Gov. Go-Go Boots has essentially gutted New College of Florida. He replaced the old governing board, which was heavily weighted toward academics and scholarship, with a football-oriented board.
The results are unsurprising. New football fields, football scholarships and football studies.
I presume that basketball also happens. The legacy students have bailed out to other more scholarly schools. The football recruits are pouring in.
The school, therefore, had a great lot of books which it no longer needed. While books may be suitable for students who study stuff, football players have less need for such distractions. The new football emphasis makes books largely surplus.
The statute says to sell or give away the used books. However, the books contained content contrary to the governor’s preferences. The school does not want to spread that around.
Public book-burning is out of favor. The governor is not worried about carbon emissions, since in Tallahassee such things do not exist. The problem is purely visual. As the new president said, “The optics of seeing thousands of books in a dumpster are far from ideal.” You could admire such concern for a governor in go-go boots.
Since burning the books looks bad, and selling them spreads disfavored knowledge, the solution was obvious. Call in a roll-off. Dump the books in the dumpster, and away they go! Now you know why they did it at a time when the campus was almost deserted.
If he were concerned with conserving money, or conserving landfill space, Gov. Go-Go Boots might have come up with a different solution. The County appears to burn money for heat in the winter; perhaps the furnace in the Capitol could be fed with books.
There is no concern with fiscal conservation. The new president, formerly the speaker of the Florida House, took in a base salary of $699,000, plus a $200,000 bonus.
Conversion from a scholarly school to a football school should make New College more profitable. Winning football programs often bring alumni support, though that support rarely extends beyond athletics. Also, modern football stadiums are very expensive.
The good news is that, since they no longer waste money on books and professors, there should be plenty for the football budget. And I know what the governor’s new board are thinking — they are too smart to spend money on education.
This post was originally published on here
