May 11, 2023 

An open letter to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics: 

We are students, alums, faculty, staff, and others community members and supporters of New College of Florida, a small, top-ranked public liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida. We are writing to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) to express our grave concerns about the reported intention of New College to apply to the NAIA (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, May 2, “New College of Florida to add softball, soccer, basketball in athletics expansion”).

We, the undersigned, do not oppose adding intercollegiate sports at New College. Many of us played sports in high school, played at New College or other schools, or work in other colleges with sports programs or work in professional sports. 

We are writing because adding sports to New College in 2023 has come as part of a political effort to destroy a place that, since 1960, has been a center for freethinking scholarship and diverse people for generations and in recent years a haven for LGBTQ+ students in Florida (New York Times, April 23, “This Is What the Right-Wing Takeover of a Progressive College Looks Like”).

We want to bring these circumstances to the NAIA leadership’s attention:  

• Public figures with reputations for anti-LGBTQ+ hate like Christopher Rufo have been made trustees on the governing board; one, activist Christopher Rufo, started officially that he expected "current students will self-select out" and then went so far as to mock existing students expressing fear over Twitter with the laugh-cry emoji. 
• There are members of the existing community who are active in recreational sports--such as longtime softball team New College Bones, New College Uglyz (Intramural Soccer Team), sailing, archery, crew, and more -- but these active athletic supporters are not being involved in the creation of the new programs and in some cases being told resources from valued existing recreational sports are to be diverted to new programs.  
  
• On campus, the president was fired without cause, just after the highest incoming-class enrollment in New College’s history following pandemic struggles; two prominent LGBTQ administrators have been fired, the Associate Dean of the Library just a few weeks before the end of the semester, and the Dean of Diversity despite the Acting President's recommendation they move to an open position
• Changes to eliminate offices and fields of study are being done without notice or over widespread objection or without debate.
• New administrators and new coaches are brought in without consultations, often based on personal or even family relationships with other new administrators.
• Some new coaches -- entering a campus whose faculty and students are overwhelmingly secular and progressive -- have made statements connecting their coaching to their evangelical Christian faith, emphasizing they see Sports not as unifying but as displacing and meant to alienate the existing campus community. 
• Our Foundation, that has supported the school since 1975 and with tens of millions raised to support the traditional mission, has had millions of dollars of existing pledges held and its investments put into a “high-risk” category because of an unsustainable spend rate.
• Selecting a highly polarizing official to give the commencement address to students working for their degrees for years, including through two years of the pandemic -- if nothing else, a traumatic remainder of a two past years that were horrible for New College.
• And so on. 

We ask: Is this what it means to add sports to a liberal arts college? Is this what it means to add a college to the NAIA? We call on the NAIA to bench New College's application until New College's new leadership starts playing fair with the existing campus community. We are not talking about the issue of transgender students playing sports, which we assume will be raised in time; neither are we, despite all the horrific policies coming out of Florida in 2023, calling for a generalized boycott or to disrupt other existing sports programs. We are only talking about New College’s application as a new program, to make a statement about what bringing sports to a campus means.

We want the NAIA to demonstrate to the wider national sports community that they will not reward the  New College leadership that is adding sports programs while disrespecting the existing students, faculty, and campus community, and to halt any application until they can concretely demonstrate they are committed to making New College a safe and welcoming campus, especially for the established community that built New College to a cherished institution over more than 60 years.

Student-athletes are making decisions now for the fall. We call on the NAIA to immediately communicate publicly that it will not allow this divisive takeover and addition of athletics to New College of Florida that is happening, so that students considering New College can weigh other options before its too late. And until its leadership shows it understands the values of college sports and unifying effect of campus intercollegiate sports — New College’s application to the NAIA would make adding intercollegiate sports a vehicle for divisiveness and bullying and its application to the NAIA must not move forward. We ask the NAIA to immediately announce they will not reward this takeover of New College.