In January 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a plan to systematically dismantle a liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida, boasting about going after anything deemed part of a “woke” agenda — racial justice, gender diversity, unions, etc. In its place, the DeSantis administration vowed to create a supposedly-classical liberal arts university. By that he basically means promoting an educational atmosphere focused on “Western values” and, of course, sports teams.
Now he’s coming after beloved preserve lands on the New College Florida campus.
On March 25, state contractors began clearing land in an area known as the Bayfront Uplands Preserve in the Campus Master Plan (CMP), the document that enshrines its protection for the purposes of passive recreation, nature study and flood control. But most people on campus just call it the Uplands, a name it shares with the adjacent neighborhood.
“It is an environmental disaster,” said Andrea Zucker, a New College alumna and Uplands resident. “We have osprey living here, we have eagles that were in a nest in these trees, all kinds of woodpeckers, so much natural habitat they are destroying right now.”
Clearing this land is a step towards severing the strong student, faculty and community ties to campus nature, strengthened by decades of stewardship at a school where ecology was a prominent theme. The Environmental Studies Program there, founded in 1972, was the first of its type in the United States.
