No doubt encouraged by the governor and state legislature’s hatred of anything not aligned with their hetero-first principles, a Florida college not only shuttered its Gender and Diversity Center, but threw out hundreds of books dealing with, you know, gender and/or diversity.
The Stop WOKE Act is likely to blame here, even if it’s not explicitly referenced by any of the college reps quoted in Steven Walker’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune article. The part of the law that tells private companies what they can and can’t discuss with their employees is completely dead, but the part covering publicly-funded schools is only mostly dead. And the state will continue blowing money defending the unconstitutional law because (1) it’s other people’s money, and (2) it really, really wants any small piece of this law to survive because legislators really, really want to keep making LGBTQ+ feel miserable and unwelcome in the Sunshine State.
The Gender and Diversity Center was shut down shortly after the school board obtained a conservative majority. The hundreds of books owned by the center were considered so valueless they were tossed en masse into the nearest dumpster.
A dumpster in the parking lot of Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the campus of New College overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center on Tuesday afternoon. Video captured in the afternoon showed a vehicle driving away with the books before students were notified. In the past, students were given an opportunity to purchase books that were leaving the college’s library collection.
As always, the cruelty is the point. At any point prior to their removal, students, teachers, and other interested parties could have been told these books were going to be removed. But rather than do that, the books were thrown away as quickly and unceremoniously as possible. Some were rescued, but the footage embedded in the Herald-Tribune shows most of the books were hauled off to the nearest dump.
When contacted by the paper, college reps pretended this was just a routine “weeding” of the school library’s shelves. Even if this were true (and it clearly isn’t), the college could have informed students, teachers, and others so these books could find new homes and readers. But the college didn’t want anyone to have any access to content its board no longer considers worth reading.
College spokesperson Nathan March also claimed it was against the law to give away or sell the books to students or other interested parties. Reporter Steven Walker points out the falseness of this claim:
March referenced Florida Statute 273 as the reason books could not be donated or sold. However, FS 273 states that New College could dispose of state-funded personal property by “selling or transferring the property to any other governmental entity … private nonprofit agency … (and) through a sale open to the public.”
That makes it clear it was handled the way the majority of the board wanted it handled: a “weeding” that was anything but routine — one that mainly targeted gender and race-related books, all without giving anyone any notice this purge of unwanted content was going to be happening. It could have been handled in a way that didn’t give the appearance of a bunch of censorial asshats sitting around wishing they could have burnt them instead. But the school and its conservative board wanted to make it clear they thought these works literature were literally nothing more than trash.
