'Only Nazis ban books': on the frontlines with students fighting Trump over higher education
Another reason to despise him.
Documentary films
‘Only Nazis ban books’: on the frontlines with students fighting Trump over higher education
Documentary First They Came for My College goes inside the fight for academic freedom at Florida’s New College
Owen Myers
It took a half century to build New College into a sanctuary of independent thought and less than a year to destroy it. In 2023 the beloved Florida liberal arts school became state governor Ron DeSantis’s latest target in his so-called war on woke. DeSantis decimated the school’s trustee board and installed a cabal of rightwing cronies, aiming to transform it into a conservative institution modeled after Michigan’s evangelical Hillsdale College.
Library shelves were stripped, with books from Black and Indigenous authors and the shuttered gender studies department tossed into dumpsters. Frat boys arrived in droves and the campus was transformed into a meathead’s playground where queer couples stopped holding hands for fear of homophobic slurs. In a move ripped from the playbook of a spiteful cartoon villain, the community garden with its koi pond and roosting owls was bulldozed and a plans were hatched to build a baseball stadium.
Students found themselves fighting for the soul of the school. “The confusion was palpable,” says former student Gaby Batista, a protest leader and former editor in chief of the campus newspaper the Catalyst. “As a student at a public university, you don’t know your board of trustees. No one anticipates having to learn their names and have their business become so directly involved in your business.”
The gripping new documentary First They Came For My College documents how this tiny school of just 700 students became a battleground in the Trump administration’s assault on higher education. After ousting former board president Patricia Okker in January 2023, DeSantis installed a gruesome line-up of new trustees who aimed to strip the school of “woke ideology” and abolished DEI programs and critical race theory. The new board included characters like openly racist former Florida house speaker Richard Corcoran and Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who fueled Trump’s attack on diversity.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/mar/06/first-they-came-for-my-college-documentary
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