New College of Florida will offer a course studying “wokeness” in January.
The class is called “The ‘Woke’ Movement” and be taught by Dr. Andrew Doyle over winter break.
It’s a one-month individualized studies program (ISP). Doyle is a comedian and conservative political satirist best known for creating the Twitter persona, Titania McGrath.
Nate March, the Director of Communications & Athletics at New College, said the name of the course “came from popular culture and the movement itself.”
The course is described as breaking down the “woke movement” as an illiberal “kind of cult,” see the full description below.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the course description was sent to students on Sunday night.
Wednesday, New College’s Provost Office, “was promoting a seminar for students that explains the ISP process and inadvertently included an out-of-date version of the ISP listings,” which caused students to speculate if the course had been taken off the ISP handbook.
The program intends to provide a background on the movement and to consider its ongoing impact on the modern world.
“Challenges to the First Amendment began around 10 years ago with the emergence of the Critical Social Justice (or ‘woke’) movement, which sought to promote equity according to group identity through authoritarian means,” Doyle wrote on UnHerd last month. “According to this view, popular culture has created a society of unthinking clones.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Florida was “where woke goes to die,” when he was reelected in November 2022.
“We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob,” DeSantis said, according to CBS.
Once he was reelected as Florida’s governor, DeSantis appointed six new members to New College’s Board of Trustees.
“Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed,” Christopher Rufo, an appointed trustee, tweeted.
Later, former New College President Patricia Okker was terminated from her position and the DEI office was abolished within the same meeting, according to the Associated Press.
“Most of us knew something was changing about higher-ed in this country at that moment. If this was successful at New College of Florida, it will be replicated in other places, and I think that’s what we’ve seen,” said Afshan Jafar, President of the American Association of University Professors Connecticut Conference.
After the institutional changes, New College made headlines when their “Rhetoric: Humor Institute” ISP was labeled as “homophobic” according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Doyle has been elected as a presidential scholar, which means that he only reports to New College’s President, Richard Corcoran instead of a department head. As a presidential scholar, Doyle’s course likely hasn’t received the same oversight.
“New College does have a committee that does approve courses, and they do have a system for approving regular courses, but I think it’s been deteriorating mostly by the new administration putting up parallel structures that are outside of faculty oversight and governance,” said Jafar. “They now just answer to Corcoran and have no limits in terms of the intellectual merit, or the lack thereof, in the course content that they’re proposing.
March told WMNF, “Please be assured the ISP is scheduled and Dr. Doyle is teaching it.”
The course description:
“What has become known colloquially as the ‘woke’ movement is best understood as a kind of cult. Its members are generally decent people with good intentions, but their methods are essentially illiberal. They brook no dissent and seek to punish heresy wherever they find it. They have an unshakeable certainty that their faith is the only way to truth. They do not believe in the possibility of redemption for the fallen. And even though they are capable of the most horrendous dehumanising behaviour, they think they are the ‘good guys’. More and more people are finding themselves increasingly frustrated and confused by the impact of wokeness on their everyday lives. The disciples of this cult have insinuated themselves into all of our major institutions: the media, the arts, the law, the judiciary, education, academia, and government. Their ideas are complex and their way of speaking mysterious, meaning that the extent of their influence is often difficult to grasp. Ideas, opinions and words which up until recently were uncontroversial can now find people fired and publicly shamed. Good people feel unable to speak their minds for fear of being misinterpreted and mischaracterised, wilfully or otherwise. Activists have managed to restrict the Overton Window to such an extent that much-needed discussions – such as how to deal with the challenges raised by gender self-identification or the costs of unfettered immigration – are often avoided entirely. There is great uneasiness about the speed of these societal changes, and many are struggling to make sense of it all. This ISP will provide a background to the historical origins of this ideology, and consider its ongoing impact in the modern world.”
