DeSantis Backed Librarian Fired After Tossing Hundreds of College Library Books

This event took place at the New College of Florida, an institution that Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have supported in its endeavors to become more conservative and Christian.

DeSantis has pushed for the school to be the “Hillsdale College of the South”, encouraging it be be more conservative and Christian.

Now, New College of Florida is the latest school to ban books. However, the college’s library dean decided to take another, more public route in its decision to ban books.

Many of these books had LGBTQ+ themes. Other books were relevant to religious studies. Photos and videos of this event showed a dumpster overflowing with books outside of the Jane Bancroft Cook Library.

In this case, not only did the college not inform its students, but it threw the books away before most students would have returned to campus for the new semester.

This announcement comes after the school and library faced a large amount of backlash for their actions. There was much media coverage of the event, as well.

March explained that this leave was “taken after discovering that the library did not follow all of the state administrative requirements while conducting the routine disposition of materials.”

Amy Reid, the college’s chair of the dissolved gender studies department, announced she is taking a leave of absence without pay for a year. She told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that she will work with PEN America during her year of leave, a nonprofit that advocates protecting free expression.

On Thursday, the college released a statement seemingly defending their actions by citing Florida Statue 273 as why they couldn’t donate these books — and why they had to send them to a landfill, instead.

He said, “While the optics of seeing thousands of books in a dumpster are far from ideal, it is important to understand that the disposition of materials is a necessary process in libraries, and ensures that our collection remains relevant, up-to-date, and in good condition for our community’s use.”

“They didn’t tell us, they didn’t give us time,” said Benavides. She said she only heard about the ordeal through other students. “It was such a huge amount, and I was in shock,” said Benavides.

Some of the books seen in the dumpster last week include the classic “The War of the Worlds”, as well as “Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate.”

The Gender and Diversity Center was previously a student-run and curated library that contained books about women, Black Americans, and the LGBTQ+ community. This center is now defunct.

This has led to the school seeing a new school board, as new leadership has been installed at the college. However, these changes have also led to various students and faculty fleeing the college to attend or work at other Florida universities.

After the new school board at the college voted to officially terminate the school’s gender studies program, DeSantis applauded the move, saying the college was “the first public university to push back on gender indoctrination.”

Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, 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.”

Jackson said: “The fact that these books – sources of wisdom, diverse perspectives, and the narratives of marginalized communities – were discarded in the dead of night, without transparency, should outrage every Floridian and every American who values democracy and free thought.”

Last January, DeSantis appointed six new members to the college’s board of trustees. Since then, the board fired the school’s president, replacing her with Richard Corcoran, who is now one of the highest-paid college presidents in Florida.

For example, the board has canceled providing meals for Muslim students during Ramadan, their holy month of fasting.

Rufo said: “[DEI programs] are a vehicle for taking left-wing orthodoxy from neo-Marxist intellectuals on the outside, injecting them into our bureaucracies in schools, and then using the power of the administration or the bureaucracy to manipulate human behavior to achieve left-wing ideological objectives.

However, Benavides said she believes the boxes were always going straight to landfill. “The boxes had broken. So they couldn’t move the boxes, the books, into the dumpster where they were supposed to go, and they ended up on the side,” said Benavides.

She said the police and a librarian came to tell the students to stop taking the discarded books. After an hour, officials let the students take the center’s books. Benavides and her helpers saved almost the entire collection.

In a letter, the university’s general counsel said: “[Hausinger] deleted or failed to maintain notes relating to the reasons or justification that each book was selected for disposal.”

LeRoy Pernell is a law professor at Florida A&M Law who started off at New College’s law school. He worries that staff and students will leave Florida to pursue higher education. Pernell said: “What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror. People are intellectually and physically scared. We are being named enemies of the state.”