Joe Capozzi“First They Came for My College” is showing Saturday in Lake Worth Beach as part of the Subtropic Film Festival.
A new documentary about the conservative ideological takeover of a small Florida liberal arts college will be screened at the Lake Worth Playhouse on Saturday for the Subtropic Film Festival.
“First They Came for My College” offers a raw and intimate inside look at the transformation of New College of Florida in Sarasota through the eyes of students who lived the experience.
The 105-minute film was made in partnership with many of those students, two of whom will attend the Lake Worth Beach screening at 5:30 p.m., and with financial support from New College alumni, who helped raise more than $600,000 when traditional film funders declined to ante up.
Director Patrick Bresnan said he considers the film an important historical chronicle about “the daily and systematic erasure” of a once-cherished campus culture, a blueprint being repeated by conservatives at colleges across the United States.
“This is the first college in the country that was forcibly taken over, and the amount of corruption and taxpayer dollars to fund this takeover is remarkable,’’ he said.
After appointing new board members, Gov. Ron DeSantis called the changes at the school a “transformation.” The school’s new board “is succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission,” he said in an August 2023 news release.
A New College spokesperson criticized the documentary as sensationalized and lacking evidence.
“Prior to the current administration, New College faced serious institutional challenges, including declining enrollment, a deteriorating and increasingly unlivable campus environment and broader instability than ever before,’’ spokesperson Jamie Miller told the Tampa Bay Times in April. “In many cases, these issues stemmed from the ideological environment that had taken hold at the institution.’’
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Founded in 1960, New College grew into one of the country’s top liberal arts schools, known for a rigorous personalized curriculum and students who received Fulbright scholarships, widely recognized as one of the most prestigious grants in the world.
But on Jan. 6, 2023, DeSantis appointed six conservative allies to the college’s Board of Trustees, effectively launching a hostile institutional takeover aimed at erasing New College’s progressive academic culture and welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ students, the film shows.
The administrators would introduce 20 sports teams, which they hoped, as one trustee put it, would “rebalance the hormones and the politics on campus.’’ New College’s previous president, who was making $360,000 a year and had 30-plus years of experience, was forced out. She was replaced by Richard Corcoran, a DeSantis ally and former state House speaker who was given a salary and benefits package worth more than $1 million.
In April 2023, Bresnan received an urgent phone call from a filmmaker friend, Holly Herrick, a New College alumnus who works for the Austin Film Society. Herrick knew that Bresnan had made edgy documentaries in Florida, including “Pahokee” in 2019 and “Naked Gardens” in 2022 about a Loxahatchee nudist resort.
“She said, ‘The governor of Florida just took over my college and they’re about to deny professors tenure. I need you to go down and shoot this tenure hearing,’’’ Bresnan, based in Asheville, N.C., recalled.
Like many people, he’d never heard of New College. But once he arrived and met students and teachers who were fighting the conservative takeover, he said he knew there was a powerful film that needed to be made.
“In the film, after they denied tenure, they drive away in a golf cart basically laughing at what they’d just done,’’ Bresnan said. “There was everything you needed to make a very compelling film. You had this very clear villains and these remarkable professors and students willing to risk everything to fight these people.’’
Alumni put up the cash
New College alumni chipped in $50,000 to get the film project going. But Bresnan ran into hurdles when he started shopping a sample reel to traditional funding sources.
“We couldn’t find anyone to fund it,’’ he said. “They said, ‘Nobody wants to see kids protesting. There are no buyers for that.’ It was a really difficult film to sustain for 2 and a half years.’’
That’s when producer Harry Hanbury, a well-connected New College alum in New York City, came to the rescue.
“Very little of the funding for the film came from traditional film funders,’’ Bresnan said. “It all came though people Harry knew who were very politically engaged and saw the attacks on universities as attacks on democracy.’’
The film evolved in other ways. In late summer 2023, some early alumni funders suggested a short film focusing on Libby, a New College student who had been expelled. Bresnan, though, pushed for what he saw as “a much bigger story.’’
To tell that broader story, the filmmakers supplied six students with iPhones and laptops to shoot video journals as the campus crisis unfolded. The students were paid $25 an hour and treated as crew members, including some who are listed in the film’s credits.
“I also wanted to make a film that young people would watch. A big part of that is seeing their peers telling the story first person,’’ he said. “There’s really no film without this student footage. It is so powerful.’’
‘A clumsy assault on culture’
Two main characters are Gaby Batista and Chloe Rusek, staffers of the campus student newspaper The Catalyst.
After the playhouse screening, Batista and Bresnan will participate in a panel discussion along with the film’s editor, Yvette Lucas (Bresnan’s wife), and New College alum Calypso Camacho.
It was Lucas who discovered the film’s title. While editing, she saw a student holding a protest sign “First They Came for My College,’’ a take on the anti-fascist World War II statement “First they came for the communists …”
“What I witnessed at New College was a clumsy assault on culture, academic freedom and self-expression,’’ Bresnan said. “This is clearly fascism. We had close to 300 hours of footage, and after watching most of it and condensing it, even to a three-hour cut, it was so clearly democracy was gone and this was some other form of government that aligns with fascism.’’
Corcoran, a prominent antagonist in the film, has called the documentary ”sensationalized” and “unsupported by any facts and disconnected from the reality” of what was happening at New College, according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
In a recent op-ed, Corcoran said that New College “champions free speech and mandates civil discourse. We expose students to a genuine marketplace of ideas. We teach them how to think, not what to think. And remarkably, when you do that, students from all backgrounds are drawn to it. That is the irony the critics refuse to confront. When quotas mandate diversity, they cheapen it. When merit, freedom and excellence lead, diversity follows naturally.”
The Lake Worth Playhouse is among more than 40 theaters across the United States showing the film.
“It’s a very democratic film,’’ Bresnan said. “Close to 10 people who worked on or produced this film are able to go and show it as if they were the director of it. It’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment in that sense that there is such shared ownership of what we did.’’
This story was published in partnership with the Lake Worth Beach Independent.
