The 'Baseball Bomb' Falling on a School Near You

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

I'm reminded of the quote from a deep throat from all the president's men.

These are not very bright guys, and this got out of hand.

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So, this is one of those episodes, Cortez, where I admit that you're probably going to roll your eyes at the top here.

Oh, really?

Yes.

Why is that?

We are doing a Ron DeSantis episode.

Okay, I ask again, why is that?

Why are we doing a Ron DeSantis episode on this podcast?

Look, I am also exhausted by Ron DeSantis, right?

Like, he's not going to be president.

He's annoying.

He's lazy.

He's a coward.

And Florida has been talking about him for so long.

And I get all of that.

And yes, laziness and cowardice also apply.

We're doing this because the way he has been using baseball specifically, his favorite sport is really important and fascinating in a way that I did not appreciate before we reported this.

And it's not even reliant on whether he's going to be the president of the United States at all.

I didn't know he's a baseball guy.

I didn't know he was wielding baseball.

Yes, yes.

He was a Little Leaguer.

He went to the quarterfinals of the 1991 Little League World Series.

He was the captain of his college baseball team.

Bona fides, okay.

That's real.

Great.

He's a baseball guy.

Okay.

But I also think he is playing up the baseball stuff to be a, yes, a man of the people.

He's just like your favorite jocks, even though he's not my favorite jocks.

Well, it might be somebody's favorite jock.

And the fact that he could be that while also having gone to Yale is part of the strategy, I think.

Your rival?

That's right.

You know, I mean, I was a a good Division I player.

I think

I hit 336

my senior year.

I always hit them.

I was a four-year starter.

I always hit in the middle of the lineup, third, fourth, fifth.

Look, I could hit a fastball, throw me 94, 95.

And I face guys that got picked in the first round,

people that pitched in the big leagues.

I never had any problem hitting them if they tried to throw it past me.

Okay, I got the episode now.

It's about you finding out whether he could actually hit 94, 95.

That's what you want to do.

No,

I do want to be clear that this is not what this episode is is about.

We're not just doing this investigation, but of course we hear Pablo Torre finds out.

Could he actually hit 94 and 95?

Like what's the scouting report?

So we reached out to a dozen members of the Yale baseball team, his contemporaries, his teammates, and none of them agreed to go on camera.

Bro, what a bunch of cowards, every single one of them.

Actual cowards.

Literal cowards, yes.

But we did find a pitcher.

who played against Ron DeSantis who would actually talk.

Literally, World Series didn't impress me.

Yale baseball team didn't impress me.

Captain of the team didn't impress me.

But there started to be growing chatter.

It started to get interesting by the time of the game.

And it was more out of annoyance

rather than anything else.

So this is former Morehouse College pitcher, Cedric Richmond.

Cedric Richmond, also former congressman.

But the game that Cedric Richmond is remembering there is the 2013 Congressional Baseball Game.

Okay.

This is the famous event, the notorious matchup.

Every year, Democrats play Republicans.

Members of Congress play against each other, and they do it for charity.

Okay.

And this is why and how Cedric Richmond came to take the mound against then-Congressman Ron DeSantis.

Vaguely remember the first at bat.

He hit a pop-up.

And I think it was right in foul territory.

I came off the mound to catch it.

And I remember that he grounded out to linda sanchez to end the game that's congresswoman linda sanchez from california yeah get that right after linda fields the ball cleanly throwing it to first base he grabs his handstring and you know

goes down with uh a supposed injury uh i don't know if he was hurt i don't know if he wasn't but i know one thing his ego was certainly hurt by the way that um linda just scooped up his ground ball threw it to first and ended the game and ended all of the noise of the great baseball Ryan DeSantis.

And I thought it was kind of, you know, chicken crap to, in my opinion, fake an injury on the last out when it appears that you're certainly going to be out.

So, you know, it was his moment,

all the hype,

you know,

not very different from today

where he finds himself.

A supposed injury and chicken crap are the two things that stood stood out to me most in that clip those are big allegations from the former congressman from louisiana um but i want to point out that this is about a lot more than just like the politics of all of this and what cedric richman brings up uh that sort of symbolism here like where desantis is right now how this all sort of speaks to it where is he right now he is polling second looking uh yes looking up at donald trump um who is way way ahead he's polling second for the republican nomination um there's another presidential debate tomorrow uh The Iowa caucuses on Monday, no one expects him to win those.

But it's worth noting here, baseball is actually a larger part, a way larger part of his identity and his mission here.

A lot of the right wing's mission today is to win the culture war by remaking the American educational systems.

And in their crosshairs are American universities in particular.

And it turns out, Cortez, that there is one specific college where Ron DeSantis has been using his favorite sport somehow, directly using it to remake their identity and to, yeah, accomplish this larger goal.

Well, the fact that you're interested in it makes me wonder if that college is Harvard.

No, although, spoiler alert, Harvard does figure in at the very end.

Shocker.

Yeah.

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Please print responsibly.

Jeb Lund, there are many reasons

I could have invited you onto the show.

I've been reading your work, been laughing at your work, listening to to some episodes of your Hallmark podcast.

All these are valid reasons.

God bless.

Yeah, you actually host a podcast about Hallmark movies, which unfortunately is not why you're here today.

Well, they can't all be happy endings, right?

Not with that attitude.

There's not a gazebo on this podcast.

Spoiler alert.

Ron DeSantis has not built a gazebo by the end of this, but he might or might not be building other key architectural features.

For the college that you attended, Jeb Lund, where did you go to college?

Where is your alma mater?

That's why I wanted to talk to you today.

Well, I went to the new College of Florida.

I transferred in in 1997.

It is in Sarasota, and all my classes were held in former Ringling, the circus Ringlings mansions.

And my dorm room was designed by IMPAY, and it had a certain Führer bunker chic to it.

So I just am I'm now just processing the mad lib of things you've just explained, which it feels like there's both a

high-end IMP architectural sensibility and also

a circus energy.

Yeah, well, the students definitely bring the circus energy.

New College is an intellectual, spiritual, and social playground.

It's like a summer camp.

You choose what you want to do based on your passions.

A lot of students are very progressive.

They're very forward-thinking.

Quote, politically correct, druggies, weirdos.

This idea that everything is barefoot and crunchy at New College is, I mean, it's a wonderful image, but that's not the way it was.

My faculty advisor was a monarchist.

The guy who was my thesis advisor wanted to restore the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Right.

And he was a fierce anti-communist.

You took your life in your hands when you wrote a paper for him and said, you know, I kind of like what those communists did.

There's a diversity of opinion and perspective.

There's, it's not just woke you can have a monarchist professor yeah yeah and so you graduated in what year i didn't my thesis was destroyed in a flood

a likely story jeb what was your thesis going to be about had it survived the flood uh re-evaluating the role of signals intelligence in the battle of the atlantic from 1941 to 1943 basically everybody who wrote about decrypting the enigma code was somebody who worked on that in World War II in England.

And curiously, they all argue that that won the war for them.

And I thought, well, you know, I'd probably say that if that was my job too.

I wonder if they're full of shit.

So that was my thesis.

The pedagogical system that underlines New College is over half a millennium old.

It's medieval.

It's modeled after the Oxford and Cambridge tutorial system.

If you want to take something, you can just go read for it and a faculty advisor will walk you through.

I guess I should also ask this question.

What's the mascot situation at your new college?

The mascot, when they were drafting the proposals for what sort of student activities and student signifiers would be, supposedly somebody put in a null set, which basically just means zero.

And whatever pattern you might put in there, the result of that is going to be zero.

And I think it was meant to be a placeholder.

In the ensuing decades, it's come to have

sort of vaguely, I guess, spiritual or intellectual meaning for students.

Sort of from this empty space, anything can be created.

But I think it just means TBD.

Well, I'm getting

in totality here from you and the way you've described your school is that you guys are a bunch of nerds.

That's the vibe that I'm getting as well, that there is some real bookishness running through this institution.

There is.

The line I use when trying to explain it to people is it's a lot like grad school for undergrad.

And you see that in terms of the academic progression of our students.

New college graduates, for every 10 students who graduate, nine of those 10 will complete a doctorate.

Wow.

There have been years where New College has outperformed Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford in terms of per capita Fulbright scholars.

And it's a punishing reading schedule.

When I applied, you had to submit four different essays, not pick one of four.

You got to do all of them.

What's it like now?

Well, I think that depends on what kind of student you are.

There's been a recent influx of student athletes that if you go by alumni and current students and instructors is meant to change the character of the campus.

If you go by the verdict of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and the people that he appointed to the Board of Trustees there, it's correcting a sort of,

you know, out-of-control wokeness at the school.

It's a sort of a demographic correction.

New college has really embraced that.

And that's part of the reason I think it hasn't been successful and the enrollment's down so much, because I think people want to see true academics and they want to get rid of some of the political window dressing that seems to accompany all this.

All you guys writing about World War II signal decrypting

has been running amok for too long.

Right.

I was very concerned about LGBTQ submarines and high frequency,

you know, non-binary direction finding, all that kinds of woke stuff about the Battle of the Atlantic.

Yes, yes, yes.

But okay, I need to understand, though, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, obviously.

How does he have the power slash ability to

get into new College and remake it in the ways that we're going to discuss today?

Well, as the governor of the state of Florida, he has the power to replace trustees at public colleges and universities, of which New College is one.

So he essentially just replaced the board with people that were more amenable to

his way of thinking politically.

You know, I saw some of the protesters out there.

I was a little disappointed.

I was hoping for more,

but, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm looking at some of the board members, and there are a couple members of right-wing think tanks.

There is the founder of a Christian Sports Academy, and there's a new president, it seems.

I don't know who the president was when you were there, but it seems like it definitely isn't this guy, Richard Corcoran.

Richard Corcoran.

Richard Corcoran has a majority.

So Richard Morgan will be the new president.

Richard Corcoran has been here for the last year.

He was formerly the Speaker of the Florida House.

He was also the Commissioner of Education, but he is being paid $500,000 more per year to be the president of

New College than Ben Sasse is being paid to be the president of UFF, which has 60 times the number of students that New College does.

This is a $1.3 million a year salary for Richard Corcoran,

a man who has been with DeSantis.

Working to establish what kind of an agenda would you say broadly when it comes to education as a concept?

Well,

you know, if you followed the sort of the conservative argument about the culture war of education, all universities are sort of hotbeds of people changing their gender identity and loathing the United States, and that needs to be remediated as soon as possible.

If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley, go to some of these other places.

That's fine.

It's fine.

And there's nothing, if that's what you want to do, there's nothing wrong with that per se.

But for us, with our tax dollars, we want to focus on the classical mission of what a university is supposed to be.

In terms of the immediate effects on the school, the diversity, equity, and inclusion process and I guess department, you would say, or office at New College was stripped away.

And we saw the firing of the then president of New College, Patricia Aucker, replaced with Corcoran, of course, the replacement of the trustees.

Dozens of instructors have already left with the understanding that basically they're not going to be able to teach what they're there to teach.

So there's no reason to be there anymore.

And so the people who are there in numbers that are mind-blowing to me, the reason why I wanted to do this story are baseball players.

And so

why are baseball players, specifically, why are athletes generally,

why are they a part of this larger political plan?

How does that part of it work?

For one thing, historically, New College has been majority female.

And I think by focusing on student athletes where you're going to get an overwhelmingly male cohort, there's the perception that you can correct what's going on at New College, presumably because it got too estrogenic and it needs some real balls to fix the problem.

But I think there's a perception, you know, I think you understand this too, Pablo, rightly, that the athletes athletes will be overwhelmingly conservative.

So I think there's a perception that you can demographically kind of bomb the school with a whole bunch of people who are on the other side of the ideological fence just by going and shopping for athletes at private Christian schools and just athletes in general.

Right.

So there's this idea that the barefootedness,

all the women, the nerds, the way to

do a bit of a great replacement of them would be to handpick the jocks, the guys that we can actually identify and handpick through recruiting as

truly like-minded to a Ron DeSantis.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's a pernicious phrasing that you used, but it's probably, it's right on.

And so the admissions department and the athletic department.

How are they working together as a matter of a top-down strategy to make sure you get the right kids?

I was able to speak to a former admissions officer named Dan Dupre, and he told me about a meeting that he had on March 31st with President Corcoran, where effectively Corcoran came in and had a very positive conversation with them.

It was very encouraging.

Corcoran came in, started off the conversation very positive, saying how we're like this A team, we're a SEAL team six.

He wanted the admissions officers to be like his SEAL team six.

which I don't really get because I don't think that as an admissions officer, you're supposed to double tap all the students.

The final sort of encouragement after this kind of chummy get together was telling everyone that they needed to accept as many athletes as possible and that there would be effectively a reward for the admissions officers if they hit a certain target.

Over the course of that conversation, it led to him yelling and making sure that we understood that we are to accept as many people as possible.

regardless of the application, regardless of the requirements that they have or don't have.

It was made very clear to us that the reason why we're accepting as many people as possible is not only to

reach that goal, that number that he was trying to get to, but also

to accept as many athletes as possible.

At the end of it, after like kind of yelling, being very

loud and exasperatory, you know, slamming his fists on the table, making sure we all understood the situation.

He then like left the room and then kind of peeked his head back in and said, oh, and by the way, if we hit that 300 number, which is an unexpected, like we've never reached that before, everybody gets 5K bonus.

And this is for a school that has about 700 students.

I mean, the SEAL Team 6 metaphor feels like he's trying to get people to hunt down his preferred targets.

Right.

And, you know, this is not particularly hard in Florida.

Florida has a lot of great athletes.

What was the athletics department like when you were there?

There wasn't one.

When did they make one?

Pretty much about a half an hour after that first meeting with Corcoran where he went into the admissions office.

They had to do it overnight for the incoming semester.

And so they're starting on

that meeting was on March 31st.

So I guess that meant that they started on April Fool's Day.

I'm getting this sense of how on the nose the contrast is between the old new college, as it were, and the new new college.

Because Because when you were there, it was, it was, again, nerds, bookish people.

And now they're trying to basically get all of you guys out of there and replace you with Ron DeSantis aligned conservative jocks.

And my mystery here is like,

how do you convince those athletes to join a baseball team at a school that did not have an athletics department?

Right.

So New College made a pitch to join join the NAIA, which is sort of the stepchild or the junior to the NCAA.

And so a lot of promises were made to students that they were going to have top-notch facilities for multiple sports.

The idea was you're going to be part of a top-notch NAIA school, and you're going to have all the perquisites and bells and whistles that come with that, including you're going to be able to pursue the kind of academic degree that you would hope to get as a student athlete.

So you're going to be able to do sports medicine and sports management, both of which are not taught at New College.

The admissions officer I spoke to said.

Those people on operating through Corbyn, through DeSantis, went and pressured our admissions team to lie to athletic students, lie to students in general, to increase the amount of enrollment that we had at the college to the level that he wanted, no matter what, no matter their

application materials, the things that they had, their level of academic rigor that could allow them to come to our college.

The real estate pitch here: like, we're going to build you all these facilities.

You'll have high class everything because we care about this and there's money here, and you'll get scholarships too, and all that stuff.

How does that manifest as your reporting led you to understand when it came to the admissions department and the practices of like who we can take and what standards there were?

Basically, all bets are off.

President Corcoran effectively told them, if it's gray, let it play.

During this meeting where he came in to encourage this, he even said that if it's,

you know, with the black and white version of like what is okay and what's absolutely illegal, if it's gray, go for it.

Those were like nearly his words verbatim.

If it's in the clear or anywhere in the gray, as long as it's not clearly illegal, I want you to do it to get those numbers up.

And yeah, that's absolutely not allowed.

I mean, let alone to hear it from our president.

So we should say that a spokesperson for New College did insist, De Pablo Torre finds out, that Richard Corcoran, the president, quote, never advocated for, nor will he ever advocate for, operating in the gray, end quote.

And that Corcoran also never encouraged admissions officials to lie to students.

But the spokesperson did acknowledge that the school's president did float increased pay for hitting admissions numbers, and he did assemble, in his words, a SEAL Team Six.

Just not, apparently, with military connotations.

Now, when it comes to Christianity, New College provided this blunt statement that I want to read you here.

Quote, we're a public university.

We don't recruit students on the basis of religion, end quote.

Now, I'll remind you, Jeb, you said you had to write four essays, four essays to get into new college.

And now,

what's that like?

Well, the admissions officer I spoke to said, and you know, maybe this is not representative of all of them, but this really just jumped out that he got an essay that was effectively a screenshot of the notes app on

that comes standard with the iPhone.

And that he saw something that sort of attempted a paragraph that was riddled with grammatical errors, noun-verb inconsistencies,

just sort of like, you know, spin the wheel, take your pick, punctuation.

And

the essay amounted to, I'm a baseball player.

I love God.

You know, just put me in coach.

But in fairness, all the baseball players who, you know, have agency and maybe aren't Republicans or at the very least, Ron DeSantis Republicans,

how do you make sure as a new college admissions department that you're getting the people that you want?

Right.

Well, I think it's contingent on who you're looking for and who you're sending out looking.

So one of the details that we learned was that of the new coaches recruited for this year, five that were brought in by the athletic director, all five of them worked at Christian schools like Liberty University or Bob Jones.

You don't need only people accredited at Christian schools to find athletes in the state of Florida.

How many kids, how many athletes did they end up bringing in?

Well, of the 338 incoming students this year, 153 of them are student athletes.

So this is a radical, truly like virtually overnight shift in the identity of the school.

And of those 153 student athletes, one in every two of these new students, how many of those are baseball players specifically?

73.

Man.

And to go ahead and contextualize those numbers again for you, the University of Florida, which again has 60 times the number of students that New College has, has about 35 baseball players.

So half the number that New College, a school that is 160th its size, has.

Right.

I mean, the average like college baseball roster is about like 35 players.

40

at most.

It's dozens more than is on an MLB roster, right?

Right.

Like the Padres don't carry this many people.

The Yankees don't carry this many people.

So how does the athletic director, the leader of the athletics department that was just born, how does he explain the fact that New College now cares more about baseball in terms of its roster size than literally every other baseball team I have ever heard of?

Well, we spoke to the athletic director, Mariano Jimenez, and he struck us a little bit differently than we'd expected.

I didn't realize you were a new college grad.

That's awesome.

I'm really excited about this call, knowing that you're a new college grad.

We had been told that he was kind of a contemptuous interviewee and had a a tendency to eat popcorn and

talk about his relationship with God, but he was very well composed and very insistent on talking about, he referred to it almost as a kind of kumbaya sentiment of using sports to improve everyone's lives and also draw the campus together.

And oddly, he kind of sounded like an old new college student.

I think civil discourse is the way forward.

I think being able to relate to people who don't have,

you know, who don't have your background is the best way to go forward.

Many times going into a situation, I assume I'm wrong.

And I think that just, it diffuses things.

I'd love to see this be the blueprint for all universities going forward.

I think this is the blueprint.

We have people from all sides coming in together,

being a merit-based place where people can come in and grow and learn and serve together in a place of civil discourse.

So just to be clear, what he's saying is never mind the 73

baseball players that we have now.

This is a laboratory for democracy.

That's what he's telling you.

Right.

On the other hand, we did do a public records request for his communications, and we found one from Director Jimenez that read,

Our top priority right now is recruiting coaches and players who line up with our core values.

But this struggle over what our refers to here is it your new college, Jeb Lund, or is it Ron DeSantis and President Corcoran and their new college?

How do they define the core values that they were referring to?

You know, I think those values are an extension of their existing war on woke.

I think the purpose is to create a kind of Trojan horse of demographically of people who align with their political interests and in a way that is antagonistic to or maybe overbearing on the existing culture at New College.

And in fact, when we spoke to the admissions officer, he said that it ended up being a large population of athletes that generally Christian, generally more devout than our

typical student population.

So I think that level of culture change is kind of what they were going for.

This time around, you know, we have the governor who

instituted the changes that happen at our college.

saying the same rhetoric as the people that he put into our college saying, you know, we want to change the culture here.

It's become too, quote, woke

and that we've moved away from what he calls the classic liberal arts

academia.

How he describes a classic liberal arts environment is actually what we had in the first place, free ability to say whatever you would like, to discuss any topics you're interested in.

There's no censorship.

Conversely, you know, that censorship is what he actually brought to our school.

And I should be clear, as a buffet Catholic myself, nothing wrong, Jab, with being Christian,

but I am reminded that this is a public school, is it not?

So the whole we're favoring a specific religion in admissions very explicitly feels like a bit of an issue.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's explicitly unconstitutional as a public entity.

And again, just to tie back to the baseball thing here, the baseball players are how they're smuggling in the religiosity, their preferred type of religiosity.

That's right.

And And in fact, of the 180 presidential honors scholarships that were conferred this year, 85 of them went to the athletic department, despite the fact that the ACT, SAT, and GPA scores for all the student athletes are down relative to the average at New College.

You know, I'm reminded as I listen to you talk about this that the right loves to rail against affirmative action because of the different standards on standardized test scores.

And this was a whole movement that resulted in in the Supreme Court, of course, changing what's legally possible when it comes to racial minorities, being rated on a curve, so to speak, when it came to those tests.

So, what was the admissions department of the new college doing when it came to the SAT?

Well, in this case, it seems that they had no problem with lower scores.

We've heard of student athletes who were personally contacted by athletic director Jimenez, essentially telling them, don't worry about the ACT and SAT, that that's not an issue.

There are even students coming up to us being told that the coach who had reached out to them over social media, which is unheard of, saying that they did not need an SAT or an ACT, that that was not a requirement.

To see him do that and bring them in straight off of social media, reaching out to them on there.

and then misleading them on the admissions program and like how that works, right?

You know, we have to have an essay.

We have to have an SAT or ACT by law.

They're like, well, coach said that we could apply and not have one of those and it'd be totally fine, that we work something out.

When we spoke to him, Director Jimenez assured us that he personally reviews every single file to know why a kid, to quote, know why this kid is not up to standards.

He said, now that was probably a community college transfer.

They don't have to take those tests, but the overall sort of sloppiness and disregard for standards and the rest of the process makes that also seem a little bit dubious.

The way it's sounding to me so far, Jeb, is that this is both incredibly orchestrated, like a truly top-down system from DeSantis to the president to the athletics director and the admissions department, all sort of like working in ideological concert.

And yet at the same time,

it doesn't seem especially like slick.

or subtle.

Right.

I'm reminded of the quote from Deep Throat from all the president's men.

These are not very bright guys, and this got out of hand.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

The trick, of course, about shielding your entire campus from outside scrutiny also is that there are some kids, presumably still, who are more Jeb Lund than they are Ron DeSantis.

And so how do the remaining students from the previous administration, so to speak, how do they feel about what's happening to their school?

Well, they're trying.

They're trying to put a game face on it and they're trying to make it work because they don't really have any choice.

We spoke to Colin Jeffries, the student body, co-president last year, and he told me that basically, you know, the first interaction he got with Richard Corcoran was, guess what?

You're getting a new mascot.

We have been working with the president to come up with a list of like mascots, but the list of mascots was contingent on we would keep the null set as the official mascot of the school just because of all that it's represented over the years.

And then we would work together to come up with an athletics mascot.

None of our suggestions were taken.

And it ended up being, okay, the athletics mascot is also going to be the entire school mascot.

And also, we aren't going to ask the students what mascot they want.

We're just going to like come up with our own mascot.

The Mighty Banions was drawn up by one student, given to the president, and then without input from the students or without like the student government seal of approval, it was just, okay, this is our mascot.

Wait a minute.

So your beloved, terribly dorky null set

has now become, unfortunately, its name.

It is nothing now.

Yeah, no, it's been replaced by the mighty banyan.

This tree is jacked.

Like, this tree has been doing a lot of steroids is what I'm inferring from the musculature of said tree.

But wait,

the arrangements, though, the living situation, the the the life of a student who's not one of these favored nation status baseball players or athletes.

What is that like now in terms of just like day-to-day stuff?

Well, academically, it's tough for them because about a third of their faculty are gone.

And so if you needed a particular instructor to complete your major and graduate and do your thesis defense and they're not there, I mean, good luck.

So some of them are transferring.

Some of them are obviously going to have to rethink what they learn.

In terms of student life, though, In the last 20 years or so, it's evolved that once you become more of an upperclassman, you go to the Dort and Goldstein dorms.

They are suites.

Those have been given over entirely to the student athletes.

And so in other words, there is a

there are upstairs people and downstairs people at New College now.

And the people with the amenities and the fancy life,

those would be the jocks.

Yes.

And for everybody else, they're kind of scrambling because the pay dorms, which are very old, have a persistent mold problem, so they can't be used.

So you have just tons of students who are living off campus at the Garden Inn about 25 minutes from school.

And there's about 200 of them there.

These were not set up for long-term living.

They're hotels.

Looking at these people who are now getting special treatment different than returning students who are like the people living in the housing that we were all assigned to in the spring.

We definitely saw like there was going to be some tension.

So we had come come up with like a unity project, which was like events that were supposed to bring people together.

It did not work essentially.

We held a bunch of events that were meant to like showcase new college culture and showcase like the new college we knew, but we ended up having no athletes coming to those events.

There was a stark divide and I would say the divide was also maybe worsened by the fact that they were like in a separate building.

It almost felt like two classes.

So I'm getting this sort of like idea of a segregated campus where there are the jocks and there are the rest of the kids.

And by the way, like on lots of sports crazed campuses, like the athletes do sort of like live off in better conditions elsewhere.

Like that's not totally unusual.

But this feels extreme in a bunch of ways.

The athletics department and the baseball team is being used to,

yeah, truly weaponize a political agenda from the very top down, from the governor to the president, on down upon the student body.

And I also wonder, what do the professors think about what's happened to the school?

Well, I think all the ones that left have expressed themselves very clearly with their feet.

We spoke to Amy Reed, who is a longtime professor there of French and gender studies.

I've been at New College since 1995.

I wear multiple hats.

I'm a professor of French and director of the gender studies program.

I'm currently chair of the faculty, and that means I sit on the new college board of trustees.

She's been able to see this up close as these changes have been happening in meetings abruptly, without warning, and with no small amount of contempt.

She watched up close as a board member just made a motion to get rid of the gender studies department out of nowhere, no discussion, and that was it.

The motion is to direct the president and staff to take the necessary and proper steps to terminate the gender studies program.

And so there went some of what she contributed to the college and the community that she had helped to build there.

She's watched up close as taxpayer dollars paid for coffee cups at the student cafe that have

Christian verses printed on them.

She's also watched up close as, you know, conservative activists on the board have called for,

and I quote here, recruiting a new cohort of mostly male student athletes who will begin to rebalance the hormones and the politics on campus.

You can't do that.

You're not allowed to do that.

And she's watched, again, you know, one of the knocks on New College for much of its history has been the price per graduate, right?

How many dollars go into each student?

And the sort of finger wagging from conservatives in Tallahassee that New College isn't being run like a business.

And yet.

We have spent $50 million

this year, including $1.9 million for the athletic budget, to bring in more men than women and a lot more money for men's teams, which was potentially a Title IX violation.

Their motivation for what they've done is

deeply misogynistic.

They created an athletic program that is skewed towards male athletes because they felt like there were too many women.

on the faculty and amongst the student body here at New College.

The NCAA says you're not supposed to be resetting resetting a gender balance through the creation of sports teams.

We were up over 65% female-identified students, which is not 50-50, but it's actually

within the parameters of a lot of other liberal arts colleges across the country.

So they brought in primarily male athletes so that this year our incoming class was majority male.

Majority male.

And to have people crowing about this

is profoundly troubling.

Okay, so we should also say here that the spokesperson for New College did claim that the athletic department signed up so many male athletes because the athletic director was also the baseball coach.

And that that whole thing about proudly rebalancing the hormones and the politics on campus, that was simply representative of, quote, hitting the ground running on the recruiting trail, end quote.

This is one word that I heard Jimenez, the athletic director, say to you,

because he called this whole thing a blueprint, right?

So as messy, as shambolic as it is, this is a plan that he seems to want to replicate,

to export.

What's your sense of where the Ron DeSantis approach to college education via the new college in Sarasota might go next?

Well, it's already gone to FIU here in the state of Florida.

And you can already see it in the state of Wisconsin.

The Republican gerrymandered all-to-hell legislature is withholding funding for state universities unless they scour those universities of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So it may not have worked efficiently and beautifully here, right?

But like any prototype, one of the reasons why you take it out and you test it is to see how it fed up.

So the next time you don't f up that way, because any governor who has the ability to remove remove trustees from a state institution could effectively do this.

And now they're going to know, thanks to New College, where the pitfalls are.

You know, it seems impossible at this point to ignore that freedom has been the political promise by Ron DeSantis, academic freedom.

We rank number one in education freedom.

Give us a new birth of freedom.

Citadel of freedom.

A citadel of freedom, the nation's citadel of freedom.

We've become the focus point of freedom.

we don't think that the purpose of universities is to impose an ideological agenda uh there should be freedom of discussion freedom of speech and there shouldn't be an imposition of an orthodoxy and and we've just been very clear on that the idea that uh censorious PC culture is preventing you from knowing the truth the idea that we need to let people have freedom of speech and yet everything you've described in terms of those freedoms um seems to be almost diametrically the opposite from what is being promised by Florida's politicians.

No, that's absolutely true.

And, you know, I haven't mentioned it before, but it's the new college model and new college as an institution as it existed before it was interfered with did a very good job of letting kids run wild.

with finding out whatever answers they wanted to.

The son of the founder of Stormfront, the number one white white supremacist website in the United States, went to new college and he was accepted.

And he was,

he was there.

He was there to do race research and he was given free reign of every archive to conclude what he wanted and research what he wanted.

And what he found out was he was wrong, right?

But he was given the freedom to do that.

So what's troubling about the DeSantis blueprint in a word that appears in his campaign book, is that authoritarian impulse that can be applied to any school in the United States where the governor has the ability to remove the trustees and change the character of a public institution?

Certain people on the Board of Trustees have been very clear that this is their plan to export this not just across the state of Florida, but across the country.

So yes, this is exportable.

And it's imperative that we all take measure of what's going on and stand up against this.

The ideological imposition and elimination of choice that is under this program that is being imposed upon us is going to have really long-term consequences for the health of our democracy.

Jab, as we mull over

the terrible forecast for education and democracy in America, I am led to the sports of this.

I am a sports reporter.

Let's not forget, Pablo Torrey finds out is a sports show.

And I want to find out at the very end, is this 73 person baseball team at New College actually going to be any good?

Well, that's a great question, Pablo.

I think probably chiefly of concern is they don't have a baseball field.

Wait, wait, hold on, hold on.

Because the promise, again, was facilities, was upgrades.

And you're saying that there is not a field.

Well, there was a plan maybe to buy out the lease of the classic car museum that's right next to the campus so they could put a baseball field there.

But that seems to have been scuppered.

Yeah, look, Jeb,

I'm no World War II military tactician.

Okay.

But my understanding is if your team doesn't have a baseball field, probably at a competitive strategic disadvantage.

Yeah, we'll bet.

We'll bet.

Yeah, in fact, when we spoke to Colin Jeffries, the former student body co-president, he said that he got an email specifically from an international student who was coming all the way to Florida to play baseball for new college.

And he said, Hey, what's going on with those upgraded facilities that

I was promised?

And Colin just had to say,

nope.

I hate that I am feeling this way, but all of it does make me kind of want to root for what is like objectively an underdog story, right?

Like

this baseball team is not going to be good.

And they are given actually none of the things they were promised by Ron DeSantis and all the cronies that have been empowered by him.

And I just,

I'm feeling a little conflicted given that

in that group might be like the next Ron DeSantis.

Right.

Yeah.

Maybe this is the sense of betrayal that is going to send him on a vengeful path toward infiltrating baseball into all kinds of other public institutions.

Libraries, for instance.

Yes.

The DMV.

Jeb Lund,

noted non-graduate of New College, thank you for telling me about your thesis and your reporting.

Yeah, thank you for providing me an opportunity in front of a broadcast audience,

a wide swathe of human beings, to admit that I'm lying in that part of my resume.

Finally, finally, the truth comes out.

So at the end here, I am thinking not merely about the demographic baseball bomb that Ron DeSantis dropped on New College, Jeb Lund's alma mater.

I am also thinking about the bomb that just got dropped on mine.

And yeah, reset the, you know, days since Pablo mentioned he went to Harvard signed to zero.

Fair.

But Claudine Gay, the first black woman to ever be president of Harvard, was ousted just last week.

And if you want to know my reasoning for why President Gay actually did need to go, concerning her alleged plagiarism slash academic misconducts and her earlier congressional testimony about campus speech codes, which was disastrous.

I talked about all that on MSNBC.

It's nuanced, but I'll put a link to it in today's newsletter at www.pablo.show.

The reality, though, is that pretty much every university president now needs to be a wartime president.

The reality is that education is now the biggest front in the culture war, baseball bombs and all.

In fact, something you should know is that the right-wing activist who orchestrated the campaign against Claudine Gay

is also,

of course,

on the board of New College of Florida, personally installed by Ron DeSantis.

He's the guy who had said this.

Recruiting a new cohort of mostly male student athletes who will begin to rebalance the hormones and the politics on campus.

And that guy, Chris Ruffo, is awful, to be clear.

But he is a cunning and shameless strategist.

Someone who may have even appreciated Jeb Lund's thesis on World War II code breaking.

Which is why every school must now be prepared to publicly defend itself.

and the mission of genuine academic freedom from the greatest weapon that these strategists all have in their arsenal.

The fact that they don't care about genuine academic freedom

at all.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production

and I'll talk to you next time.