Gov. Ron DeSantis re-emerged on the weekend press conference circuit Saturday to take a victory lap at a Southwest Florida school he and his political allies radically changed in recent years, telling a receptive crowd that when it came to conservative reforms, they “ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Speaking Saturday at New College in Sarasota, DeSantis boasted that the school has been wrested away from “the Left,” and is now akin to places that the property-owning white men who established the United States learned.
“But the mission is we want a liberal arts education that is rooted in the Western tradition that is a classical education similar to what our Founding Fathers had when they went to, to universities. That is something that I think will attract people, not just throughout Florida, but throughout the country,” DeSantis asserted.
According to a report by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, New College has seen its lowest retention rate of first-year students in the college’s history and the departure of more than a third of the faculty.
A newly established athletics department at the college brought in record enrollment through athletic recruiting, but it also led to a decrease in overall grade point averages and test scores, according to the Herald-Tribune. Subsequently, the college dropped 24 spots in the U.S. News and World Report rankings of top liberal arts colleges in the country.
DeSantis’ remarks went beyond New College, touching on a number of right-wing, hot-button issues, such as Major League Baseball moving its All Star Game from Atlanta years ago, the dissemination of so-called “woke” ideology, and the “corruption of academia.”
DeSantis also celebrated squelching protests of the ongoing Israeli war with Hamas.
“The lawn at Florida State, they turned the sprinklers on. They were gone very quickly. Tried to do it at (the University of Florida), didn’t work. And even beyond universities, you know, they tried to take over a street in Miami.”
“A couple of months ago, Miami PD had all of them dragged off in 15 minutes, which was very good because they were taking over places for hours and hours in other parts of the country. Then fast forward a couple of weeks after that, they tried to take over a road going into Disney World and the Florida Highway Patrol ejected them in 11 minutes. That’s a new world record,” DeSantis joked.
“If one of the presidents of our colleges or universities in Florida allowed their campus to become what we’ve seen recently from Harvard or Columbia, they’d be out of work the next day,” the Governor maintained.
The post Ron DeSantis says revamped New College is like where the ‘Founding Fathers’ went to school appeared first on Florida Politics – Campaigns & Elections. Lobbying & Government..