What happens when a governor stages a conservative takeover of a public college? This isn’t a rhetorical question, because, well, it actually happened.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was reelected to office in 2022, he promised to reshape the New College of Florida, a small public liberal arts university in Sarasota, Florida, that he declared was overrun by the left. DeSantis appointed six new conservative-leaning members to the school’s board of trustees. About a month later, the board fired New College President Patricia Okker. Shortly after, DeSantis signed bills that banned DEI programs at Florida public universities, placing various New College campus resources and even fields of study into disarray.
Students, alum, faculty, and staff did not take this lying down — and the New College community’s resistance to DeSantis’ takeover is the subject of a new documentary, First They Came for My College.
After DeSantis made his new appointments to the board in 2022, Holly Herrick, New College alum and head of Film & Creative Media at the Austin Film Society, called Patrick Bresnan, a prominent documentarian, to travel to Florida and capture the takeover in real time. The filmmakers worked closely with the college’s student newspaper The Catalyst, gave students iPhones to capture their daily lives, and documented various rallies and board meetings. The film features students, staff and faculty, board members, and even parents. “From the beginning, I was captivated by the students, professors, and alums’ intense desire to save their school, which they portrayed as a bastion of intellectual curiosity,” Bresnan said in his director’s statement about the experience.
The documentary, which premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 12, showcases student life at the changing university, from the student paper and student governance to social lives and sports. And as public universities across the country are facing increasing oversight from its state governments, it aims to answer the question: What happens when leaders put politics before students?
Ahead of the film’s premiere, Her Campus spoke with one of the executive producers of the doc, Harry W. Hanbury (who is also a New College alum), as well as two participants in the doc, Gaby Batista, a student activist and journalist who was on campus during the takeover, and Amy Reid, a former professor at New College who also co-founded the school’s Gender Studies department.
Questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you center student voices throughout the production of the film?
Harry W. Hanbury: We had a great advantage, which was that three of our team are New College alums. The students and faculty at New College, after the takeover, were inundated by media from all over the world. Everyone was parachuting in and sticking cameras in people’s faces and asking for a 10-second sound bite, and our approach was very, very different. We would film a little bit and then we would take people out for meals and say “order whatever you want.” The other piece was giving students iPhones. We gave iPhones to six or seven students, and some students had cameras of their own, and they just documented the hell out of stuff. And so we got this perspective on life at the college, and the experience of going through this through the students’ eyes that was unlike anything else.
Gaby Batista: I was encouraged to do video diaries, which felt like I was stepping into the shoes of a YouTuber. That’s at least how I was approaching it. I also filmed with one of the iPhones at student parties. It was really important for the students to also have the camera in their own hands, to get an even better grasp of the New College feel and the sort of behind the scenes that even alums couldn’t really access in student spaces.
Amy Reid: It really matters that students were not just depicted in the film, but were the makers of the film because that is how the New College educational program always worked. Students were not ever supposed to be passive about their learning, but to be the drivers and agents of their own education. This film feels right because it is about the students and about giving them some agency and control in a situation where the government was trying to take that away from them 100%.
What was the moment you think students realized something big was happening at their college?
GB: It wouldn’t be more apparent until Jan. 31, 2023, which was the first board of trustees meeting post takeover news. Not even a month later, that’s when this big meeting happens. Our president was ousted and replaced with someone the board definitely had ready to go to replace her, who has no experience in education. I remember exactly where I was and what I was wearing — it was one of those moments.
AR: As faculty, we’d been watching for a couple of years and seeing a sequence of bad legislation come through that was limiting how faculty could teach and making the environment feel quite threatening to faculty. We had already started organizing around that. The change came on Jan. 6, 2023, when we found out that it was coming specifically for our campus and not for the university system as a whole. That did take us off guard, but we had already started organizing, and so faculty quickly started working together to mount a response. I mean, our union membership shot up to almost 100%. People realized that they needed to do something and to stand up, but we also needed to let students take the lead in defending their education.
Tell me more about the role of student agency, independence, and self-determination within the film.
GB: Featuring New College culture was really important to giving the film life. It’s a film that really does center the students and our experiences. I felt like an active participant, and it was a really special thing to be a part of.
HH: Historically, if you look back at instances where people have overthrown autocratic rule, once you get 3.5% of the population actively engaged in a social movement, or democracy, that’s a force more powerful than any authoritarian government. It’s amazing that at New College, there were rallies with at least a quarter of the student body and there was a letter issued by the faculty that 80% of the faculty signed that censured the Board of Trustees. So, some of what happened to New College, what it exemplifies is the kind of ideologically motivated attack that sees universities as sort of laboratories of autocracy. This is a place where you can do top-down governance in a way that the autocrats in our country dream about, but they were surprised by the level of engagement at New College. One of its great strengths is that the students are not docile. They are very much in control of their own education.
How does a student movement sustain itself when faced with constant obstacles?
AR: One of the challenges with student organizing is that people are students for a small amount of time, and so they graduate. So how do you build structures that allow for new leadership and new initiatives to come on board? That is a challenge, and it’s something that people, as alums, were coming back to New College to try and help the students organize. There was a lot of awareness of that — you need to keep track of students after graduating.
GB: That was a really big concern: How are we gonna keep this momentum after I graduate, after my peers graduate? It really got to a point that what I could tell students or underclassmen was: “Do your thesis. Excel. Graduate. Continue traditions. Create new traditions and foster community.” That, in and of itself, is resistance, and you don’t have to stretch yourself so thin to put on a rally at every board of trustees meeting. That’s when the focus turned a little more to, “Just be yourself and keep the essence of New College within yourself and in your community.” That’s really the best way that any semblance of resistance can continue on campus.
AR: The film was about training students, in some sense, to take control of their stories by giving them cameras. It’s also done a real service to this country by training a number of students to be engaged and to be fearless. That’s what gives me a lot of hope here. One of the things that isn’t covered in the film, but is pretty important, is that the students, as they graduate, have continued to work in other ways on related issues. There are people in this film that we’re going to continue to hear from in the years ahead as they move into not being student activists, but being activists and leaders in communities nationwide. So this story ain’t over.