Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo have built their political brands on combating cancel culture and censorial “wokeness.” They claim to oppose the authoritarian repression of free speech and open debate.
Tell that to the New College professor now out of a job after speaking his mind about the havoc they have wrought at the public honors college in Sarasota.
In January, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a regime change at New College of Florida. The governor appointed six new trustees—most controversially, Christopher Rufo, an architect of the critical race theory (CRT) moral panic—to the board, which soon after fired the president and installed Republican politician Richard Corcoran as interim president.
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Rufo and another DeSantis appointee held their first public meeting on campus in late January. It was a tense early episode in the conservative overhaul of the historically progressive school, which left a poor first impression on many in attendance. Among the displeased were visiting history professor Erik Wallenberg and visiting English professor Debarati Biswas, who thought the board members had demeaned the students in attendance who challenged them.
In a March op-ed in Teen Vogue, Wallenberg and Biswas expressed their growing concerns about the school’s new leadership, namely the trustees’ behavior at the initial meeting and subsequent “social media posts and interviews” that suggested they “are here to rule rather than help us thrive in our existing environment, where all fields of study are open to debate and discussion.”
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and New College of Florida trustee, walks through protesters on his way out of a bill signing event featuring Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in Sarasota, Fla. on May 15, 2023.
Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesResponding on Twitter the next day, Rufo called the authors “pure left-wing Mad Libs” and ridiculed their article for being published in Teen Vogue, before drawing attention to his critics’ shared status as contingent faculty members in adding, “Luckily, both are visiting professors.”
Rufo’s thinly veiled threat was soon realized. This May, New College chose not to renew Wallenberg’s contract. The only discernible explanation is the history professor’s public opposition to the school’s new leadership.
Notably, the nonrenewal appears to have contradicted the wishes and efforts of Wallenberg’s academic department. As the professor told The Daily Beast, toward the end of the year, “the head of the division asked if I would be interested in coming back,” since “they needed someone for next year to continue.” (Wallenberg had been New College’s sole U.S. history instructor).
But after six weeks, during which his division head “tried very hard to get my contract through,” he received the unfortunate news. “On the last day of classes, the interim president said he declined to sign the contract but didn’t say why.”
Rufo was quick to relish Corcoran’s decision on Twitter. In a quote tweet of his previous post deriding the two professors’ op-ed, the trustee announced that New College had “let the contract for visiting professor Erik Wallenberg expire.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs three education bills on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla. on May 15, 2023.
Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images“I wish Professor Wallenberg well and hope his work on ‘radical theatre and environmental movements’ finds a more suitable home,” Rufo wrote (scorning research on Depression-Era federal theater for which the history professor was recently granted a Ph.D.). In another post, Rufo celebrated the decision as evidence that the school “will no longer be a jobs program for middling, left-wing intellectuals.”
The trustee’s gloating—not the first instance of Rufo mocking a laid-off critic of his administration—falls flat, though, as Wallenberg’s department’s six-week-long, dashed effort to renew him reveals that he was apparently quite a valued faculty member at New College. While his contract was in limbo, Wallenberg mentioned, academic division meetings took place in which “people were outraged that this was being held up.” After Corcoran’s decision, he recalled, students who caught wind of the news were “upset to not have me coming back.”
Beaux Delaune, a New College student who took a U.S. history survey and environmental history course with Wallenberg, attests to this latter point. “To be quite honest, I’m devastated about Wallenberg’s dismissal,” Delaune wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “He invited conversation in class that I almost never had the chance to engage in anywhere else.”
Biswas said there was “no academic reason for which Professor Erik Wallenberg wouldn’t be renewed,” particularly in light of positive peer and student evaluations (as well as, Wallenberg noted, a forthcoming publication in a top journal and his recent Ph.D. making him all the more employable).
Rufo’s tweets have led Wallenberg to reasonable conclusions about his dismissal. “I mean, he makes it very clear that this was a political hit job on his part and the board’s part, and, for whatever role the president has in this, we don’t know,” he told The Daily Beast. “But it’s clear the president refused to sign the contract, and certainly Christopher Rufo makes it seem from his tweets that it was about what he thinks our politics are.”
Biswas regards the decision to ax Professor Wallenberg as “purely vindictive.”
As for her own employment status, the English professor believes she was spared Wallenberg’s fate because her renewal offer was signed before his, by the pre-Corcoran administration. Once Corcoran took over, she told The Daily Beast, he held all new visiting assistant professor contracts, including those “that were yet to be signed”—like Wallenberg’s—“hostage.” Biswas suspects this was “primarily [because Corcoran] wanted to get both of us out,” but, since she was already renewed, he was only half successful.
In an email to The Daily Beast, New College’s communications office did not comment on claims of political retaliation against Wallenberg, stating only that he “was a Visiting Professor of History at New College” whose “contract ended in May.” Neither Rufo nor a staff member of interim President Corcoran’s office responded to requests for comment.
The affair sheds light on issues caused by the standardization of non-tenure-track jobs in academia. The problem this poses for faculty speech is plain: Those employed on a contingent basis, from adjunct instructors to assistant visiting professors, are easily disposable and thus face great risk of retaliation for their speech.
As such precarious arrangements have become an academic commonplace, so, too, have contract nonrenewals as a simple way for administrators to do away with “troublesome” and vocal faculty members.
Wallenberg’s dismissal represents, at worst, a blatant and perhaps illegal instance of such retaliation.
On June 8, a nonpartisan free speech advocacy organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), published a letter to New College to this effect, imploring the school to “immediately reverse course and publicly reaffirm its commitment to protecting faculty expression and academic freedom rights.” PEN America has condemned the move as an “authoritarian decision” and an “affront to the principle of academic freedom.”
The affair—sure to chill dissent on campus—marks the latest hardship the New College community has endured as collateral damage in DeSantis’ fatuous “war on woke.” Wallenberg describes the students and faculty as feeling “embattled” since the announcement of the new board members, and Biswas notes that “fear and extreme uncertainty” have taken hold on campus.
“The current goal of education is to really nurture the potential of every student to be producers of knowledge,” Biswas said. “[The new administration is] absolutely destroying that potential and that promise, and therefore creating a culture of fear.” Delaune, a rising second-year student, said the takeover has “felt like a horrible nightmare,” and described DeSantis and his appointees as “playing with my school” with “zero respect for us as people” or “for professors they don’t agree with.”
At the January meeting that initially compelled Biswas and Wallenberg to speak out, Rufo insisted that his goal was not to “replace the left-wing orthodoxy with the right-wing orthodoxy,” but to “expand the bounds of public debate.”
The non-renewal of a professor who was in good standing with all at New College—except of course, with its political activist conservative stewards—suggest otherwise: That the bounds of permissible speech at the school have never been narrower—and criticism of its new administrators falls outside of them.
