The Playbook Behind the “University Wars”—And Why It Fails on Purpose
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
Oct. 15, 2025
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| ILLUSTRATION BY GABRIELLA TRUJILLO |
Before reading any further, take a few minutes to read the entirety of Kathryn Joyce’s eye-popping, brilliant investigative story, "The New College Gambit: The right-wing takeover of Florida's public honors college blurs the line between tragedy and farce, but attack on universities are about to get worse." It was published close to a year ago in In These Times on December 9, 2024. For your convenience, I post it below.
It is essential reading for anyone trying to understand what’s happening to higher education today. As covered in an earlier blog, it's also prescient, forecasting New College's massive decline in ranking from 76th to 135th in only two years since its takeover.
Joyce’s reporting is meticulous, her narrative gripping, and her insights chilling. The story of the right-wing extremist takeover of New College of Florida reads like a case study in how to dismantle a public institution under the guise of “reform.”
What’s happening at New College isn’t an isolated meltdown. It’s a template.
Start by dissolving or neutering faculty senates and concentrating power in presidential offices and partisan boards. Replace peer governance with top-down directives, and call it “reform.” Then rebrand the language of coercion as virtue, referring to it as "patriotic education," "intellectual diversity," or "institutional neutrality." This right-wing campaign weaves together speeches, op-eds, think-tank memos, policy statements, and book launches into a chorus of coordinated narratives
But the real engine of the story predates today’s culture warriors not the least of which has involved decades of a systematic defunding of higher education. Starve public higher education long enough, drive up tuition, "adjunctify" the faculty, and alienate the public—then arrive with a cure that looks suspiciously like more control and less education. What’s being sold as reform deepens the very decay it claims to cure.
Here’s the twist: even on their own terms, the new products don’t sell. As former New College professor Matt Lepinski put it, there’s no student demand for courses taught by extremists. The spectacle may grab headlines, but it doesn’t fill classrooms. Meanwhile, students lose mentors, degree paths wobble, and programs evaporate. The result is a university less capable of serving anyone—left, right, or center.
And perhaps that’s the point. As Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, observes in his May, 2024, report, failure can be the strategy. If you’re funded by people who want government to fail, then governing badly is success. In that frame, the destruction of a particular college isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It’s a deliberate step in a larger campaign to turn higher education into a patronage system—advancing loyalists, purging critics, and sidelining the public mission.
Starting to sound familiar? I hope not. But if the pattern feels eerily recognizable, it’s because the same logic is at work: dismantle trust, centralize control, and call it reform. The question, as always, is whether we’ll recognize it in time to stop it.
Consider the enrollment theater at New College: rapid recruitment of athletes as a quick way to boost headcount while cutting the academic core. This is diversity and inclusion as optics, not education. It’s also expensive, which brings us to a basic civic truth: we all pay taxes. Public universities are funded by the public. They exist to advance the public good. When governance collapses into factional control, taxpayers of every stripe—conservative, moderate, progressive—subsidize a campus that delivers less scholarship, less freedom, and fewer real opportunities.
Language matters here. The euphemisms—intellectual diversity, viewpoint balance, freedom institutes—mask a transfer of power from scholarly communities to political appointees. Strip away the branding and the structure looks familiar: it’s right-wing patronage with a campus mailing address.
So where does this leave us? For starters, there is abundant clarity. What was marketed as a renaissance is, in practice, a consolidation—of authority, budgets, and narrative. It also offers a stark warning: a system that treats dysfunction as a governing strategy will inevitably reproduce itself—unless it is confronted by organized resistance.
It also reminds us, in the soberest of ways, that public higher education remains a public good—a cornerstone of democratic life. Most students aren’t looking for political theater; they want rigorous teaching, stable programs, meaningful credentials, and campuses where they can think freely without being drafted into someone else’s culture war.
The antidote isn’t nostalgia; it’s action leading to structural repair. We must restore shared governance; secure transparent, adequate public funding; protect academic freedom and tenure rights across the spectrum; and measure success by growth, timely completion, and meaningful student learning, not by how efficiently a board can silence a department. Even if a single campus can be “captured,” the public doesn’t have to underwrite a model built to fail.
The irony is hard to miss: even many conservatives don’t want what this model is selling. They want rigorous degrees, credible programs, and professors who teach—not propagandists who pose as educators. In that gap between the sales pitch and reality lies the opening for a different story—one in which universities serve democracy itself, not a faction; where education strengthens the public good rather than partisan power; and where language like “freedom,” “inclusion,” and “excellence” carries real meaning.
