PATRICK X. BRESNAN | USA | 2026 | 105 MIN | ENGLISH
As political appointees remake a celebrated Florida college from the top down, students and faculty fight to preserve its distinctive culture, academic freedom, and the place they call home.
For more than six decades, New College of Florida built a reputation as a rigorous public liberal arts school known for independent learning, unconventional thinking, and a campus culture of radical acceptance. That identity is thrown into upheaval when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appoints a new slate of trustees charged with reshaping the institution as part of his broader higher-education agenda. Filmed as the transformation unfolds, this urgent documentary moves between classrooms, contentious board meetings, student protests, and intimate conversations with faculty, parents, longtime students, and newly recruited transfers. Programs disappear, DEI initiatives are dismantled, professors are denied tenure despite faculty approval, and new leadership pushes the college toward a markedly different vision of public education. The film captures the frustration, defiance, uncertainty, and competing ideas of the people living through the change as their campus becomes a testing ground for a much larger national debate. The documentary asks who gets to define academic excellence, how much political power should shape public universities, and what might be lost when public education becomes a battleground for competing political visions.
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