New College in Exile: Hampshire College
Bea Oyster/Teen Vogue
No other 2024 presidential candidate has championed the right’s crusade against young people, especially the marginalized, quite like he has. We travel to Tampa, Tallahassee, and Sarasota — plus western Massachusetts — and speak with more than 20 Floridians who are fighting to make the state equitable and safe for everyone. Libby Harrity does not like the cold.
The 20-year-old college senior — who uses all pronouns interchangeably — mentions their disdain for winter weather from her dorm room at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, when we first meet over FaceTime. He has just moved here from the South, where he attended and subsequently left New College of Florida, aka the school equivalent of a poster child for Governor Ron DeSantis’s enforced Florida brain drain[2]. (Teen Vogue has reached out to New College for comment.) A few weeks after our initial meeting, I meet Harrity in person, this time with some of their classmates — some new, some old — and it becomes clear that, despite the temperature difference, he is finally adjusting.
With the changing New England leaves in the background, Harrity — wearing a cobalt New College of Florida hoodie, her tattoo for the school[3] exposed on her thigh (gym shorts in below-65 weather, already fitting right in) — seems almost comfortable. But the reality of how Harrity and some of their friends got from Sarasota to Amherst has been anything but. New College, Florida’s designated honors college[4], was formed to provide a liberal arts[5] education in Florida, and its small, public college designation, starting in 1975, meant that students didn’t have to go out of state and take on additional debt to access that experience.
The school has produced several of Florida’s Fulbright scholars. Many of the New College students, past and present, who speak with Teen Vogue are recipients of in-state scholarships[6] meant to keep promising young Floridians in the state. The typical New College student, senior Chai Leffler tells me, would choose the school “because it gives you independence and agency in your own education, and you get to make relationships with professors that you don’t get when you go to a big state school.”
Story continues It’s not just about the education, but about the school community too. Senior Gaby Batista says that, during their years there, New College was “this very queer, weird place where you can dress in whatever you want, you can identify how you want, you can change your pronouns every day of the week.”
Harrity echoes this: “New College was a very queer campus,” he tells me. “I would argue the majority of people on campus had some sort of alternative gender identity.” In January, DeSantis began an ideological coup at the school, which changed it so starkly in the ensuing months that students and professors alike began leaving the college en masse. That’s how Harrity and dozens of their classmates ended up at Hampshire College, more than 1,300 miles from the school where they initially found a home.
Libby Harrity at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.
Bea Oyster
The new board members quickly got to work: They, Holloway wrote, “fired the college’s president, appointed a DeSantis ally in her place” — Richard Corcoran — “voted to end the gender studies program, signaled the sunsetting of tenure, and aggressively recruited male students to undo what right-wingers call the ‘feminization’ of American colleges.” The new administration is made up largely of people who, Inside Higher Ed reported in September[9], “lack higher ed experience but have close ties to Corcoran or the Republican Party.” Corcoran himself had never worked in higher education before his appointment this spring. Rufo is known for essentially launching the anti-critical race theory campaign[10] in 2020; when DeSantis announced his appointment, he credited Rufo[11] with “[leading] the fight against critical race theory in American institutions.”
A few weeks before the publication of this story, Rufo announced a “culture war” fellowship[12] at the Manhattan Institute, hoping to “[address] critical race theory, gender ideology, higher-education reform, crime and policing, and civil rights law.” Rufo lists himself as an alumnus of Harvard University, where he technically graduated from their extension school; his framing of his educational background has been called into question by The New Republic. (Rufo told the magazine that he was unaware of any debate that the two programs are referred to differently.) Unsurprisingly, Rufo and the rest of the new administration at New College have a clear view[13] of what the changed school should be; included in this view are specific notions about the students who should attend it.
State officials say they hope to turn New College into the “Hillsdale of the South,”[14] referring to the private Christian conservative college[15] in Michigan. Earlier this year, The New Yorker[16] reported that Hillsdale has an education model that “some scholars consider dangerously incomplete,” which “communities across the country are looking to adopt.” It was based on these developments that Hampshire College[17] — a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts that teetered on the brink of closure in 2019[18] and is currently fundraising on its steps to protect academic freedom[19] — offered admission to New College students and to match their tuition costs.
“This opportunity is in response to the continuing attacks on New College of Florida intended to limit intellectual exploration, turn back progress toward inclusion, and curtail open discussion of race, injustice, and histories of oppression,” Hampshire announced in March[20], accusing New College of “impos[ing] a narrowly politicized curriculum… its current students.” As a result of the New College Board takeover, 40% of the school’s professors left[21] before classes started in September, leaving many students without instructors for their classes. Leffler tells Teen Vogue that there aren’t any professors who can advise them on their thesis, part of an urban studies major,[22] so they’ve been forced to find advisors in other departments.
Libby Harrity at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.
Bea Oyster
Isabelle Campesi, a junior studying history and creative writing, says most of her planned thesis advisors have left the school. She’s just glad, she adds, that she took her mandatory American history course before the DeSantis takeover. Visiting professor Erik Wallenberg, who was the school’s only American history professor, did not have his contract renewed this year.
Before that, he had written about the New College takeover for Teen Vogue.[23][24] In the process, the New College student body that was attracted to the school pre-takeover for its small, close-knit, inclusive community is being changed intentionally. One biochemistry professor planning to retire in 2024 told the Guardian in September[25], “I don’t know what majors we will have next fall or even who will still be here.” The Guardian also reported that over 100 undergrads[26] had transferred in advance of the fall 2023 semester.
“The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned,” Rufo wrote in a February tweet[27]. To that end, the school has launched a new-student recruitment strategy: creating a booming athletic program. Under the new administration, New College’s incoming first-year class — its biggest ever — is now almost half comprised of athletes[28], who overall have lower test scores than previous incoming classes, according to Insider Higher Ed. (The athletics department has allegedly hired coaches[29] only from Christian colleges, according to to one complaint filed with the U.S.
Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.) And USA Today reported[30] that the new student athletes have received “a disproportionate amount” of the school’s scholarships. This apparently intentional recruitment strategy has created a campus culture clash. Some of the dorms have been deemed a potential health risk[31], and the new athletes and incoming first-year students are reportedly getting priority housing while others have been unexpectedly slotted[32] into off-campus hotels rented by the school[33].
That culture clash has, at certain moments, resulted in conflict. That’s really why Harrity has ended up at Hampshire. In May, during finals week, DeSantis staged a bill-signing on campus.
Rufo, who lives in Washington state outside Seattle, made the trip to attend. Harrity and a friend planned to protest the signing, having protested previous board meetings on campus since the hostile takeover happened. “Me and a friend of mine get down there at eight in the f*cking morning,” Harrity recalls. “We are immediately met with police aggression.
We’re like, ‘Fine, whatever.’ We literally are writing in chalk on the ground, you freaks.” During the protest, which she says swelled to about 40 students and faculty members, Harrity — then the president of New College’s student senate — felt obligated to act as “the voice of the student body.” She approached Rufo: “I tell him my full name, my title, and I say, ‘You must listen to us.'” As the police dragged her back, Harrity says, she spat on the ground twice, once near Rufo’s feet.
Two months later, Harrity learned from a Tampa Bay Times reporter[34] that Rufo had posted a document with her name and birthdate on it to his over 500,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter[35], pressing charges of battery[36], alleging Harrity spit on him. Harrity says she got a lawyer, who was able to strike a deal: If Harrity left New College and left Rufo alone, he would drop the charges[37]. “Rufo, by some kind of grace in his soul, agreed to this deal[38].
The full intention of this was to remove me from the scene[39], and they got what they wanted….,” says Harrity. “Cutting this deal, where I wouldn’t have to deal with a trespass [warning], I wouldn’t have to continue dealing with this criminal trial, and I wouldn’t be faced with expulsion? Yeah, I’m going to take that deal.” So Harrity joined the 30-plus New College students[40] currently in exile at Hampshire College.
Another 30 will arrive in the spring[41], according to Insider Higher Ed. Many more have left New College, while others want to stay and try to preserve campus culture, or they don’t have the option to leave. But the assault on New College’s culture in favor of a more conservative and, to some, more regressive one, isn’t just a Florida problem. “What’s happening at New College,” 2023 graduate Madi Markham warns, “is going to happen elsewhere.”
Libby Harrity at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.
Bea Oyster
The transition to Hampshire, for the New College emigres we spoke with, has been interesting. Harrity and Qadira Locke, another former New College student who fled to Hampshire, give it mixed reviews. The two served together on the New College student senate last year and have remained friends through the switch.
“I really had the best opportunities that I could have asked for, for the time that I was in” New College, Locke tells me one October afternoon on a near-empty expanse of green, overlooking distant waves of tree canopy. Qadira started New College’s indigenous student union, before they transferred and had to leave it. “I felt like I was finally able to take full advantage of my education in a way that I was not able to [previously]. It’s because of the educational quality, the style of education I was able to get [at New College], at least in the fall semester.”
Qadira Locke (left) and Libby Harrity (right) at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.
Bea Oyster
Because of the drastic changes at New College, Locke finds themself too paranoid to get comfortable at their new, proudly supportive college. “I find myself even now hesitating to reach out to [Hampshire] faculty, because I have this dramatic, lingering trauma of New College,” they say. “I’m worried that I’m gonna get professors in trouble, even here. If I email them with a question, that will get them fired. That’s not a reasonable thing to feel about a college professor.”
Hampshire was meant to be a somewhat similar environment[42] to the “normal” New College, with small classes, lack of a core curriculum, and a heavily LGBTQ+ student body. (The New College campus is removing its gender-inclusive bathroom signage, but all bathrooms on Hampshire’s campus are gender neutral.) Hampshire has been open[43] about the many benefits the arrival of new students provides for the school, including boosts in fundraising and enrollment. Since it nearly closed in 2019[44], Hampshire has spent the last few years regaining its footing.
The 2023 incoming class is its largest[45] since the near-closure in 2019.
Bea Oyster
A benefit for students, in addition to receiving an education similar in style to pre-2023 New College, is that Hampshire is also in a consortium[46] with Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and UMass Amherst, which widens academic possibilities. Hampshire administrators told Inside Higher Ed in September[47] about the need to provide context for the Hampshire community about the New College students.
Harrity and Locke both feel that parts of the student body have been clueless or disinterested when it comes to what brought them here. Still, Harrity is grateful for the queer community. In that sense, they say, “We are safe here, we are among our own.”
Locke is quick to express gratitude for being able to leave New College, but they temper it with the complicated feelings that go along with the experience of transition. “I was thankful to be able to come up here and have the financial means to come up here. A lot of New College students don’t have that…. There are so many more opportunities for me up here.”
They continue, “But all it’s made me do is seethe, with jealousy and frustration, that this kind of [educational] infrastructure,” meaning the opportunities they have access to in their discipline in Hampshire’s consortium, “does not exist for students in the South. Quite frankly, that’s all it’s done.” Locke has felt alienated by the way people talk about them as a Floridian.
They recall a conversation they had once with someone from Europe, which ended in Locke being told they were “pretty smart for an American.” “I feel like I get that same sentiment here, but it’s shifted towards, ‘Wow, you’re pretty smart for a Floridian.’ Nobody says that outright; it’s more so the glances.” Locke, who is half Indigenous and half Palestinian, says others have assumed they’re a Republican or a racist because of being from Florida. “You have no clue the breadth of how I feel about your statement and your preconceived notions about people in the South,” they say.
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Bea Oyster
She was forced to take on student loans after having to leave the state’s Bright Futures scholarship program, which did not transfer to her financial aid package at Hampshire. Not everyone can leave New College — or even wants to. Seniors Batista and Leffler both speak empathetically about their new classmates, many of whom have come to the school via the newly robust athletic program.
The current NCF students I speak with for this story are reluctant to judge their new classmates for enrolling, especially since they reportedly received many of the available scholarships. “One of the things we routinely say is, ‘Athlete or not, we are all just pawns in their game,'” Leffler tells me, referencing the new board’s attempts to change the culture of the school. “We do not matter to them in the way that our education matters to us, so we have to be the ones to take agency for that and to advocate for ourselves.” Batista and other students acknowledge that, despite their open-mindedness, the campus culture has already been damaged.
Leffler says the culture has been further eroded by “petty” changes from the administration, referencing the decision to remove gender-neutral signage from single-stall restrooms on campus[48]. “They have Chick-fil-A sandwiches in the student center[49] now,” Chai added about the chicken restaurant known for its chairman’s anti-LGBTQ organization donations[50]. “It’s like they’re playing a game.” Batista echoes those statements: “Just a lot of random stuff that makes it like a little…” They pause. “You can feel every slight degree of change here.”
Bea Oyster