Florida College Discards Gender Studies Books Ahead Of New School Year

When hundreds of books got hauled away in a dumpster from the library of the New College of Florida on Thursday, the tiny liberal arts college with a governing board dominated by appointees of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis once again found itself at the center of the state’s culture wars.

“We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash,” Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the Sarasota college’s governing board, posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, condemned the college for “a brazen act of censorship.”

“These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history’s darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACU of Florida, said in a statement.

Both sides were responding to accounts spread through social media that officials at the campus of roughly 700 students had sent a large collection of books from the college’s recently shuttered gender studies program to a local landfill.

But a statement by New College administrators said people were confusing two different batches of books. It said volumes taken away by dumpster came from a routine culling of the main library’s collection, largely to get rid of old and damaged books. Books related to gender studies, it said, were also placed outside the library and “were later claimed by individuals planning to donate the books locally.”

A student who alerted classmates to the book dumping told The Associated Press that she saw two large boxes filled with books Thursday at the campus’ student-run Gender and Diversity Center, located in a building where staff were busy moving