Opinion | Rescuing trashed books from the New College…
New College of Florida, the state’s smallest and most embattled public university, has become a global embarrassment for Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“The optics of seeing thousands of books in a dumpster are far from ideal,” its president, Richard Corcoran, had to admit.
Indeed, the optics would have been awful even if it were an ordinary college rather than the one in Sarasota that DeSantis is conspicuously turning into a paragon of right-wing purity.
The widely circulated photograph of that dumpster filled with books brought to many minds the images seen globally of the bonfires in dozens of German cities on May 10, 1933, when Nazi students and professors ceremoniously destroyed tens of thousands of offending books.
Among them were the works of the Jewish-born poet Heinrich Heine, who had written a century before, “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.”
There was no inventory of discarded books at New College, as state law appears to require, so it’s not possible to say whether they were dumped for ideology or simply to clear shelf space. Some were water-damaged, the college said, but many appeared to be sound.
