This week, a public college in Florida threw away hundreds of books. Many of the books that were thrown away seemed to have something to do with women’s rights, LGBTQ problems, or race.
Someone from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune shared photos and videos on social media that show the books in at least one dumpster and cardboard boxes in New College of Florida parking spots.
Some of the book names that can be seen in the pictures are “Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop,” “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,” “Feminist Thought,” and “Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey.”
New College of Florida said that throwing away the books was part of “longstanding annual procedures” to explain its actions.
“What people saw online of a dumpster full of library books is part of the normal weeding process,” the college said in a statement. Chapter 273 of Florida’s laws says that New College can’t sell, give away, or transfer these things, which were bought with state money. Materials that aren’t wanted are thrown away, and when possible, they are recycled.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been trying for years to make the small liberal arts school, which is known for having liberal students, more conservative. This is why the books were thrown away.
New College also admitted that it had thrown away books related to the gender studies program that it had ended. Last year, New College said it was ending the program. This came a few months after DeSantis added six new people to the college’s board of trustees, supposedly to change the culture of the college.
DeSantis signed a bill into law at a ceremony at New College in May of last year. This bill said that public universities and colleges in Florida could not use state or government funds for diversity programs.
“At the same time that the New College library was cleaning out its collection, some books from the now-defunct Gender Studies program were taken out of a room in Hamilton Center that is being used for something else,” the statement said.
In a long and angry statement released Thursday, Bacardi Jackson, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, spoke out against the destruction of the books.
Jackson wrote, “These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge. They remind me of some of the darkest times in history when governments tried to control thought by burning books and wiping out knowledge.” “Every Floridian and American who values democracy and free thought should be outraged that these books—which contained wisdom, different points of view, and the stories of marginalized communities—were thrown away in the middle of the night, without any explanation, and without giving students the chance to keep them.”
Florida has been in a culture war for years, and books, especially ones about LGBTQ people, race, and women, have become a flashpoint. In the last couple of years, the state has passed laws that make it harder for public schools to teach about sexuality, gender identity, and critical race theory. To follow these new laws, some schools have banned or taken out of their libraries books with LGBTQ, Black, or female characters.
PEN America recently looked at the 2022–23 school year and found that book bans were most common in Florida, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah. They also found that 56% of the books that were banned were about race or LGBTQ problems or had characters of color or LGBTQ characters.
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