Since January 2023, when Gov. Ron DeSantis installed a new conservative majority on the New College of Florida Board of Trustees, the travails of the school's students and faculty have been documented in multiple media.
The New College saga reached a wider audience this June when the HBO show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” mined it for 28 minutes of comedy gold.
As of this writing, Oliver's segment on New College has drawn 3.3 million views on YouTube.
The documentary “First They Came for My College” offers a fresh and moving perspective on this narrative.
Just after the hostile takeover of New College,, the filmmakers placed iPhones into the hands of students and encouraged them to document how the school's brutal transformation was affecting
them in real time.
The scenes that linger are the ones that depict the clear pain of the students as, to quote Oliver's inimitable characterization, their “rare haven for gentle nerds” is ripped to shreds by both natural and man-made hurricanes.
The students witness their professors’ acts of moral courage, such as when Faculty Trustee Matthew Lepinskiannounces his resignation after the board denies tenure to five colleagues.
They also follow professor Amy Reid, who took over Lepinski’s position as faculty board trustee and fought valiantly for the gender studies program she had founded.
Eventually, months after the school threw hundreds of gender studies books into a dumpster, the students film Reid as she packs up her own books in her office.
The students in a journalism course taught by Maria Vesperi learn hard lessons of empathy and source reliability as they develop a story about a newly recruited student athlete who had been arrested for intoxication.
Vesperi gently points out that these new students are – like the “old” ones – pawns in a political game.
However, such empathy is not always reciprocated by the newcomers.
In one scene, two young men are walking across campus holding hands when they are confronted by a group of apparently “new” students.
There is unmistakable menace in the voice of one of the new students, who directs an insulting question toward the same-sex couple as they rush away in a panic.
One of the most remarkable figures in the documentary is Student Trustee Grace Keenan, who patiently counsels the board against rushing to replace the school's famous "Null Set" mascot – only to be cruelly mocked by another trustee.
Yet Keenan triumphs in the final sequence of the documentary, which captures a series of vignettes from an utterly shambolic graduation ceremony in May 2024.
In her ceremony speech, Keenan noted that while New College students had been constantly lectured about their supposed lack of virtue, she found that it wasn't the young people who were the most difficult to work with at the school.
And this is the whole point of "First They Came for My College."
Throughout the documentary, we see students who never lose their sense of humanity despite the determined efforts of an authoritarian-minded administration to crush it.
The “gentle nerds” who courageously stood tall during the takeover of New College of Florida will always deserve our admiration and gratitude.
Jonathan Scott Perry is a history professor at the University of South Florida and an officer of the USF Faculty Senate. This article represents his own views and not those of the university.
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: New College came for the 'gentle nerds.' They fought back. | Opinion
