FL: Affirmative Action Revived for Some

You may recall Governor Ron DeSantis has a project to take over Florida's New College and turn it into a conservative bastion. Manny Diaz, Florida's unqualified education commissioner said their hope is "that New College of Florida will become Florida's classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

You may also recall the DeSantis is a staunch opponent of affirmative action, proudly telling the Moms for Liberty crowd that he goes even further than simply not doing AA. 

It's a standard MAGA talking point-- decisions should be merit only! They take considerable pleasure in quoting Martin Luther King Jr on being judged by content of character rather than color of skin.

But now it turns out that maybe a little affirmative action is okay-- as long as you're affirming the right thing.

New College hasn't just dismantled the gender studies department. That's old news. Steven Walker reported for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about the new wave of students at New College, and, well, academic excellence does not seem to be their defining feature.

Overall, the average ACT and SAT scores for the incoming fall class at New College were lower than the previous year. The same group's overall GPA was also lower than in fall of 2022, according to data obtained by the Herald-Tribune and confirmed by the college.

Much of the drop in average scores can be attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school's $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships.

 New College is recruiting heavily for athletes because Richard Corcoran, interim president and former head education privatizer for Florida, announced back last March that the school was going to build an athletics department. From scratch. Walker reports that of the 328 incoming students, 115 are student athletes. They scored 47% of the merit scholarships. Note: New College doesn't have athletic facilities, nor have they been accepted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

They are also mostly men. Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, gets an explanatory quote from MAGA culture panic leader and New College trustee Chris Rufo:

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.

Well, heck. Even Reason, the very Libertarian magazine/website knows what that is. Emma Camp hit it under the headline "New College of Florida Embraces Affirmative Action for Men." They picked up the above quote, as well as noting that Rufo afformed that the whole point of expanding athletics was to draw more males. Rufo has written and ranted before about the "problem" of "the great feminization of the American university."

There are all sorts of issues here, but I'll let the Libertarian right call the college out on this:

But even if one accepts the premise that female-led institutions are more left-wing than male-led ones, New College's response—to engineer a more conservative institution by reducing female participation in it—is inherently in conflict with the strong defense of meritocracy and opposition to affirmative action espoused by Rufo and his allies.

Young women are outpacing their male counterparts in the academic sphere; girls now comprise roughly 60 percent of college students. While young men's failure to academically compete with their female classmates is worth our concern, the solution is not to lower the bar for men to obtain collegiate gender parity (something many selective colleges have been quietly doing for years). Nor is the solution to an illiberal left-wing campus culture to engineer a more male—and supposedly more conservative—student body.

Is the problem simply that MAGA doesn't like women very much? Sure seems like it some days. But for the moment let's just note that they are perfectly okay with affirmative action for dudes, which sure seems to support the theory that they were never against affirmative action--just the people they felt it was affirming, and the whole meritocracy argument was bad faith baloney.

But hey-- they are on the way to more closely resembling Hillsdale, with its student population of 865 men and 813 women.