Discarded gender and diversity books trigger a new culture clash at a Florida college

When hundreds of books got hauled away in a dumpster from the library of the New College of Florida on Thursday, the tiny liberal arts college with a governing board dominated by appointees of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis once again found itself at the center of the state’s culture wars.

“We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash,” Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the Sarasota college’s governing board, posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, condemned the college for “a brazen act of censorship.”

“These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history’s darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACU of Florida, said in a statement.

Both sides were responding to accounts spread through social media that officials at the campus of roughly 700 students had sent a large collection of books from the college’s recently shuttered gender studies program to a local landfill.

But a statement by New College administrators said people were confusing two different batches of books. It said volumes taken away by dumpster came from a routine culling of the main library’s collection, largely to get rid of old and damaged books. Books related to gender studies, it said, were also placed outside the library and “were later claimed by individuals planning to donate the books locally. ”

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A student who alerted classmates to the book dumping told The Associated Press that she saw two large boxes filled with books Thursday at the campus’ student-run Gender and Diversity Center, located in a building where staff were busy moving furniture, repainting and otherwise preparing for students to return to campus next week.

Natalia Benavides said those boxes got moved to the library parking lot near the dumpster, but fellow students and activists responding to her alert managed to save most of the Gender and Diversity Center’s books before they got thrown away.

“Primarily what was in the dumpster were library books —- they were stamped with `discard’ and they were bound so that you knew they were from the library,” said Benavides, a fourth-year student. “They seemed to be of every topic under the sun: art history books, books on aesthetics, psychology books.”

It’s not surprising that discarding books would trigger controversy at New College. Known for decades as a progressive school with a prominent LGTQ+ community, the campus became a target for DeSantis and as war on “woke.” In early 2023, the governor overhauled the college’s Board of Trustees by installing a majority of conservative members.

The new trustees promptly fired the college president and replaced her with a Republican politician. Several other administrators also lost their jobs. The board dismantled the office of diversity and equity and a year ago voted to shut down the campus’ gender studies program.

“Every couple of months, they have destroyed some part of this campus whether it is physical spaces or our books,” said Amy Reid, the professor who led the college’s gender studies program and now plans a yearlong leave of absence.

Reid said she believes books were removed from the Gender and Diversity Center, a student-run office that was independent of the academic gender studies program, because it’s also being shuttered. She said the center’s sign was also taken down and that it had housed more than two boxes of books, many of which she suspects ended up in the trash.

“Was I surprised that this happened?” Reid said. “No, because we’ve seen an effort to refashion this campus and make it unwelcoming.”

New College’s statement said only that books “associated with the discontinued Gender Studies program” had been removed from a room “that is being repurposed.” A college spokesman, Nate March, declined to to answer further questions.

Zander Moricz, who leads a group of student activists called the SEE Alliance, said books from the Gender and Diversity Center that were nearly thrown out included volumes on slavery, a collection of Jewish stories and three copies of the Bible.

Campus police prevented students from retrieving books from the dumpster, he said, which was loaded onto a truck that members of his group followed to a local landfill.

“The vast majority of the books were 100% readable and in good condition,” Moricz said.

The American Association of Libraries encourages academic libraries to cull books in poor physical condition or no longer deemed accurate or relevant — though its guidelines say books should never be removed because they’re controversial.

Association spokesperson Jean Hodges said it’s up to individual libraries what to do with removed books.

“Donation, recycling, resale, and disposal all fall within normal practice,” Hodges said by email.

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Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.