The thing is, Rufo and DeSantis are basically happy to have New College be a catastrophic mess this year, for two reasons.
1) Except for the incoming class, the students are people who chose to be at New College as it once was. So they hate those students as much as they hate the faculty. This is basically pretty close to ISIS or the Taliban taking over a village and then subjecting the villagers to mandatory re-education sessions and beating those who are suspected of disloyalty. The goal is to punish those who remain for the crime of having not been on their side in the first place.
2) Chaos lets him and his buddies hire people who have no professional credentials at all on the grounds of expedient necessity and essentially hand out salaries as ideological rewards. They're going to end up with a faculty who don't know anything about the disciplines they teach, but do know some kind of far-right lunacy about that field that they can spout continuously for weeks on end. They're not building a Hillsdale, they're building a brick-and-mortar TruthSocial.
They don't care if New College is viable four years from now, this is about destroying something as a warning to their enemies and giving the spoils to their cronies and pals.
So well stated on the essence of competency and the consequences of incompetency. I would also add that incompetent administrators run from accountability. You state that well noting that the leaders are not holding themselves accountable to the students- in market terms to those paying the bills- or to the taxpayers for any public funds. This lack of accountability will also be apparent as these leaders blame others for the disasters. Thank you again for your thoughtful essay.
The thing is, Rufo and DeSantis are basically happy to have New College be a catastrophic mess this year, for two reasons.
1) Except for the incoming class, the students are people who chose to be at New College as it once was. So they hate those students as much as they hate the faculty. This is basically pretty close to ISIS or the Taliban taking over a village and then subjecting the villagers to mandatory re-education sessions and beating those who are suspected of disloyalty. The goal is to punish those who remain for the crime of having not been on their side in the first place.
2) Chaos lets him and his buddies hire people who have no professional credentials at all on the grounds of expedient necessity and essentially hand out salaries as ideological rewards. They're going to end up with a faculty who don't know anything about the disciplines they teach, but do know some kind of far-right lunacy about that field that they can spout continuously for weeks on end. They're not building a Hillsdale, they're building a brick-and-mortar TruthSocial.
They don't care if New College is viable four years from now, this is about destroying something as a warning to their enemies and giving the spoils to their cronies and pals.
So well stated on the essence of competency and the consequences of incompetency. I would also add that incompetent administrators run from accountability. You state that well noting that the leaders are not holding themselves accountable to the students- in market terms to those paying the bills- or to the taxpayers for any public funds. This lack of accountability will also be apparent as these leaders blame others for the disasters. Thank you again for your thoughtful essay.