Can I hate Desantis and still think this school’s mission statement is stupid. Colleges are for the rigorous study of academic pursuits, teachers are there to challenge pupils, it should be difficult.
To me, that flies in the face of any organization claiming it’s identity is acceptance and inclusion.
Keep failing at a regular college? The conclusion you will draw is you are not ready for this, failing is wasting money and time so perhaps something else is in your future.
Keep failing at an accepting inclusive college? The conclusion you will draw is they were not inclusive or accepting enough to meet your needs, perhaps a different college where they are even more accepting is the ticket.
Grade inflation and lowered graduation standards are a thing, of course, but it would never occur to me to parse “acceptance and inclusion” as referring to academic ability, and not race/gender/sexuality/etc. “You’re about acceptance and inclusion? I guess that means you can’t give people bad grades!” makes about as much sense as, “You’re about acceptance and inclusion? I guess that means you have to accept white supremacists!”
No, its identity has nothing to do with being more tolerant towards doing badly on one’s classwork, and its students do very well after graduation:
It has had a Fields Medalist, a Rhodes Scholar, a large number of Fulbright Fellows, and many other graduates receiving such important achievements. If somebody is going to say, “But that’s not that many,” then please remember that New College has only had about 6,000 graduates over its history. For its size, it’s had much more successful graduates than nearly any other American university.
New College’s identity was never “acceptance and Inclusion”. Sure, it accepts and includes the sorts of students who were once not that treated well in general at most colleges (but so do a lot of colleges today). “Acceptance and inclusion” is just some phrase someone arbitrarily decided to claim was its identity. Some people say that its motto is “Each student is responsible in the last analysis for his or her education.” I would say that it’s about teaching yourself how to learn independently. When I was there, the student council jokingly voted that the motto of New College should be “There’s a lot more to running a starship than answering a lot of damn fool questions”, which is a quotation from Star Trek.
Looks to me like DeSantis has a problem with the concept of whole person that is used for student selection at some institutions. That goes against the current Qliban idea that people can only be defined by one and only one trait.