust them and didn’t believe Bogotá would actually keep them running, or that the services would actually be free. Some had shown up to care blocks looking for food and had been turned away empty-handed.


A gilded statue of Simón Bolívar in a Bogotá square.

“We really do need to work harder on spreading the word [and] improving trust,” said Jason Díaz, the manager of the laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block. “There is a lot of stigma with government institutions.”

And sometimes the services are just not enough. Blanca Liliana Rodríguez told me about the at-home assistance program her family had benefited from last year. Rodríguez cares for her two adult sons — one with physical disabilities, one with mental disabilities — plus her 77-year-old mother and her 82-year-old father-in-law, who lives elsewhere. She’d been cooking three meals a day for her father-in-law and delivering them to his house.

The psychologists who came through as part of the government program worked with her family for three months, teaching Rodríguez and her sons how to communicate better, and even leading couples therapy with one of her sons and his girlfriend. They helped her realize she was taking on far more than she needed to. Her sons started helping with cleaning and picking up medications and she joined a new WhatsApp group with 30 other caregivers in her neighborhood that remains active to this day.

But when the time-limited services ended, Rodríguez was on her own again, still overwhelmed by the sheer scope of what she was managing. “Three months is definitely not enough time for the at-home assistance program,” she told me.


Blanca Liliana Rodríguez in her home. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

The city officials accompanying me on the visit immediately defended the short timeline. The program, they emphasized, was intentionally brief — designed to “install capacity” in caregivers and make them more resilient. It felt a bit like PR for a funding problem, not to mention condescending — these women were already extraordinarily resilient. They were just dealing with their own health and financial problems, their own exhaustion. Rodríguez said her memory had been getting worse.

At the beginning of this year, Bogotá stopped administering the at-home assistance program that had helped Rodríguez and her family. The Bloomberg funding that had supported the services had run out, and Galán’s team hadn’t figured out how to keep paying for it, let alone scale it up.An independent evaluation, conducted over the last two years, found that the at-home program had freed up over 18,000 hours for caregivers and reduced their daily unpaid care work by more than an hour. Half of the caregivers reported feeling less burdened, and nearly half of people with disabilities became more independent.

But it was expensive. So the city tested a cheaper model, moving some therapeutic services into the care blocks rather than delivering everything at home. The new hybrid model cut costs per participant by 57 percent while still reducing caregiver depression and anxiety.

When I asked Galán’s administration whether the city would resume its at-home programming, Tami, the women’s secretary, responded that they planned to restart services next year. The city aims to run both models: full at-home assistance for caregivers who truly can’t leave their houses, and the lower-cost hybrid for others.

Meanwhile, Galán has continued expanding the less expensive parts of the care system. His team opened two new care blocks this year and added programming like nature therapy sessions run by the city’s botanical garden.

James Anderson, who leads the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, told me that he expects the care block idea to expand further around the world, and that the United Nations Development Programme has been working actively behind the scenes to help. At a 2024 Bloomberg event in Mexico City last year, more than 70 mayors toured the city’s own version of care blocks, known as Utopías, and showed “incredible interest.”

 

Bogotá, Colombia | Juanita Escobar for Vox

Anderson thinks the model could follow the trajectory of climate action planning. Before 2005, he pointed out, mayors didn’t talk specifically about “climate”: they had water projects, sanitation projects, housing projects, all run by different agencies with no coordination. Twenty years later, every major city has a climate action plan that coordinates efforts across city hall. “That’s the trajectory that I imagine this issue will travel,” he said.

That vision is already underway. CHANGE, the City Hub and Network for Gender Equity, is a global network of city governments led by former mayoral staffers in London and Los Angeles. They’ve been working to spread the Bogotá model, developing an implementation guide and planning workshops for interested cities. Currently, they’re coordinating with a team in greater Manchester in England, have been helping Freetown in West Africa, and are actively involved in identifying a US city for a pilot next year, though conscious of the growing American backlash to anything associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“If you can’t make the case for why this won’t make your dollar stretch, there’s no point in having the conversation,” said Leslie Crosdale, CHANGE’s co-executive director. “It’s an efficient system and makes your city more resilient.”

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown, credits both CHANGE and Claudia López with helping kick off the idea in her city. Their care block is expected to launch by mid-2026, and in the meantime, Freetown is opening three temporary spaces before the end of December to meet demand from women in the community. “What excited me was being able to give back an opportunity that many women lost—the opportunity for education, the opportunity to just get health care,” Aki-Sawyerr told me.

Ai-jen Poo, who leads the National Domestic Workers Alliance, pointed to a disconnect in the US, where cultural expectations assume families can manage needs independently, despite millions being nowhere close to affording enough care. “You have this mismatch between the infrastructure and the reality where the individual family is just bearing the brunt in an impossible situation,” she said. “I think there’s a use case in the US for care blocks. It probably won’t look exactly the same, but I do think that there’s a lot there.”

Jason Díaz manages laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block.

Back in Bogotá, Jason Díaz, the 36-year-old manager of laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block, offered a glimpse of what that could look like in practice. He told me his job had made him more sensitive, more humane, teaching him to slow down more, and notice when someone needs help before they ask. “You learn to do it everywhere — at home, on the street,” he said. “It teaches you how to help people without expecting anything in return. The important thing is to be part of the solution.”

At the Castillo de las Artes care block, a sign hung on the wall in bright purple and green: “Cuidar no es ayudar, es corresponsabilidad.” To care is not to help; it is co-responsibility.

Spanish-English interpretation for reporting was conducted by Catalina Hernandez. This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

New College of Florida 'Statement on the Removal of Books and Library Materials' is Not Credible by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

New College of Florida ‘Statement on the Removal of Books and Library Materials’ Is Not Credible

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 22, 2025

I cannot get the images of mass book removals out of my mind, nor can I reconcile them with the university’s official claim that these actions reflect routine library “weeding” (see the August 14, 2024 Statement on the Removal of Books and Library Materials). What is plainly observable on campus tells a different story. Entire sections of shelving now sit empty—an outcome that goes far beyond standard thinning or rotation of materials and exceeds what is typically associated with responsible collection maintenance.

Source: 

Steven Walker

 @swalker_7 on Twitter

According to the American Library Association (2018), responsible collection maintenance is a selective, policy-driven, and content-neutral process—one that does not result in the wholesale disappearance of subject areas or function as a proxy for censorship. In library science, weeding is understood as an incremental practice intended to refresh collections, not one that produces visible gaps across disciplines or coincides with the elimination of academic programs.

The timing, scale, and physical outcome of these removals therefore raise serious questions about the adequacy of the explanation offered. Regardless of the terminology used, the practical effect has been a substantial reduction in access to entire bodies of scholarship—an outcome that cannot reasonably be characterized as neutral or merely procedural. Framing such results as routine risks substituting administrative language for meaningful transparency and accountability, particularly when the materials removed are closely associated with fields that have recently been discontinued at New College.

Whatever the intent, the outcome is clear: access to established fields of scholarship has been materially diminished in ways that are neither incidental nor easily reversed. 

I don't ever see this happening at UT-Austin. I certainly hope I am correct.

Reference

American Library Association. (2018). Selection & reconsideration policy toolkit for public, school, & academic libraries. https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit/

Statement on the Removal of Books and Library Materials

Post Date and Author:
August 14, 2024 - by New College Communications
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The New College Library is following its longstanding annual procedures for weeding its collection, which involves the removal of materials that are old, damaged, or otherwise no longer serving the needs of the College. This process is carried out by professional Librarians trained to assess the collection. A library needs to regularly review and renew its collection to ensure its materials are meeting the current needs of students and faculty. The images seen online of a dumpster of library materials is related to the standard weeding process. Chapter 273 of Florida statutes precludes New College from selling, donating or transferring these materials, which were purchased with state funds. Deselected materials are discarded, through a recycling process when possible.

Separate from the New College library weeding its collection, a number of books associated with the discontinued Gender Studies program were removed from a room in Hamilton Center that is being repurposed. These books came from a number of sources, primarily donations over a number of years. Again, Gender Studies has been discontinued as an area of concentration at New College, and the books are not part of any official college collection or inventory. When the books were not claimed for pickup from the room, they were moved to a book drop location by the library where they were later claimed by individuals planning to donate the books locally.

'Two years since conservatives took over a liberal arts college, what’s been lost—and gained': And Why This is Important to Texas and the U.S.

'Two years since conservatives took over a liberal arts college, what’s been lost — and gained': And Why This is Important to Texas and the U.S.

by

Angela Valenzuela

December 22, 2025

Let’s dispense with the euphemisms. What has happened at New College of Florida is not a “diversification of viewpoints,” a “restoration of balance,” or a principled defense of free speech. It is an ideologically driven takeover—imposed from above, funded lavishly by taxpayers, and justified through a cynical distortion of democratic language.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

Administrators and political operatives insist they are rescuing New College from a so-called “progressive echo chamber,” even as students report syllabi dominated almost exclusively by Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute ideologues. They proclaim devotion to the “marketplace of ideas,” while systematically abolishing entire fields of inquiry—gender studies, race-centered scholarship, critical social analysis—that have long been integral to a liberal arts education. They rail against indoctrination while installing their own.

This is not pluralism. It is replacement. Nor is it supplemental, but supplanting.

Even more galling is the claim that critics are “weaponizing data” when the very metrics that once made New College a nationally respected institution—academic peer reputation, student outcomes, scholarly trajectories—are now collapsing. A nearly 60-spot drop in rankings (also see Moody, 2025). A four-year graduation rate below 50%. Declining faculty resources. These are not abstractions; they are the cumulative effects of governance by fiat rather than by faculty expertise, student need, or institutional mission.

And yet, in the midst of this academic decline, spending per student has exploded—far exceeding that of comparable public institutions in Florida. Taxpayer money has not been invested in teaching, research, or student support, but funneled into rushed athletic expansion, failed modular housing projects, hotel contracts, and symbolic spectacles designed to please political patrons rather than serve students. If this is stewardship, it is stewardship for donors and governors, not for the public.

The rhetoric of democracy rings especially hollow here. Decisions of monumental consequence were made without faculty consent, without student buy-in, and without meaningful public deliberation. Trustees were installed. Presidents were imposed. Programs were eliminated. Mascots were replaced. Statues were proposed. A “compact” drafted by a presidential administration hostile to higher education itself was embraced—not because the campus demanded it, but because ideological loyalty was rewarded with preferential access to power and money.

This is not democratic governance. It is authoritarian management with a populist accent.

The irony, of course, is that the very people accused of silencing dissent—faculty teaching about race, gender, inequality, and power—are the ones now demonstrating what academic courage looks like. Professors who stay. Students who speak. Faculty who refuse to abandon their courses or their commitments. They expose the lie at the heart of this project: that freedom is being expanded when, in fact, it is being selectively granted.

Free speech, it turns out, is protected when it flatters power—and constrained when it challenges it.

New College has become a warning, not a model. A case study in how quickly a public institution can be hollowed out when ideology replaces expertise, when greed replaces care, and when democracy is invoked only to justify its own dismantling.

The tragedy is not merely what has been lost—programs, faculty, trust, academic standing—but what is being normalized: the idea that universities exist to serve political agendas rather than the public good.

That should alarm anyone who believes higher education belongs to students, scholars, and society—not to governors, donors, or culture-war opportunists.

Reference

Moody, J. (2025, Oct. 1). Spending soars, rankings fall at New College of Florida: Student outcomes and rankings are slipping at the liberal arts college while spending is up. Critics believe the college is at risk of implosion, and some are calling for privatization, Inside Higher Education. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/state-oversight/2025/10/01/spending-soars-rankings-fall-new-college-florida

Two years since conservatives took over a liberal arts college, what’s been lost — and gained

Dec. 11, 2025


New College of Florida student Alexandra Levy is concerned about the changes at her school. She poses for a portrait on the campus on Nov. 12. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

By Juliet Schulman-Hall | JSchulman-Hall@masslive.com | MassLive | Dec. 11, 2025

This is the second article in a two-part series by Shulman-Hall examining higher education under the Trump administration. Read the first here.

A wave of anger hit Alexandra Levy by the third class in one of her political science courses. As she flipped through the syllabus readings, she began searching the authors online — one after another, after another.

Every reading was from Hillsdale College, a private Christian school, or The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.

Wearing a bright pink scarf and a sweater on a “cold” 60-degree November day in Sarasota, Florida, Levy described the class as one of multiple she has encountered at New College where newly-hired conservative professors have shaped what she is taught.

“I just never experienced only showing one opinion or disguising that opinion as fact,” she said.

Levy began at New College of Florida in 2023, the year Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis transformed the Honors College into an increasingly politically conservative institution through leadership and programmatic changes. The changes were modeled after Hillsdale College’s conservative education.

Read more: How a small Florida college became Trump’s blueprint to threaten higher ed in Mass.

For many higher education leaders, the overhaul of New College has been seen as a blueprint for the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on higher education, including threats and demands toward Harvard University.

They worry that the changes at New College could be coming to their own schools.

Since 2023, New College has dropped nearly 60 spots in national liberal arts rankings, and a recently released report shows that spending per student at the college is more than triple most other publicly-supported colleges in Florida.

A view of the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla. on Nov. 12. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

The college has also experienced a declining four-year graduation rate, dropping to 47.4% for the class of 2024.

However, to Richard Corcoran, president of New College of Florida, the transformation of the institution embodies more than what some datasets reveal. He argues the college is going in a positive direction despite data that has been “weaponized” by critics without context.

“The old New College is gone. The new New College is rising. The people trying hardest to tear it down are the ones who understand that we are succeeding,” Corcoran wrote in an op-ed last month.

Corcoran said New College hasn’t become a conservative college, but a place with a diversity of perspectives.

“If colleges and universities are not the marketplace of ideas, if they’re not the place to have have every possible debate, idea, discussion, then we fail as a country. And that’s all we’re trying to create here. If we do that, and we do it well, we’ll be the best liberal arts college in the country, Just like we were in the ’70s,” Corcoran told MassLive.

A drop in academic stature at New College

Mimi Fuller, a marine biology student who works as a teacher’s assistant, said she has noticed more students struggling in introductory classes.

“The amount of people that are failing Foundations of Biology is ridiculous. This is the easiest biology class you can take,” Fuller said. “It’s rare that I grade an exam that has an A. It’s so rare.”

But that wasn’t what New College used to be like, according to Benjamin Brown.

Brown, who graduated in 2009, remembers New College as a place where students once went on to earn advanced degrees, many of whom became Fulbright scholars.

Mimi Fuller, second from left, and her friends hang out between classes at New College of Florida on Nov. 12. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

New College was on a positive path between 2021 and 2023, under its first female president. The college’s four-year graduation rate and the number of students with a high school GPA of 4.0 or higher were increasing. And yet, the college had continued to grapple with enrollment declines for several years.

Brown was critical of the previous New College presidencies and excited for a fresh set of eyes and values during the overhaul of the New College administration in 2023. He became the college’s alumni association chair that year.

His positivity quickly waned as he watched his alma mater become a “disaster,” he said.

“We’re not achieving anymore,” Brown said. “We’ve fallen by 59 places in the relevant U.S. News ranking that we look to. We used to have a lot of students on track to go into Ph.D. programs, get Fulbright scholarships and also some Goldwater scholarships. You’re not really doing that anymore. There are still some who entered the program before Corcoran came in who were achieving that, but it’s clearly coming to an end.”

The nearly 60-spot drop in New College’s rankings over the past two years is largely due to the academic peer assessment score. The score measures the perception of institutional quality among presidents, provosts and deans at peer liberal arts colleges, according to Eric Brooks, U.S. News’ director of education data analysis. The faculty resource measures also declined, he said.

What’s being taught at New College — and what isn’t

The academic achievement of New College students is one metric, but Mary Churchill, an associate dean at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, has a separate concern about what is being taught.

Churchill has heard from New College faculty who are worried about being punished or caught teaching material that the administration might disagree with.

“If the goal in your classroom is dialogue across difference — to debate ideas, to debate pros and cons of any subject — and you are constrained in only being able to present one side, your ability to support your students in their growth of thinking critically and having critical discourse is really limited,” Churchill said.

There has been a censorship issue not only at New College, but across many institutions in predominantly red states, such as Texas or Georgia, that are abolishing gender studies or conversations about race, she said. Academics as far away as France have approached her with concerns about the changes at New College, she said.

“I think you can be academically rigorous within an environment where you have multiple viewpoints, conservative and progressive. But in either situation, when you’re trying to silence the opposite point of view, I do think you are impacting academic excellence,” Churchill said.

While some programs, like gender studies, were abolished under Corcoran’s leadership, others have been emphasized. For instance, New College has focused on the classical liberal arts by requiring all first-year students to take a class on Homer’s The Odyssey.

This year, David Harvey, the dean of the Center for the Study of Western Civilization, signed up to teach an introductory class on The Odyssey, in part to see how freshmen were doing academically. While he saw some concerning statistics about the academic performance of students in 2023, he said the college has bounced back — and is paving a brighter future forward.

“By and large, I’ve been pleased at how they’re doing. Most of the students are engaged; they’re learning what I want them to learn,” Harvey said.

David Harvey, dean of the Center for the Study of Western Civilization, poses for a portrait on
the campus of New College of Florida. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

Harvey believed New College was becoming a “progressive echochamber” before 2023 and was academically declining, despite its prowess in prior years. The Corcoran administration has been dedicated to restoring political balance on the campus, Harvey said.

“The common refrain, which I actually strongly agree with, is that we want to teach students how to think, not what to think. And by and large, I found that to be true. If you look across our campus, we’ve got a range of courses, programs, a range of opinions. Nobody’s being disciplined for their political views or told what they can and can’t teach,” said Harvey, who has taught at the college for 25 years.

Sarah Hernandez, an associate professor of Sociology and Caribbean and Latin American Studies, has weathered the changes at New College as others left or transferred.

Despite disagreeing with many of the priorities of Corcoran’s administration, Hernandez didn’t want to leave her students, especially those who couldn’t uproot their lives to transfer to places like Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts.

She had left her home once before, moving away from her family in Mexico to study in the U.S., and didn’t want to repeat the experience.

“At some point, one gets done with running,” Hernandez said.

Sarah Hernandez is a professor of Sociology and Caribbean nd Latin American
Studies at the New College of Florida. (Juliet Schulman-Hall/MassLive)

Covering an entire wall of Hernandez’s office is a raised relief map of Mexico. It was a gift from Mary Elmendorf, an anthropologist who studied Mayan women in Mexico, who was also the wife of a former New College president.

The map isn’t just decoration; Hernandez said her attachment to it reflects a broader commitment she has to bringing diverse cultural perspectives to the classroom.

Hernandez has continued to teach courses such as the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity amid the changes at New College.

This differs from approaches taken by some professors at Harvard, who have stopped teaching courses focused on race and gender in the wake of pressures from the Trump administration.

“I’m not afraid. It’s like, if you want to fire me, let’s have it and see. Because you claim that you are for freedom of academia, freedom of speech,” Hernandez said.

Receiving — and spending — more taxpayer money

Brown, a former alumni association chair, watched in frustration as his dreams for New College’s academic revival fizzled out and DeSantis and New College administrators went on to “take Florida taxpayer money and light it on fire.”

“The impression they were giving is this is going to be a serious college with a more conservative flavor, better matching the public attitudes about this in Florida. But what’s been delivered is a financial disaster,” said Brown, who resigned from his alumni chair position in March over financial concerns.

After years of underfunding, New College faced significant issues of deferred maintenance, such as mold, water leaks and structural issues in buildings. The college received nearly double the amount of state appropriations — jumping from $35.5 million in 2021 to $66.5 million in 2023, according to Suncoast Searchlight.

Some of the school’s funding has gone toward demolishing old buildings. Still, remnants of deteriorating structures remain on campus, with bright green algae or mold coating the windows of old dormitories, obstructing the view of the twin beds and bedframes still inside.

Brown felt like funding was being prioritized for uses that weren’t immediately necessary, such as the beautification of campus or building sizable athletic teams quickly.

A recent report from the Florida State University System shows that New College of Florida has been struggling compared to other Florida institutions. That includes the percentage of students graduating in any year, the cost to produce a degree and operating expenses per student at the college in 2024.

Corcoran refutes a lot of that data.

Some of New College’s issues were inherited from previous administrations, such as the millions of dollars in deferred maintenance that needed to be addressed and graduation and employment metrics, Corcoran said in his op-ed.

He also said the Florida State University System report is simplistic, making graphs look outrageous because of how small New College is compared to large Florida institutions.

Corcoran argued that because New College is required to be a residential college, its costs are higher than other Florida institutions that don’t have as many students living on campus. Expanding the college requires investment, he said.

“Less than three years ago (January 2023), New College wasn’t struggling; it was in a death spiral,” Corcoran wrote in his op-ed.

However, many campus community members have complained about overspending at the college, citing a drastic increase in athlete recruitment without adequate housing.

Corcoran has been in hot water for using $3 million to buy modular housing that was plagued by mold and destroyed by a hurricane and nearly $4 million for hotel contracts between 2024 and 2025 due to a lack of housing on campus, according to the Herald-Tribune. Hotels are still being used.

Are New College athletics to blame?

Part of what has changed the culture — but improved the enrollment — at New College was the creation of collegiate athletic teams.

Athletes have been blamed for disturbing the artsy, alternative culture at New College. In the words of one board of trustees member, recruiting athletes would begin to “rebalance the hormones and the politics on campus.”

Critics also claim New College has overspent on athletics and accepted student athletes without as much regard to their academic merit — to boost enrollment.

On the campus on a November morning, different languages could be heard as groups of athletes shouted at each other across walkways and blasted music out of a portable speaker.

Pickup games of soccer across a green lawn and beach volleyball between a few friends permeated the sunny, palm-tree-heavy campus.

In the afternoon, athletic teams congregated across the campus, from the women’s beach volleyball team warming up on sand courts next to the Sarasota Bay to the baseball and softball teams tightly sharing a field. (Many athletic facilities have been built since 2023, including a million-dollar baseball field, which has been in the works.)

For many of the New College athletes MassLive spoke with, it wasn’t until they arrived that they learned of the college’s contentious overhaul.

The New College of Florida softball team practices on campus. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

Sweaty from an evening of a pickup basketball game, Alexis Monero, a New College baseball recruit, said the college was a unique opportunity for him to get playing time, even if the college has a large baseball team.

Student athletes make up around 30% of the college’s population, but additional students come to New College interested in joining the teams, according to the school.

Since arriving at New College, Monero has noticed a clear divide, in the cafeteria or at parties, between those who are athletes and those he calls “narps” or non-athletic regular people. 

Part of that happens naturally from taking part in time-intensive sports, but he has also seen it as a result of non-athletes unfairly blaming athletes for changes at their school.

“We really didn’t want to ruin their school or anything,” Monero said. “We really just came to play college sports. Because right now, college sports is so saturated. Any opportunity you can get, you’re going to take it as an athlete.”



Both Hernandez and Fuller said some athletes at New College have needed more academic support than their non-athlete peers.

Data from 2023 shows that incoming student-athletes had lower high school GPAs and average SAT scores compared to non-athletes accepted at the college as freshmen, according to a records request obtained by MassLive.

The average GPA for admitted first-time-in-college athletes in 2023 was 3.64, compared to 4.05 for non-athletes. Meanwhile, the average SAT score for admitted students was more than 100 points higher for non-athletes, regardless of whether they were freshmen or transfer students.

The college has been improving its SAT scores for freshman students. That upward trend may be in part because New College changed the academic threshold athletes must meet to be recruited, according to one coach. 

‘A political spotlight’

Jackson Dawson, a basketball recruit, said there is a misconception about athletes’ academics. He defies it with his 4.0 high school GPA.

However, he has contributed to the newly visible conservative culture on campus.

Sitting in a white lawn chair eyeing the pelicans diving into the water, Dawson crossed his arms over a baby blue quarter zip sweater that read “Trump International Golf Club.”

Weeks earlier, he was standing in a similar spot on campus with about 80 New College community members for a vigil honoring conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in September. It was an event run by the Turning Point USA chapter at New College, where Dawson is the founder and president.

“We just shared what Charlie meant to us and his impact that he had on the world. I was fortunate to meet Charlie five times, I believe. So I always tell people other than my parents, he probably had the biggest impact on my life so far,” Dawson said.

Part of the way Dawson was able to interact with Kirk was through Dawson’s work at the White House and during President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Dawson took on a variety of roles in several agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. He went on trips with Vice President J.D. Vance to Boston, hikes in Montana and attended the NATO Summit in the Netherlands.

He did that work while taking classes at New College. Dawson spoke with his professors through email, Zoom or phone to discuss what was covered in class. And, he wrote essays and completed assignments from afar.

“I was lucky enough to be able to go to New College and have the opportunity to do that because at most schools you’re not allowed to dismiss basically a semester of school. But I was able to do school and work nonstop,” Dawson said.

New College student athlete Jackson Dawson founded the school's Turning Point USA chapter and interned at Donald Trump's White House. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

In the three years Dawson has attended New College, the Turning Point chapter has grown from about a dozen students to 106 — more than 10% of the student body. He said their work isn’t trying to tell people what to think but rather trying to create a community that values free speech and limited government.

That message echoes what the New College administration has claimed the institution is like: a place that doesn’t indoctrinate students, but exposes students to all viewpoints. However, the college has contradicted that mission through some politically conservative moves, according to some college community members.

For instance, New College announced it was planning to erect a statue of Kirk and volunteered to be the first college to sign the Trump administration’s “compact.”

The compact requires institutions to adopt definitions of biological sex, cap international undergraduate student populations to 15% and abolish departments that “purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” among other standards.

If signed, the school would receive preference for funding from the federal government.

Over 14% of New College’s undergraduate population were international students in 2024, with the most coming from Brazil. Athletic recruiting has helped bring more of that diversity to campus.

Spectators watch a scrimmage by the New College of Florida softball team on campus in Sarasota, Fla. on Nov. 12. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

In opposition to the compact, New College’s faculty passed a resolution in November asking Corcoran to decline the Trump administration’s compact for preferential federal funding.

In a large auditorium with dozens of faculty members seated on folding chairs on a November afternoon, some faculty expressed concern about not being consulted by the New College administration and whether the Trump administration could restrict their ability to speak openly about certain topics. Only one faculty member spoke in opposition to the faculty’s resolution.

New College administrators wanted to sign up for the compact because the school has already implemented many of the principles laid out in the compact, they said.

However, many of those principles were what drew over a hundred educators and students away in 2023, including Matthew Lepinski, a former faculty member of New College who abruptly resigned from the Board of Trustees that April.

He saw the campus “thrust into the middle of this education culture wars” under politically conservative leadership, ultimately not benefiting students. Those changes were part of DeSantis trying to build his brand for his presidential campaign, Lepinski said.

“[New College] used to be kind of a secluded, out-of-the-way campus, and now it’s gotten a political spotlight shown on it. And I don’t think that benefits students who are just there to learn,” Lepinski said.

Levy, a New College student, has seen a conservative switch on campus firsthand as a student.

She has felt like other student groups, like Turning Point USA, are favored and treated differently than, for instance, the chapter of the League of Women Voters, where she is president.

Levy has heard of some students being invited to events that she wasn’t, and has felt like there has been a difference in what kinds of free speech are protected, such as signing people up for voting versus talking about gun rights.

“You get rewarded for being the kind of student they want,” Levy said.

Levy’s frustration with New College’s campus culture is one shared by Harvey, the chair of the faculty, though he comes to it from a different point of view.

He believes in the direction the New College administration has taken to restore political balance on campus. At the same time, he said the Kirk statue and the compact could be wrapped up in “conservative virtue signaling,” where the college’s administration has attempted to show the state or potential donors that it is going in the right direction.

“One of the things that has been frustrating to me is that a lot of the traditional supporters of the college, a lot of the alumni have been alienated by some of the rhetoric and the virtue signaling that’s taken place,” Harvey said. “Whereas, from my point of view, the things that they loved about the old New College are all still here.”

A metaphor in New College’s mascot

As the sunset cast red and purple hues across the Sarasota Bay on an abnormally cold November evening, Hernandez, a faculty member at New College, clenched her dark blue water bottle in one hand. She walked toward the rose-colored marble mansion, a former home of circus mogul Charles Ringling.

Hernandez’s office was previously in the building, but Corcoran’s arrival forced her and other academics into the more modest facility next door.

A banyan tree cast its shadow across the top of the mansion as the faint resort-style music echoed from neighboring electric fire pits and sand volleyball courts, formerly home to dozens of trees.

In 2023, as the overhaul of New College took shape, the college removed its mascot, the Null Set — once a placeholder that had been reenvisioned into a mathematical sign representing its academic focus.

Corcoran’s administration changed the mascot to the Mighty Banyans. It was chosen because of how big they are and their ability to live for centuries.

The Mighty Banyans logo hangs from a necklace on the dugout of the New College of Florida softball team. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

Banyan trees, also known as “strangler figs,” begin to grow when birds or other animals spread seeds onto other trees. As the seeds grow, the banyan tree sends down roots, strangling the host tree until only the banyan tree, with its networks of trunks, can survive and spread. 

To Hernandez, the mascot is an apt metaphor for the overhaul that has taken place over the past two years — a representation of authoritarian decisions without community buy-in.

DeSantis’s installation of Corcoran and other conservative leadership was the seed that ultimately grew to kill what the college once was, according to some students.

What is left is the “Mighty Banyan” of New College, an utterly changed version of the school they loved.

A banyan tree in front of College Hall on the campus of New College of Florida. (Thomas Simonetti for MassLive)

Walking past the tree, Hernandez stood under a covered passageway lined with arches connecting her new and old office buildings.

Looking toward Corcoran’s office, Hernandez expressed hope that other institutions now being politically pressured to make changes would stand up for their principles more than New College was able to, pointing to Harvard’s federal lawsuits against the Trump administration.

“You’re not alone,” she said.



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About the Authors

Juliet Schulman-Hall is MassLive's Higher Education Reporter. You can reach her at jschulman-hall@masslive.com or on X at @JSchulmanHall.