\n<\/p>\n
But that sort of lament has largely left the new trustees unmoved. When a current LGBTQ+ student told reporters about her grief, Rufo\u00a0quoted<\/a> her comments on Twitter, adding a laughing-crying emoji.\u00a0<\/p>\n The invocation of Hillsdale College, a 1,500-student private Christian school in rural Michigan, might seem a surprising model for overhauling a public Florida institution, but it shouldn\u2019t. The college, sometimes called \u201cthe citadel of conservatism,\u201d has long had an\u00a0outsized political influence<\/a> in movement conservatism. Right-wing politicians and advocates vie for slots in its speaking program, the speeches of which are then distributed to a claimed audience of 6 million through a monthly Hillsdale publication.\u00a0Ginni Thomas,<\/strong> a conservative activist\u00a0who sought<\/a>\u00a0to overturn<\/a> the 2020 election, and who is married to Supreme Court Justice\u00a0Clarence Thomas,<\/strong>\u00a0facilitated<\/a> the launch of Hillsdale\u2019s Capitol Hill campus in Washington. This magazine called Hillsdale a \u201cfeeder school<\/a>\u201d for the Trump administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hillsdale has also spent the last 12 years\u00a0proselytizing its Western civilization-focused model of \u201cclassical education\u201d<\/a> through a nationwide charter school-planting network, a bundle of freely-licensed right-wing K\u201312 curricula (including its\u00a0ahistorical post-Trump \u201c1776 Curriculum\u201d<\/a>), and its extensive connections with conservative state leaders. It\u2019s largely thanks to Hillsdale that the idea of \u201cclassical education\u201d\u2014despite its varied forms and perspectives\u2014has become right-wing shorthand for anti-\u201cwoke\u201d American exceptionalism and an antidote to critical race theory. Last year, Tennessee\u2019s Governor Bill Lee<\/strong> announced plans to open 50 Hillsdale charters across the state; the year before, Hillsdale president\u00a0Larry Arnn,<\/strong> who is also the former president of the Claremont Institute,\u00a0claimed<\/a> that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem<\/strong> offered to build him an entire campus. (Noem\u2019s office did not respond to a request for comment.)\u00a0<\/p>\n But in Florida, Hillsdale\u2019s footprint is uniquely large. The state boasts the highest number of Hillsdale-affiliated K\u201312 publicly-funded charter schools, several\u00a0launched<\/a> or\u00a0directed<\/a> by spouses of prominent state Republicans, including Corcoran and Republican congressman\u00a0Byron Donalds.<\/strong> Hillsdale was\u00a0instrumental<\/a> in helping DeSantis\u00a0overhaul<\/a> the state\u2019s K\u201312 civics standards along more \u201cpatriotic\u201d lines. Last year the state hired a Hillsdale duo\u2014one staffer, one undergraduate\u2014to\u00a0assess<\/a> whether math textbooks Florida teachers submitted for approval contained prohibited concepts like critical race theory. And a number of prominent Florida officials, including Corcoran and DeSantis himself, have addressed gatherings hosted by the college, where Arnn praised both men as among the most important people in America today.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rufo has addressed Hillsdale audiences too: once in early 2021, where he laid out what quickly became Republican talking points about critical race theory, and again last spring, in a speech entitled \u201cLaying Siege to the Institutions<\/a>,\u201d which he recently described as his \u201ctheory of action.\u201d In the latter\u00a0address<\/a>, delivered while Rufo was teaching a journalism course for the college, he called on state legislators to use their budgetary power to\u00a0reshape public institutions<\/a>, including higher education.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to get out of this idea that somehow a public university system is a totally independent entity that practices academic freedom\u2014a total fraud, that\u2019s just a false statement, fundamentally false\u2014and that you can\u2019t touch it or else you\u2019re impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams,\u201d he said. Instead, conservatives must have the guts to say, \u201c\u2018What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.\u2019 And so we get in there, we defund things we don\u2019t like, we fund things we do like.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In terms of the former, he elaborated, states should defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and find creative ways to undermine university departments perceived as too liberal, like changing state teacher accreditation laws as a means of rendering teachers colleges irrelevant. Both suggestions have become common conservative talking points over the last year. As\u00a0The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a> this week, South Carolina legislators have requested information from its state\u2019s 33 public colleges and universities regarding training around race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, following similar moves in Florida and Oklahoma.<\/p>\n In terms of what the right\u00a0does<\/em> like, Rufo advised state legislators to fund the creation of new, independently-governed \u201cconservative centers\u201d within flagship public universities to attract conservative professors, create new academic tracks, and serve as a \u201cseparate patronage system\u201d for the right.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSome people don\u2019t like thinking about it that way,\u201d Rufo said. \u201cBut guess what? The public universities, the DEI departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there\u2019s going to be a patronage system, wouldn\u2019t it be good to have some people who are representing the public within them?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In many ways, that\u2019s an old idea. Big-money donors on the right like the Olin and Koch foundations have been establishing \u201cbeachhead<\/a>\u201d\u00a0academic centers<\/a> in universities across the country since the 1970s, as a means of shoring up academic arguments for right-wing policies, creating a pipeline of conservative talent, and endowing professorships for right-wing scholars\u2014some of whom, more moderate academics suggest, are unemployable on their own merits. (Of possible note here: Corcoran\u2019s appointment to New College follows his\u00a0failed bid<\/a> to become Florida State University\u2019s president in 2021, when he was passed over, apparently, in part for lack of qualifications.)\u00a0<\/p>\n But these days, the model has been adapted, so that funds for such programs and institutes are increasingly coming from state legislatures directly, as numerous red states have passed bills\u00a0establishing new \u201cclassical\u201d and \u201ccivics\u201d institutes<\/a> with barely-disguised agendas. In Arizona, the legislature effectively replaced private donations from the Koch foundations with taxpayer funds in order to\u00a0create<\/a> a new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, to address a claimed lack of ideological diversity. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor\u00a0Dan Patrick<\/strong> has\u00a0sought<\/a> to establish a free-market think tank at University of Texas Austin, partly as a\u00a0response<\/a> to critical race theory. In Tennessee, Governor Lee paired his proposal to create dozens of Hillsdale charters with a call to\u00a0build<\/a> a $6 million, Hillsdale-inspired civics institute at University of Tennessee Knoxville to combat \u201canti-American thought.\u201d<\/p>\n Florida already has several, including a politics institute at Florida State; the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University; and the University of Florida\u2019s freshly-approved Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education, dedicated to \u201cthe ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization,\u201d and tasked with helping create anti-communist content for Florida\u2019s new K\u201312 civics curricula.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last spring, this track record prompted another Florida school, St. Augustine\u2019s private Flagler College, to worry that it was being, well, groomed to become \u201cthe Hillsdale of the South.\u201d The legislature was considering a multimillion dollar grant for the school to establish its own \u201cInstitute for Classical Education\u201d\u2014money that was certainly needed and might also be used to shore up existing programs, but which faculty feared would come with intolerable strings. Professors there brought a resolution to the faculty council, declaring that, if the funding came through, faculty would retain control over how it was used for hiring and curriculum creation. In Flagler\u2019s case, the administration readily agreed.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n