Somewhat bothered by liberal media outlets taking it at face value that Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo are trying to "remake" New College as a prestige conservative institution, then acting amused/bemused at how badly they're supposedly failing in this endeavor (faculty exodus, lowered academic standards for incoming students, and so on). I think the safer assumption would be that they're doing what it looks like they're doing, which is trying to kill the school and, secondarily, squeeze as much money out of its corpse as they can. They're lying about that, but they're also on record lying about basically everything else you can think of. Is it so difficult to call a grift a grift?
Even to the extent that it's not just an excuse to pay Richard Corcoran $700,000 a year - let's look at their ideological commitments. They hate queer- and minority-friendly education, yes, but not in a way that's neatly separable from their grievances against public education, higher education, and certainly public higher education. You're not going to see faculty retention as a problem if you think those professors were plotting against you! Look, the Federalist Society's mission isn't to improve the quality of the judicial system, it's to fill it with disciplined and obedient conservative robots who will regurgitate pre-written taking points in a consistent, predictable way. That is the value system of these people. If that seems like it's at odds with the qualities that make a great university a great university, then maybe it is.
Besides, guys in their income bracket are not going to be sending their own kids to state school on scholarship, bastion of "classical education" or otherwise. DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard and Rufo went to Georgetown (and Harvard clown school). Their problem with institutions like these is that they are too accessible to the wrong type of people, wink wink nudge nudge, not that they aren't accessible enough. They are not going to exert themselves creating an open public alternative when they can be perfectly satisfied with crushing everything they have the power to crush and then using the Supreme Court to discipline the Ivies. Just wrecking Florida's public primary and higher education systems should be more than enough to undermine both economic mobility and ideological diversity - they don't need to build anything in its place to accomplish those goals. They are being given way too much credit even by the people supposedly opposed to them.
