Florida’s New College Wants to Teach All About ‘Woke’

By Bill Cotterell

There’s a certain satisfying irony in seeing how the college campus where Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to stamp out liberal indoctrination with his “war on woke” is offering an independent study course focused on some of the self-congratulatory silliness that has swept through so much of academia in the past several years.

Important epochs like the Renaissance, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement or the New York Yankees dynasty of the 1950s usually have to be finished before scholars start analyzing the great leaders and key events of history. We don’t even start capitalizing time spans until at least half the major players die off.




So it’s good that New College of Florida will soon start taking a scholarly look back at the stampede of “woke” teachings and social consciousness in higher education and politics that prompted protest marches, boycotts and “canceling” of anyone who defied the liberal line or spoke out against this new political correctness on steroids. Chairman Mao’s little red book of the 1960s was a mere set of suggestions, next to the enforced orthodoxy of the 2010s.

And, naturally, since the “woke” folk adjudged themselves morally superior to the poor, benighted masses, their fashion soon set the tone in the news media as well the classroom.

Let’s let the New College course catalog describe it: “What has become known colloquially as the ‘Woke’ movement is best understood as a kind of cult. Its members are generally decent people with good intentions, but their methods are essentially illiberal. They brook no dissent and seek to punish heresy wherever they find it. They have an unshakeable certainty that their faith is the only way to truth.”

Results of woke condescension were seen all over America. Sports teams changed names and mascots, statues of famous leaders were hauled away from public places, cities and states issued apologies for things that happened centuries ago, some governments studied reparation payments, and names of high schools and military bases were neutered. Some facts of history were glossed over in schools, other events were over-emphasized, news organizations amended their style books for more “inclusivity” and Hollywood rewrote criteria for the Oscars to require diversity in casting, crews and plot lines.




Some clothing, foods, words and hairstyles were scorned as “cultural appropriation.” Art works, from Chaucer to stand-up comics, were censored. They spliced a foreword into “Gone With the Wind,” apologizing for its cultural insensitivity and explaining that — well, shucks — the Civil War did not exactly celebrate diversity.

There will certainly be plenty for New College students to study — including how all of this mandatory sensitivity produced a political backlash. It’s no coincidence that the rise of Donald Trump, and his former disciple DeSantis, occurred during the great awokening. Several excesses gave Republicans something to talk about, while upstaging Democrats who were forced into a sort of, “Well, yes, but I can explain. …” stance on social issues.

The New College study of wokeness is not the only serious examination of current events. From Harvard to Stanford, at least a half-dozen universities offer courses in Taylor Swift’s music, and Yale has a course on Beyonce’s oeuvre.

Fads have caught fire often, either flaming out quickly or evolving into government programs. There were hundreds of “Townsend Clubs” across the nation in the 1930s when a Los Angeles physician, Francis Townsend, came up with an idea for a 2 percent national sales tax that would fund pensions of $200 a month for older workers who permanently retired. The idea was to ease the Depression by opening up jobs for the unemployed. The Townsend theory faded but Social Security grew out of the concept.




Then there was the McCarthy Era, roughly 1950 to 1955, when U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin ran a witchhunt for supposed communists in the Pentagon and the State Department. Just as wokeness is an overreaction to social-justice concerns, McCarthy seized upon the Red Scare — including communist conquest of China and the USSR stealing our atomic secrets —and ambitious politicians like Richard Nixon told us subversives were everywhere.

It’s appropriate that New College is hosting the voluntary chalkboard study of woke. The Sarasota school had earned a free-spirit image until DeSantis decided, a couple years ago, to make it sort of the Fort Sumter of his culture wars.

With a widely diverse reading list, and with most of the perpetrators and victims of the DeSantis campus purge still alive and unrepentant, the course titled “The ‘Woke’ Movement” sounds like a rare opportunity to learn from a cultural shift that’s still going on.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at [email protected]. © Copyright 2024 News Service of Florida.