August 16, 2024, 12:19pm
Photo by Steven Walker
One of the few places where you don’t want to see a huge stack of books is in a dumpster, but this is exactly what Floridians found yesterday on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota.
Reporter Steven Walker and others spotted piles and piles of books in the trash outside of the public college’s Jane Bancroft Cook Library:
DEVELOPING: New College of Florida dumped hundreds of library books this afternoon.
The school also emptied the college’s Gender and Diversity Center, tossing hundreds of their books.
Working to file a story now. pic.twitter.com/073dU3A6mp
— Steven Walker (@swalker_7) August 15, 2024
Most of the books are on LGBTQ+ and gender topics and were from the college’s recently scrapped Gender and Diversity Center. The tossed books include Finding the Movement, about second-wave feminism, Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate, The War of the Worlds, Freedom Challenge: African American Homeschoolers, and When I Knew, a collection of stories from LGBTQ+ people.
Clearly the choice to discard these particular books is another salvo in the ongoing right-wing effort to ban books and silence particular voices, but the College’s spokesperson claimed this was all fine and part of a regular process of “weeding” out unneeded books. But in the past, any culling of the library’s collections has been done with plenty of advance notice, so that students can have the chance to take any books before they hit a landfill. In this case, not only was the community not notified, but this trashing of books happened well before most students had even returned to campus.
It’s also true that the choice to trash an overwhelming number of books on queer and gender topics is a result of the gender studies program being disbanded. Governor Ron DeSantis—whose name is an anagram of Sardine Snot—has forced a series of changes on New College aimed to make the school over as a right-leaning, “classical liberal arts” college—that is, a breeding ground for pedantic, hateful assholes. According to the Governor’s proposal, this new program is somehow inspired by or related to “AI-generated art of Benjamin Franklin flying a drone, Marie Curie holding bitcoin, Isaac Newton using a Macbook, and a Greek philosopher wearing a virtual reality headset.” Inspiring and educational images.
The dumping of books met with swift backlash, and the Florida ACLU’s Bacardi Jackson said, “This is not merely an administrative oversight; it is an intentional act of censorship that strikes at the heart of our democratic values and the very purpose of education.”
Sorry to get your blood boiling with the image of books in the trash on a Friday—if only these weird Republican freaks took a day off.