Grieving the Loss of Riches

A couple of weeks ago my calendar program notified me that it was my cousin Ansel’s birthday. He would have been 66 this year. He was a graduate of New College and though he’s been gone several years now, he and his alma mater have been on my mind the past few weeks.

A Brilliant Mind, An Oversized Heart

Ansel was brilliant, possessing a sharply honed mind that took no prisoners matched by an oversized heart that was regularly broken in the suffering of the world he so readily engaged. He was talented musically and often spent his weekends playing the piano for residents of convalescent facilities near his home in Cary, North Carolina. 

But Ansel always had a difficult time holding life together, especially all the pain he experienced as a deeply empathic gay man. He routinely anaesthetized those demons with alcohol and with “whatever I can get my hands on,” in his words. A number of nights of my life were spent at the local detox center waiting to check him in.

 

Ansel had come to live with Andy and me in Orlando in the mid-1980s. He enrolled at Valencia College, where I then taught. Through their special student services office he was able to gain admission to the state’s Vocational Rehabilitation program. The program was able to provide funding which allowed him to find his own housing and covered tuition, books and living expenses. He quickly achieved a brilliant record at Valencia taking classes full-time and working part-time for the college. His professors would often glow as they spoke of his performance in their classes. When it was time for him to graduate, his counselor worked hard to find him an appropriate place to transfer. 

That place was New College.

 

A Place Where He Could Flourish

 

In the mid-1980s, New College had just become a state university system school, having begun its life as a private liberal arts college. With limited enrollment and dedicated faculty, New College was a dream come true for Ansel.

Like all New College students, he was required to plan his own educational program. He  focused on political science and history which he loved while broadening his program to include encounters with all the other disciplines. Ansel had enough structure to function and enough guidance and encouragement to flourish. And at New College, he found classmates who understood him and among whom he blossomed.

I visited Ansel a couple of times during his stay at New College. I was impressed by the rare combination of open-ended creativity and demanding academics I observed at work there. As a college instructor, I was clear that this was exactly where Ansel and students like him needed to be even as this approach would not work for every student. Most of my students simply needed more structure than New College would have provided. From the beginning, New College was never the place for every student. But it was perfect for students like Ansel.

Ansel would graduate from New College and move back home to North Carolina where he would attain a master's degree in political science from North Carolina State University. He was working on his doctorate there when he suddenly died. I never knew what the cause of death was. But I suspect his tired body simply could no longer sustain his compulsion to numb the pain that so often plagued his broken heart.

But if the events of his life broke his big heart, the news coming out of Florida regarding his beloved New College today would surely shatter his very soul.

 

An Ideological Purge 

While Florida’s current governor and state legislature have readily ignored serious issues like the ravages of climate change which are already impacting Florida more deeply and more immediately than most places in the country, they have doubled down on culture wars using the power of state government to wage them. New College has found itself in the cross-hairs of this battle.

 

The first round in this assault was the appointment lasts year of six new trustees for the college, ideological culture warriors ready for battle. One of the new trustees immediately asserted “We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.”

In other words, New College would be ideologically purged and its instructional staff and students replaced by ideologues who hold the party line. This is a playbook right out of every authoritarian regime from the fascists of the early 20^th CE to the communists of the latter 20^th CE.

The second round occurred when the president of the college was fired and replaced by another ideologue, a former state legislator who a colleague there praised as having “picked more fights with more people than anybody I've ever seen before.” What a perfect choice for a college president.

As commissioner of education, he had championed union-busting, fundamentalist charter and private schools funding and forcing schools to remain open even as Florida’s COVID rates led the nation. Described by teachers as imposing a Christian fundamentalist approach on Florida’s public education system, the commissioner tipped his hand early on by asserting “All education is ideological” and revealing his intent to ideologically shape the next generation of Floridians.

Forced to resign from that position after he was named in a closed bidding scandal involving his own business and a county school system he was then overseeing as commissioner, he was then rewarded by the governor whose culture war he had waged with appointment to the presidency of New College. Immediately upon replacing the president the new board had just fired, he was awarded a $400,000 salary increase over his predecessor.

Clearly, ideological allegiance has its privileges.

 

The latest step in this assault has been the closing of the college’s office which handled diversity, equity and inclusion. This is the office that had made major strides in connecting town and gown, of integrating New College’s brilliant students into a community marked by a stark division between the very wealthy and the working poor who serve them. Students were encouraged to work among the homeless and the town’s people of color, combining academic rigor with real life experience.

The tarnishing of the educational success story that was New College is tragic. And it is unclear whether the college will survive this assault. Long a jewel in the state university system, the ideological purge and reconstruction the state is attempting to impose on this very fine college, its faculty, staff and students, is a travesty.

 

Resistance is Not an Option, it is an Imperative

 

Of course, this is but one of many elements of the culture war in a state which is increasingly being recognized by observers around the world as a laboratory for the rise of a post-democratic fascism. The moral panic around LBGTQ issues, the banning of books in libraries and the shutting down of any in-depth discussion of racism in our state are all part and parcel of an experiment to replicate the neo-fascist regimes we see in places like Orban’s Hungary today. The sad thing is that there are now so many new white retirees who have flocked to artificial communities across the state to live out their golden years avoiding taxes and social responsibilities who are more than happy to go along with this drift into fascism so long as their privilege is not questioned.

For the time being, there seems to be no stopping this speeding train hurtling toward the washed out bridge ahead.

This day as I think of my dear cousin, whose heart simply could not hold the suffering of the world he so deeply felt and whose body finally gave way to the abuse it endured to numb that pain, I grieve both his loss as well as the loss of the college which gave him hope. I know this is not forever. Repressive use of power is never able to sustain itself for long, those who wield it almost inevitably turning inward and devouring each other. Fear almost always has an insatiable appetite.

But the casualties of this culture war are still occurring and may yet prove to be severe. The loss of a crown jewel in what was once a promising state university system would be a deep wound indeed. For those of us who love our state and weep over the devolution we see occurring here, resistance is not an option, it is an imperative.

A very fine account of what is happening at New College and how its staff, faculty and students are handling this assault can be found at this link from WGCU, the public radio station at Florida Gulf Coast University in Ft. Myers. Libby Harrity, who was one of the students interviewed for this broadcast, is a parishioner at my parish, St. Richards, Winter Park, where her mother is the rector. Libby is the quintessential New College student - brilliant, outspoken, passionate.

I think Ansel would have loved her.

 

 

 

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 

  © Harry Coverston, 2023

 

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