Discarded gender and diversity books trigger a new culture clash at a Florida college
When hundreds of books were hauled away from a dumpster at the New College of Florida library on Thursday, small liberal arts college With a board dominated by appointees of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, the state once again found itself at the center of the state’s culture war.
“We abolished the gender studies program. Now we throw out the trash,” Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the Sarasota college board of trustees, posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter.
The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, condemned the university for “a brazen act of censorship.”
“These actions are nothing short of a cultural cleansing, reminiscent of some of the darkest periods in history when regimes attempted to control minds by burning books and erasing knowledge,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACU of Florida, said in a statement.
Both sides were responding to social media reports that campus officials had taken a large collection of books from the university’s recently closed gender studies program to a local dump, along with about 700 students.
But a statement from New College administrators said people were confusing two different batches of books. It said the volumes taken by bin were from a routine thinning of the main branch’s collection, largely to get rid of old and damaged books. Books relating to gender studies were also placed outside the library and “were later claimed by individuals who intended to donate the books locally.”
A student who alerted her classmates to the book dumping told The Associated Press that she saw two large boxes full of books Thursday at the student-run Gender and Diversity Center on campus. The center is located in a building where staff was busy moving furniture, repainting and otherwise preparing for students’ return to campus next week.
Natalia Benavides said the boxes were moved to the library parking lot, near the dumpster, but fellow students and activists who responded to her report managed to rescue most of the books from the Gender and Diversity Center before they were thrown away.
“The main books that were in the bin were library books — they were stamped ‘discard,’ and they were bound so you knew they were from the library,” said Benavides, a fourth-year student. “They seemed to be about every subject: art history books, aesthetics books, psychology books.”
It’s no surprise that the book-tossing would spark controversy at New College. The campus, known for decades as a progressive school with a prominent LGTQ+ community, became a target for DeSantis and as a war on “woke.” In early 2023, the governor overhauled the college’s board of trustees to install a majority of conservative members.
The new trustees are fast dismissed the president of the college and replaced her with a Republican politician. Several other administrators also lost their jobs. The board dismantled the Office of Diversity and Equality and a year ago they voted to close the gender studies program on campus.
“Every few months they destroy some part of this campus, whether it’s physical spaces or our books,” said Amy Reid, the professor who led the university’s gender studies program and has been away for a year.
Reid said she believes books have been removed from the Gender and Diversity Center, a student-run office that was separate from the academic gender studies program, because it is also closing. She said the center’s sign has also been taken down and there were more than two boxes of books inside, many of which she suspects ended up in the trash.
“Was I surprised that this happened?” Reid said. “No, because we have seen an attempt to remake this campus and make it unwelcoming.”
The New College statement said only that books “related to the discontinued Gender Studies program” had been removed from a room “that is being reconfigured.” A college spokesman, Nate March, declined to answer further questions.
Zander Moricz, who leads a student activist group called the SEE Alliance, said the Gender and Diversity Center books 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. The dumpster was loaded onto a truck that his group followed to a local landfill.
“The vast majority of the books were 100% readable and in good condition,” Moricz said.
The American Library Association encourages academic libraries to remove books that are in poor physical condition or are no longer considered accurate or relevant. However, the association’s guidelines state that books should never be removed because they are controversial.
Association spokesperson Jean Hodges said it is up to individual libraries what they do with the removed books.
“Donating, recycling, reselling and disposing of all items are within normal practice,” Hodges said by email.
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Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.
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This story has been corrected to clarify that the name of the library organization is American Library Association and not American Association of Libraries.