yeah, some are calling it the "Mighty Bannons" as
a piss-take on Desantis' misguided effort to turn it into the "Hillsdale of the South".
While there was a large crunchy granola contingent, the professors and staff leaned conservative to libertarian (as older folks tend to do, a lot of retired Foreign Service and other government types on the faculty / in the admin), seemed to me. But the missed-the-60's-hippy-crew were always the loudest. e.g., we had an excellent economics professor who was ex-CIA. She leveraged her CIA connections to bring a CIA recruiter on campus for interviews for summer internships/post-graduate jobs/whatever (apparently the CIA needs economists more than it needs cloak and dagger spies). Well, the crunchy granola crew got wind of the impending CIA recruiter visit, rushed to fill up the time-slots and then used their allotted time each to yell at the recruiter about the CIA's nefarious activities. Thanks, assholes. WTF.
Parties were decent, the "PCPs" Palm-Court Parties in the courtyard of the overly ballyhooed at the time IM Pei designed studio apt style dorms (which you shared with another student unless you ponied up for one of the few singles available or were an RA, who got singles as part of the gig). And then weekly WALL parties, again named for sitting on the brick retaining walls surrounding the Palm Court and doing what college students do.
Found out pretty quickly the first year the clown college down the road whipped the llama's ass when it came to throwing all-out bashes. Technically it was called or maybe still is Ringling School of Art and Design, a feeder school for Disney animators and such. They turned their tiny little campus on Tamiami Trail into an all-out interactive haunted house with 3 rooms of dj music and decorations. We were geeked when we brought in extra sound for the once or twice a semester "Wall" parties. These mofos put us to shame with their effort to make a fun party.
Things got weird in the alumni mailing lists a decade or so back: an alumni from slightly before my time offed his aging-out-of-it wife in Mexico and threw her down a well or in a sewer (mother of his children too).
I think he was one of the co-creators of MTV's
Pimp My Ride and went on to win Emmy Awards for producing reality TV (survivor). Going to Hollywood and working behind the scenes was a path of choice for those not pursuing PhDs or some sort of graduate level education or who got turned down by the CIA to help ruin sub-Saharan African economies.
What's dumb about Desantis' initiative is one of the main things the Desantis folks called out and one of the first things they did was dismantle the Diversity Equality Inclusion dept--which in New College's case meant firing one person. Well, New College didn't even have a DEI department or staffer *until* someone in Desantis' administration got a bug up their bum about it post-George Floyd and mandated
that all public colleges in Florida have a DEI department..
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Agreed.
