In January of 2023, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis announced six additions to the board of New College, a small liberal arts school in Sarasota.

In a just world, this should not have been a story.

But it was. Because, instead of appointing six liberal progressives, as had somehow seemed a constitutional duty for most colleges for most of the last 40 years, DeSantis instead appointed six conservatives.

Who then swept through the place, tearing up the boards of progressive education, firing the leadership, and totally renovating the curriculum.

He was, after all, an obvious man to call, if you were going to start a counter-revolution in academia.

An Emeritus Professor of English, at Emory University, as far back as 1997 he was penning books like: Literary Criticism: An Autopsy.

In 2008, he penned the only half joking: “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future”.

In short, he sits in the lineage of both Alan Bloom and Harold Bloom. Raging against the closing of the American mind, and for the Western Canon.

In this episode, Gavin Haynes talks to him about his hands-on experience in reversing the decline of culture – in the practice of long marching back through the institutions.

Danube Politics is the current affairs strand of the Danube Institute, a Budapest based think tank, bringing Hungarian conservatism to the Anglosphere and beyond.

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