Invisible book burning / Secret rhythm

Today: Writer and editor Maria Bustillos, and Colin McGowan, a writer living in Chicago.

Issue No. 143

Fighting Words
Maria Bustillos

Chats From Underground
Colin McGowan

Fighting Words

by Maria Bustillos

Following their eradication of the school’s gender studies program and their closure of its thirty-year-old student Gender and Diversity Center, the far right-wing trustees of New College in Sarasota, Florida kept right on going with their barbarian rampage last week, as the Gender and Diversity Center’s books on LGBTQ+ topics were dumped, yes, into a dumpster.

The Gender and Diversity books were a student-curated collection, and not formally part of the library, but the books were dumped simultaneously with a culling of books from the main library. That gave New College president Richard Corcoran the opportunity to sneakily write, in a note to the campus community, “The administration at New College has never been involved in deciding which books are selected or deselected from the library’s collection”—conveniently omitting that the discarded LGBTQ+ books weren’t technically part of the library’s collection. In what appears to be related news, faculty board representative Amy Reid, former chair and founding director of the gender diversity program, announced on Thursday that she is taking a year-long leave of absence.

On the service formerly known as Twitter, New College board member Chris Rufo gloatingly claimed responsibility for both the book dumping and the abolition of the gender studies program, explicitly linking the two.

All this happened because in 2023 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis installed a herd of his prurient Republican creepo pals on the board of trustees of New College, including Rufo. That’s right, the guy who tweeted all that gross stuff about trans people two weeks ago—the guy who stoked the conflagration of outrage that resulted in the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!—was put in charge of a once-revered public liberal arts college in Florida, along with a few of his fellow creepos. More than a third of the faculty, about 40 professors, had quit within the year.

“The fact that these books…were discarded in the dead of night, without transparency, and without giving students the opportunity to preserve them, should outrage every Floridian and every American who values democracy and free thought,” Bacardi Jackson of the Florida ACLU responded.

The slow-motion intellectual demolition of New College is part of an escalating far-right campaign to inflict damage on educational institutions through book bans, board takeovers, and attacks on professors and curricula, all focused on curbing or reversing decades of progress on diversity, access, and freedom of thought. Earlier this month, books by Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood, Rupi Kaur, and Sarah J. Maas were ordered to be removed from every public school classroom and library in the state of Utah. A report published in March by the American Library Association showed a nearly twenty-fold increase in challenges to library books in the last three years.

How to fight back? Through public accountability, through yelling, and through the development of better protections for libraries and their collections.

There’s loads of video and detailed photos of the New College books in the dumpster, and some of the books were reportedly rescued by students and others. There are named witnesses who can produce this evidence, along with what I hope will be demands for accountability in the days to come.