New College trustees vote to dismantle gender studies major in direct curricular intervention

The New College of Florida board of trustees voted to begin dismantling the gender studies major, making it one of the first academic programs in the United States to be eliminated directly by a politically appointed governing board rather than through normal faculty-driven curriculum review. The decision was associated with board member Christopher Rufo, who had publicly described the elimination of gender studies and other programs he associated with critical theory as a central goal of the New College transformation. The action extended governance capture into the content of academic programs themselves, setting a precedent that boards, not faculty, could determine which fields of scholarly inquiry were permissible at a public institution.