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His death certificate doesn’t tell me how he died. The causes of death are listed as “end-stage renal failure,” “diabetes mellitus,” “hypertension.” Yet I have no idea what forced my father’s body to shut down, his heart to stop, on that given night.

He’d had a cold, my mother told me, and had gone to bed early in the spare bedroom so he wouldn’t keep her awake with his coughing. Did his cough give way to a silent heart attack? she wondered. We know more about what did not happen than what did. At no time did he shout for help, or cry out in pain. There was no harsh death rattle, no deep gasps for a final breath he couldn’t find. My mother sat not 10 feet away from him on the other side of a thin wall, reading a book; if he had called out for her, made any sound of distress, she would have heard, and gone to him.

When others begin to tell us that we should be thankful he didn’t suffer in the end, a memory rises up, the fragment of a prayer from an Orthodox liturgy I had attended with my parents: Grant us … a Christian and peaceful ending to our lives. It’s true that I had feared he would linger in pain for years. I worried about dementia, a stroke, a coma, the slow or sudden erosion of his mind or his memory; I dreaded the day when he would need more care than my mother could provide. I have just enough of what some would call perspective to be glad that none of these things happened, that the moment of death was the peaceful one he’d prayed for. But I cannot be grateful for how he died. He could have lived a hundred years, and I wouldn’t have been ready to let him go.

[Read: Grief is evidence of love]

My mother and I don’t know the moment he took his last breath. The time of death I read on the certificate is not the moment his life ended but the moment the paramedics gave up trying to resuscitate him. I will never know for certain what happened that night. I know that he was sick, and had been on dialysis for six years. I know that he had a cold. I know that he went to sleep, and never woke up.

He was 67 years old.

Stable was what my mother would always say, when I asked her how my father was doing. Dad would tell me that he was about the same, or fine, or, more commonly, so wonderful you wish you were me.

This article has been excerpted from Nicole Chung’s forthcoming book A Living Remedy (Ecco)

He had been diagnosed with diabetes in his early 40s. I remember reading the pamphlets he brought home from the doctor, extracting promises from him about how he would learn to manage the disease. But our family was frequently without health insurance, and the medication he needed was expensive. As a restaurant employee, he worked long shifts, often missing breaks and meals. He had little free time for exercise, no money for a gym or nutritionist, and unless he felt very ill, he did not go to the doctor.

My parents didn’t want me to fret about the family finances—they thought that, because I was a child, it was none of my business—but there was only so much privacy in our 1,100-square-foot house. Growing up, I was aware that we never seemed to have quite enough—enough to pay off debt or keep every unforeseen problem from turning into an emergency. I knew when they lost jobs, when the unemployment ran out. What I took for stability when I was younger proved to be a shallow facsimile of it, a kind known to so many families, dependent on absolutely everything going right.

I doubt that my father, during the long years when he could trace no significant or debilitating issues to his condition, had either the luxury or the inclination to worry much about his health—or his lack of health care. Even when both my parents found themselves unemployed in their late 50s, their initial worry was not for Dad’s medications or missed checkups, but whether they would be able to pay their rent, buy groceries and gas.

That is, until my father grew very sick, the sickest he had ever been, and we had no way of figuring out what was wrong with him.

By then, I was a parent myself, a graduate student married to a postdoctoral fellow, living across the country from my parents. It was agonizing to confront how little I could do for them, with my attention and energy divided between the family I was raising and the one that had raised me. My mother and father were among the estimated 48 million Americans at the time with no health insurance, too young for Social Security and Medicare, and my father was in desperate need of medical attention. I tried to help them research available assistance, though they had always disparaged what they called “handouts.” We might as well have spared ourselves the time and trouble for all the good it did: They were denied Medicaid coverage. They were ineligible for the food and rental-assistance programs they applied for. If they’d had dependents, it would be different, one social worker told them, but as it was, well, they both just needed to find work.

My father had worked for most of his life and believed he still could if the right job came along, despite his overwhelming fatigue and swollen legs, constant upset stomach, and severe neuropathy. Hard as my mother and I pushed him, he only agreed to apply for Social Security Disability Insurance after two years of unemployment, when he began feeling so poorly that he had to spend much of the day in bed. I don’t think I imagined the note of satisfaction in his voice when he told me that his claim had been denied. He wanted me to know that I’d been wrong to pressure him—he had put his hand out, and it had all been for nothing.

Finally, my parents got my father on the waiting list for an appointment at a federally qualified health center. After examining him and ordering blood work, the doctor there got him an appointment with a kidney specialist who rotated through the clinic once a month. He was the one who finally diagnosed my father with renal failure, explaining that his kidneys had lost more than 90 percent of their function. If Dad hadn’t gone to the clinic when he did, the doctor added, he would have died within weeks.

A staff member at the nephrologist’s office had helped my parents submit another claim, and my father was at last approved for the Social Security Disability Insurance and state Medicaid plan he had been denied several months earlier. He began attending dialysis sessions three days a week at a nearby center. It did its job, first saving and then extending his life. But the ongoing treatments left him drained, more vulnerable to other illnesses and infections. We knew that he wasn’t thriving, nor improving. He was enduring.

Still, I put so much faith in that word, stable. Sometimes, when I wanted to reassure myself, I would remind myself of all that he was able to do.

He could care for himself during the day when my mother was at her part-time job. He could get up on his own, shower, get dressed. He liked to wear aloha shirts in the summer, thick sweaters and cardigans in the winter, and hats—baseball or bucket—year-round.

He puttered around the house, as my mother put it, taking care of small chores. He couldn’t bend over to clean the floors, but he could wash dishes and wipe down the counters. He couldn’t manage a lengthy trip to the grocery store, but he could prepare dinner for the two of them.

If it was a dialysis day, he would pack his bag of snacks and wait for the medical shuttle to bring him to the treatment center. If not, he might go sit out on the patio, listening to the radio, smoking one of the few cigarettes he still allowed himself, watching the hills change color in the shifting light.

He was happy to hear from me and chat whenever I called; unlike my mother, who began lobbing fresh questions as soon as I said I had to go, he knew how to say goodbye and mean it.

I had understood that he wasn’t going to get the long and comfortable life I wanted for him. But I believed we would get some sort of warning, a sign that death was imminent—a bad lab report would come back; the doctor would tell him that dialysis was no longer working. I never imagined that he would simply die, quietly, peacefully, in his sleep.

Many weeks later, a friend calls it a common American death. We are in her car, on our way to dinner, speaking of various conditions that run in our families. Both of us have seen our loved ones’ health problems exacerbated by financial insecurity, inaccessible medical care. She says that what happened to my father was tragic, and we talk about how it might have been prevented if only he had gotten the help he needed. How many people here, she says, die for the exact same reason every day?

[Read: Living sick and dying young in rich America]

I think of how many times I have heard terminal illness and death referred to as “equalizers,” as if they can flatten our differences and disparities simply because they come for all of us sooner or later. Sickness and grief throw wealthy and poor families alike into upheaval, but they do not transcend the gulfs between us, as some claim—if anything, they often magnify them. Who has the ability to make choices that others lack? Who is left to scramble for piecemeal solutions in an emergency? If you have no rainy-day savings or paid medical leave, if your support system is scant or under-resourced, if preventive or lifesaving treatment is hard for you to access or altogether out of reach, you will have a profoundly different experience than those who become seriously ill—or find themselves caring for sick or dying loved ones—knowing that, if nothing else, they can afford to meet the moment.

This is a country that takes little responsibility for the health and well-being of its citizens while effectively urging us to blame one another—and ourselves—for our precarity under an exploitative system in which all but a small number of us stand to suffer or lose much. A country that first abandons and then condemns people without money who have the temerity to get sick. It is still hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him. With our broken safety net, our strained systems of care and support, the deep and corrosive inequalities we have yet to address, it’s no wonder that so many of us find ourselves alone, struggling to get the help we need when we or our loved ones are suffering.

What killed my father, on paper, was diabetes and kidney failure: common indeed, the eighth- and tenth-leading causes of death in the United States in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But failing organs, life-threatening infections, death in his 60s—these were not inevitable outcomes, nor matters of pure chance and inheritance, an avalanche of genetic misfortune. He needed access to quality health care in order to manage and treat his illnesses. He needed it throughout his life, not only in his final years, when it was granted as a crisis response.

I cannot remember my last conversation with my father. When I called home in his final months, I would often catch him on his own while my mother was at work. No particular call stands out in my memory. My mother later said that our weekday talks had represented a turning point for him.

“He knew that he wasn’t doing well,” she told me. “I think he had decided that it was time to accept you, love you, forgive you for everything—and just be your father.”

The regret and anger I bear are a constant ache, fierce and gnawing and deep, so entwined with my grief that I cannot begin to parse where one feeling ends and another begins. Sometimes I want to ask my mother if she or Dad blamed me for living far away from them, or for not being able to help more. But I realize that I am afraid to hear the answer, and the question seems too great a burden to add to her grief.

I know that whatever my father experienced at the moment of his death, my parents’ choices were limited from the start. I know that I should not blame myself, any more than I blame them, because they were long unable to access the help they needed, trapped and ill-served by a broken system. Yet as their only child, one who grew up steeped in worry for them, I have long felt responsible for their well-being. My father’s death may have been a common one, but to me it was a shock, unprecedented and cataclysmic. It is still hard for me to accept how little I was able to do to prevent it.

Before this year, life at New College of Florida could feel like a retreat into a pleasantly forgotten corner of the country. Students walked on paths that wound past wisps of Spanish moss and a stately Banyan tree to a park on Sarasota Bay, where the outside world often felt as distant as the sun setting into the Gulf. Then on January 6, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s popular Republican governor, seized control of the college by appointing six new members to its board of trustees.

Suddenly, the Sarasota campus found itself at the center of the culture wars. A DeSantis spokesman declared that the college had been “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.” Christopher Rufo, the most outspoken new trustee, vowed to take it back. “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within,” he tweeted. In New College, Rufo saw every excess of “wokeness” in academia. He believes that critical theorists spent decades pursuing the “ideological capture” of universities, installing “coercive ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs.” At New College, he charges, the students and faculty faced something like “a hostage situation.”

[Graeme Wood: DEI is an ideological test]

On a recent visit, though, I found that New College bears little resemblance to this caricature.

New College has problems, some typical of left-leaning colleges. Some of the criticisms and proposals put forth by the new trustees are reasonable. But Rufo’s indictment, which has been embraced by the populist right, is mostly wrong. New College was never captured by a large and fearsome DEI bureaucracy. In fact, the academic program cultivates a fierce and idiosyncratic independence. And when it hired its first dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2022, it wasn’t surrendering to the woke left. It was responding to an explicit mandate from a DeSantis appointee.

Here, an example is useful to clarify how anti-woke dogma does and doesn’t square with the facts on the ground. It concerns diversity, equity, and inclusion––a trio of concepts, like God, country, and family, that most people support in the abstract, but that warrant skeptical scrutiny when they are put forth as official orthodoxies in higher education, given how often they are invoked to justify ideological discrimination or bias in hiring, infringements on academic freedom, free-speech violations, and bloat. Recall that Rufo advanced a narrative of radical leftists imposing a “large” DEI bureaucracy on New College to coerce and bully professors and students while undermining free speech and open inquiry. DeSantis to the rescue!

The real story of DEI at New College: The bureaucracy that Rufo inherited was largely the result of directives from a DeSantis appointee in the state capital, not radical leftists on campus. Here’s how it happened. Florida’s public colleges are overseen by a 17-member board of governors. In 2016, then-Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, appointed a future chairman of that board: Sydney Kitson, an NFL player turned real-estate developer. In 2019, DeSantis made a consequential appointment to the same board: Brian Lamb, who’d played point guard at the University of South Florida (ask alumni about the clutch free throws he sank in the last seconds of a 1998 game against Florida State University) before becoming a banker.

After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, Kitson announced an initiative “to examine the inequities in our society.” He put Lamb in charge, perhaps because Lamb was by then the global head of diversity and inclusion at JPMorgan Chase. Lamb sent a strongly worded memo to all the presidents of public colleges in Florida, announcing the board of governors’ “clear and steadfast commitment to prioritize and support diversity, racial and gender equity, and inclusion” and “to hold each university accountable for policies, programs, and actions.” The memo called for “total integration of D.E.I. initiatives throughout the institution.” It declared that “a university’s strategic plan, as well as its mission statement, should prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion;” that a senior administrator should establish DEI as a strategic priority; that “universities should consider the integration of D.E.I. best practices into their academic curriculum”; and that DEI performance indicators would be monitored by the state.

In short, a banker appointed by DeSantis led an aggressive top-down push for sweeping new DEI initiatives in all of Florida’s public colleges, compelling every campus, including New College, to put more emphasis on DEI. Months later, Rufo (who says DeSantis appointees should be obeyed for the sake of democracy) arrived at New College and lambasted the very DEI bureaucracy another DeSantis appointee had helped create, talking as if it had been imposed by leftist radicals.

That isn’t to say that DeSantis approved of what his appointee did or that there wasn’t any support at the left-leaning New College for a bigger DEI bureaucracy. And these events cut in a different direction too. Republican political appointees foisted a top-down ideological agenda onto every public university in Florida in 2020, and few journalists, progressive faculty members, or students objected. Now, as new trustees excise that same DEI bureaucracy that Lamb pushed, left-leaning critics decry the top-down interference of political appointees in college governance.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian government?]

All of that aside, there was no large DEI bureaucracy at New College running roughshod over dissenters. Ironically, despite its leftward tilt, New College never fully obeyed the board of governors, perhaps due to its long-standing culture of quietly ignoring authorities who tell others what to do. Its DEI bureaucracy turns out to have been so tiny and oft-ignored that its elimination––which mostly meant firing one person––constituted a minor change, for better or worse.

Ian Allen / NYT / Redux

New College was founded as a private institution in the 1960s. Its approach was distinguished by faculty contracts with students who pursued personalized study plans rather than a fixed curriculum. In 1975, facing financial difficulties and declining enrollment, the institution joined Florida’s public system of higher education, at first merging with the University of South Florida. In 2001, it became an independent public college, and the state legislature designated it as Florida’s official honors college. In 2016, as liberal-arts colleges everywhere saw declining applications, New College, while struggling to recruit and retain enough students to stay financially healthy, set the goal of expanding its size from fewer than 700 undergraduates to roughly 1,200––a number it has never achieved, despite ongoing pressure from the state.

[Diane Roberts: ‘Most important, we must not upset DeSantis’]

Today, its unusual and highly regarded academic program and its in-state tuition of less than $7,000 a year are draws. Deteriorating dorms and spartan amenities are repellants. Social life can be as tight-knit and comforting—or as gossipy, limiting, and stifling—as in a small town. And the student culture, variously described to me as hippie, alternative, woke, creative, social-justice oriented, and queer friendly, tends to be self-reinforcing, attracting students with whom its vibe resonates, even as the dearth of Division I sports, Greek life, and preprofessional majors causes other sorts of students to rule it out.

“It tends to be the case that moderate or more conservative students had a hard time making friends and connections in groups,” an alum named Eugenia Quintanilla told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2019, “just because the ideas that they believed were considered to be offensive.” Opposition to LGBTQ rights looms largest among social taboos, partly on behalf of students like Alaska, who is trans and declined to give a last name. She told me about the hardship of growing up in Jacksonville, where looking and dressing differently made her a target of bigots. At New College, she found “an oasis” where she feels safe and accepted. Nothing is likelier to trigger conflict with the many students who take pride in their community’s acceptance of queer people than anyone seen as threatening that oasis. Of course, many moderate and conservative teenagers today are tolerant of gay and trans people. And New College’s failure to be more welcoming of nonprogressives limits the school’s appeal.

The faculty culture is mostly shaped by the school’s unusual approach to academics. The opportunity to help students tailor a custom course of study and research, in accordance with their curiosity and passions, attracts professors who like classroom instruction, academic mentoring, independent studies, and frequent shifts in the material that they are discussing, lecturing on, and evaluating. Many value independence and flexibility in their teaching and research more than the different benefits of life at a larger, better resourced, and more bureaucratic institution.

That’s why many New College faculty members, including professors who are broadly sympathetic to concerns about leftist excesses in higher education, were bewildered when DeSantis and Rufo began to characterize it as an institution where the academic program is ideologically captured by leftists and engaged in indoctrinating students. Professor Peter Cook, whose fields of expertise include animal cognition and comparative neuroscience, acknowledges that many of his colleagues are left-leaning, but insists that there is no organized resistance within the New College faculty or its administration to competing viewpoints. “Plenty of us would welcome more ideological diversity at New College,” he told me.  

In Cook’s account, which multiple professors corroborated, New College offers faculty radical freedom in their domain. Though most of its courses align with the classical liberal arts, “each professor is able to teach what they want how they want,” he emailed. “We do not have a curriculum committee, and there are no formal departments with structured oversight and control of course offerings and content.”

This autonomy insulates the academic program against top-down coercion and groupthink alike. Cook said he has never had any pressure, from colleagues, administrators, or students, to frame his research or coursework through an ideological lens. “It’s simply not how the school operates,” he said. “The college has its struggles, as nearly all smaller colleges currently do, but they are not the product of its being a top-down ideological training camp, which, point of fact, it is not.” (My search for professors who felt ideologically pressured yielded a single outlier, who worried that students might file a complaint after class if referred to by the wrong pronouns.)

The curricular freedom that New College offers is not for everyone—unless you’re a self-motivated student who is energized by exploring your curiosities, I would recommend a different school—but it helps a particular kind of undergraduate to thrive. While browsing student research in the anthropology lab, I met Nickolas Steinig, who told me that he finished high school near the top of his class and chose New College because of its cheap tuition. He created his own major in media production, completing classes in documentary filmmaking, tutorials via the school newspaper, and an internship at a local radio station. He found a course on the ethics of news photography offered by the Poynter Institute and took it as an independent study with a professor who oversaw his progress, suggested additional reading, and engaged in one-on-one conversations. For the thesis that all students are required to complete, he is creating a video-production company. “I found a classmate who’s a cinematographer and another who was doing a thesis on entrepreneurship,” he told me, “and we decided we would form a start-up.” He may not earn as much a year out of college as graduates of other schools, a metric tracked by the board of governors on which New College underperforms, but his nascent for-profit business may well prove to have a bigger upside than a higher-paying entry-level job.

Chloe Rusek, a second-year student, excelled in high school, earning a 4.6 GPA while participating in various programs in the visual arts, but between the coronavirus pandemic and striving for exemplary grades, she felt burned out and nearly decided against college. “New College resparked that light in me because it was not as much ‘Do busy work; get good grades,’” she told me at a used bookstore a short drive from campus. “The emphasis was, ‘What do you want to explore?’”

She wants to create an area of concentration that fuels her love of learning, but worries that the new trustees don’t intend to conserve the features of academic life at New College that make it intellectually rigorous and unusually invigorating.

I sympathize with her uncertainty. “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff, told the Daily Caller, referencing a Christian liberal-arts college that is a darling of movement conservatives. But more like Hillsdale could mean a lot of things. Recruiting more conservative faculty and students but preserving the bespoke approach to courses of study? Educational requirements covering the “great books” and other classics? Injecting Christianity into the school? Raising funds from conservative donors by leveraging the culture war in the style of Hillsdale’s president, Larry Arnn?

[Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book]

“By the end of this calendar year,” Rufo emailed me, “I hope to see a new core curriculum based on the classical model and the hiring of new humanities faculty who are aligned with our mission to restore New College as a center for classical liberal teaching and scholarship. In the short term, I expect that we will have some instability, turnover, and perhaps a short-term decline in the student population, but I hope to see enrollment numbers increasing over a two-to-three-year time horizon, after we have established a new marketing, recruiting, and admissions strategy.”

Adding to the confusion on campus, Rufo sometimes presents himself as a champion of academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and freedom of speech, but other times talks of believing in “an uncompromising new conservatism” that includes eliminating whole fields of study. “We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty,” he tweeted on February 28. “Some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.” (A DeSantis-backed bill introduced in the Florida legislature this month would instruct the board of governors to direct all colleges to remove “from its programs any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.”)

Everyone is dealing with the uncertainty differently. Faculty members are contacting union representatives to parse their collective-bargaining agreements, updating résumés, and wondering if their tenure reviews will be delayed or if their tenure is still worth anything.

I spoke with a couple of students who were looking into transferring and one student who hates the new trustees but wants to stay to spite them, fearing that a mass exodus will only help them to transform the institution. Another confessed that he can’t afford to go anywhere else. The turmoil surely weighs on prospective students too.

Among the trustees, I’ve focused on Rufo because he has done the most to shape the public’s views of the college and to detail an agenda that is being watched by right-leaning politicians and activists. Over time, differences may emerge among the trustees––whole articles could be spent describing the distinct and interesting worldviews of Eddie Speir, who co-founded a Christian charter school, and Charles Kesler, a college professor and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books—but so far the DeSantis appointees have voted together.

Amy Reid, a professor of French language and literature at New College, was among the faculty members whom I most wanted to interview. She is the institution’s director of gender studies, which Rufo characterizes as a “massive” and “radical” department that indoctrinates students and is affiliated with a third of all faculty. In Reid’s telling, the gender-studies program at New College has a budget of just $7,000 or so for programs and expenses, plus a 15-hour-a-week office-manager position. Like the heads of all the interdisciplinary programs, Reid gets a stipend of $10,000 from the provost’s office. She oversees one faculty member and, this semester, an adjunct teaching one course. In a typical semester, she told me, an introductory course and one other course in gender studies are offered, along with courses cross-listed in gender studies. (This semester, according to Reid, there are four cross-listed courses.)

[Yascha Mounk: How to save academic freedom from Ron DeSantis]

Rufo points to a long list of “affiliated faculty” to suggest that gender studies is large. But being on that list often just means you teach at least one course in a different discipline that you’re willing to make eligible for gender-studies credit. For example, Manuel Lopez Zafra, a professor of religion, teaches a class called “Growing Up Amish in Sarasota” and might be willing to work with a student whose concentration is gender studies to focus their assignments on topics related to gender. Similarly, Robert Zamsky, a professor of English, teaches a course named “Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman: Questions of American Literature,” and getting gender-studies credit for the class is a possibility.

If the field of gender studies as a whole suffers from a dearth of viewpoint diversity, then the ability to earn gender-studies credit in courses taught by professors who haven’t spent their academic lives in gender-studies departments, journals, or conferences would seem to function as a bulwark against ideological capture. And whatever one thinks of gender studies as a whole, gender studies at New College can be properly evaluated only by probing the approach taken at the institution.

Reid’s account of the value of gender studies was anything but radical, and she struck me as diligent about refraining from indoctrination. “This is a field students have real curiosity about––and part of what New College offers students is the ability to align what they study with their curiosity and enthusiasms. What we do is help students to identify the questions they want to ask and to begin looking for their answers,” she told me over lunch at the Ringling Museum.

If a conservative high-school student wanted to come and study gender in a rigorous way, Reid told me, “I would tell them that this is a good place to do it.” Were they to advance conservative arguments on abortion or pornography in class, she’d ensure they got their say. “You listen to what people say and make sure that no one is slapped down for their statements,” she told me. “My colleagues and I in our classes try to emphasize that learning spaces require trust and confidence … You have to give students space to think for themselves.”

Reid was neither naive nor evasive about the fact that, as a result of voicing conservative views, students might face blowback from peers outside of class, something she worried about less before the internet. “In the past several years, some conversations, mostly in spaces faculty don’t have access to, have become more venomous, and cruel things are said––to, by, and about students,” she said. “That’s not right. So a student who came here who was really conservative, depending on what they said, might end up getting flamed out by somebody. And that would be unfortunate.”

Multiple faculty members expressed similar concerns: Many students and alums belong to a private email list that the college does not administer or control. It perennially results in a handful of students feeling bullied, some for being out of step with prevailing campus ideology. Rufo is correct to flag that dynamic. I found no evidence, though, for his claim that bullying students exploit the DEI bureaucracy “to isolate, shame, intimidate, and expel” others. (When I asked him for examples, Rufo revised his claim, charging instead that “the DEI bureaucracy turned a blind eye to harassment and bullying of conservative, white, and Christian students.”) But regardless, the campus “climate” is among the obstacles to recruiting and retaining more diverse students: Social stigma is hard anywhere, but especially intense on a tiny residential campus.

At the same time, New College students are adults with free-speech rights posting on a forum that is outside the control of the institution. If a few behave like jerks, they resemble bullies on every social-media platform. If you’re skeptical of college bureaucrats mandating “training” in “inclusion,” as Rufo and I both are, the question of how best to address a forum where some students are jerks is tricky, with no obvious answers. That, in my estimation, is why the problem endures, not because of any top-down support for the bullying. Contra Rufo’s narrative, the director of gender studies was actively working against bullying among students, as was New College’s former president.

Thomas Simonetti / The Washington Post / Getty

Nineteen months before the new trustees arrived, Patricia Okker became New College’s president. Perhaps no single action by the trustees has alienated the faculty and students more than firing her and replacing her with Richard Corcoran. Partly, that’s due to the perception that DeSantis’s appointees are lining the pockets of a political ally. Corcoran is a former Republican speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and was a former Florida education commissioner on DeSantis’ recommendation. For his work as interim president, the trustees awarded him a base salary of $699,000, or $400,000 more than Okker had earned, Inside Higher Ed reports. The article goes on to note that “Corcoran will receive an $84,000 annual housing stipend, a $12,000 automobile allowance and the potential to earn a 15 percent goal-based salary bonus.”

The trustees will decide if he gets the bonus.

Okker was generally liked and trusted by both faculty and students, several of whom told me that by firing her, the new trustees proved themselves to be either clueless or disingenuous. Okker’s fans felt she was focused on making the institution more friendly to conservatives even before the new trustees arrived.

I wasn’t able to speak in person with Okker, but she spoke to me by phone, and I reviewed many of her publicly available statements. Far from urging students to accept any set of beliefs uncritically, she explicitly emphasized that all good scholarly research begins with unanswered questions. “The best questions––this is what I always tell my students––are hard ones,” she declared in one major address on campus. “I especially love hard questions where you’re not exactly sure how to go about finding the answer, because that process is where we learn.”

Okker did disagree with the new trustees about diversity, equity, and inclusion. She told me that though she welcomed “opportunities to engage with the critics of DEI to find ways of improving our practices,” at bottom, “I strongly object to eliminating DEI.” She explained, “In more than 15 years in higher-education leadership, I have seen firsthand the benefits of thoughtful work in DEI, and DEI professionals often have significant experience mediating tense situations among people with strongly opposing views, an expertise we need more, not less, of.”

Searching Okker’s speeches for passages that might grate on conservatives, I thought that the most obvious candidates are paeans to diversity. “We must foster a sense of belonging—for all,” she said at her inauguration. “For example, we must ensure that the Black and brown members of our community experience a powerful sense of belonging here. We must make sure that our policies and processes create an environment where our LGBTQ+ students, faculty, and staff can thrive. We must ensure that our neurodiverse community members and people with disabilities and people with mental illnesses know that they are valued for the essential contributions they make.” Perhaps it is unnecessary, or counterproductive, to list identity groups in a bid to make everyone feel welcome; regardless, the next lines in Okker’s inauguration speech show that she sought to welcome other groups too.  

“We must develop new programs to create solutions to the national challenge of young men turning away from a college education, while also continuing to work for gender equity,” Okker said. “And we must ensure that people from all sides of the political spectrum are welcome here—not as visitors, but as valuable, respected, and necessary members of our community. Why is this our first charge? Because talent and creativity are not confined to any one demographic.” Surely this is not the “woke nihilism” that was ostensibly causing New College to struggle.

One of the first outside speeches she gave as president of New College was to the Military Officers Association of Sarasota as part of an effort to increase viewpoint diversity on campus. “I met a New College alumna who was a veteran, and she had a pretty rough experience,” Okker told me. “So you think, What about a veterans’ group on campus, how can we get that started? How can we reach out to more conservative high schools and not assume they’re not interested in sending us students just because they haven’t in the past? I reached out to conservative business organizations and conservative alumni, who felt, to be honest, really pissed off with the college. I thought of it as a year of laying a foundation, bringing together people who might help us change into a more welcoming place.”

She told me that though colleges should support all of their students, they should also challenge them. “I reject the idea that to support students you have to shield them from people who don’t share their politics,” she said. “We have to prepare them for that. I talked openly with people in student affairs about how, you know, we’re actually not doing our students any favors if they are so isolated from other points of view that they don’t develop the skills to interact with others. If they don’t know anybody who is conservative, someone that they really know and love and trust, that’s not going to serve them well in the workplace, or even at the holiday dinner table, where most encounter people with different views.”

Whether Okker would have been the best choice to continue as president is a judgment call. But the notion that she was pro-indoctrination or resistant to increasing viewpoint diversity is preposterous––and by firing her, the trustees lost a potential ally on many issues who was trusted by faculty and students.

“That’s the heartbreak for me: believing change would be good for all students, conservative students, liberal students, for the whole campus. And the way to do that is not to have chaos and fear, but to build trust,” she said. “Because to achieve real cultural change, you have to be methodical and disciplined and get everybody rowing in the same direction, committed to the mission. If instead, everyone is constantly asking, ‘Do I have a job?,’ that makes real cultural change, which takes a lot of hard work and dedication, harder.”

The notion of the struggle for control of tiny New College as a fight of national importance, let alone a blueprint for academic takeovers everywhere, strikes some as absurd. “Is this bug important enough to step on?” the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin asked in a Substack post. Yarvin suggested that if DeSantis really wanted a Hillsdale of the South, he would go about it differently. “Does Florida have some shortage of land, or of builders? How hard is it to pour a little concrete, hire a bunch of nerdy classics victims and STEM postdocs, and put up a quirky viral application site? Start now and really hustle—by September, you’ll be teaching Virgil to homeschooled virgins on occupied Seminole land.”

[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

Yarvin and others suggest that DeSantis targeted New College not because he saw potential for a model that he could next apply to a school like Florida State University, with its more than 30,000 undergraduates, huge faculty, and numerous graduates in the state legislature, but because New College was a small, flailing, defenseless target with a hippie reputation. In this telling, it is too sui generis to yield a model for reform, but close to perfect, in a time of negative polarization, for a politically advantageous spectacle akin to punching hippies: baiting New College students, then filming the most radical, who ideally have blue hair, facial piercings, or gender-nonconforming dress, to mock them as they intemperately shriek “Fascists!”

DeSantis partisans, though, insist that the takeover is more than a PR stunt and fundraising gambit. Many progressives also perceive the stakes to be substantive. For DeSantis, the fight over New College is part of a broader quest to crush any hint of progressivism in public education, Michelle Goldberg argued in her New York Times column. She added that, for Rufo, a reconstructed New College would serve as a model for conservatives all over the country to copy. Whether or not New College is similar enough to other institutions to offer lessons for reforming them, I expect its fate will be treated as a sign of whether conservative takeovers can work elsewhere. If it succeeds, others will follow; if it fails, confidence in DeSantis will take a hit.

In Rufo’s telling, they’ve already won some major victories, too.

On February 28, the New College board of trustees voted to eliminate the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence. The next day, Rufo took a victory lap on Twitter. “We are the first university in America to abolish its DEI bureaucracy and restore the principle of colorblind equality,” he wrote. “‘Diversity, equity, and inclusion’ is a euphemism for left-wing racialist ideology.”  

The trustees voted after hearing a report by Bradley Thiessen, an administrator whom they temporarily made president and instructed to survey the entire institution to clarify the scope of DEI. Exactly how big and influential was the bureaucracy that Rufo repeatedly cast as running and ruining the college?

As it turns out, the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence, where almost all DEI work was housed, had four staffers and a total annual budget of $440,000. Of those employees, just one worked mostly on DEI initiatives: Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, the DEI dean hired in 2022 and fired this month. Tasks performed by others in the office included compliance with federal and state laws and requirements of accreditors, teaching financial literacy to students, and outreach to prospective students. The new trustees and president are preserving many of those functions, and continuing to employ three of the four staffers, in different administrative units.

Thiessen also found that the college had one online training course in DEI that it called mandatory (though 70 to 75 percent of the faculty failed to complete it without consequence) and that, recently, the college had started requiring applicants for faculty jobs to complete a diversity statement. Under the new regime, the training session will no longer be mandatory and the diversity statements will no longer be required. Those are, I think, good changes that should be cheered by everyone who values the independence of faculty or objects to the politicization of hiring scholars. I credit Rufo and all the trustees who voted with him on that matter.

But most of Rufo’s rhetoric about the size, scope, and power of the college’s DEI bureaucracy was nonsense. One tiny office required very little of anyone in theory––and even less in practice.

On some level, Rufo seemed to grasp the dissonance between his initial rhetoric about DEI at New College and its reality. “I’m actually quite happy to see this report, to see what the status quo is, and for those who are concerned about disruption, this is really not as great of a disruption as even maybe I would have predicted,” he said at the meeting where the trustees heard Thiessen’s report. “But these are decisions based on principle.” But later, he emailed me that “you have to look at this on a proportionate, rather than absolute, basis.” New College is tiny, so “on a per capita basis, this is a large DEI department,” he argued, adding that “as the old phrase goes, one rotten apple ruins the bunch.”

A principled opposition to DEI bureaucracies of any size is fine. In the populist-right media ecosystem, however, the audience still believes that DEI run amok was among the biggest problems at New College––and that eliminating it was a major step toward turning the college around. “You are really engaged in what I would really call a liberation tactic,” the conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager told Rufo during a recent interview. “It’s like when the Berlin Wall fell down and how much the East German authorities were disgusted by it. I think the parallel, unfortunately, is actually almost precise.” In fact, every significant problem at New College long predated the DEI bureaucracy and remains just as challenging after the board’s actions. And that isn’t the only reason that most of New College is not greeting the new trustees as liberators.

Calls by DeSantis, Rufo, and others to axe whole academic departments are a bigger threat to academic freedom at the college than the one DEI dean was. And if gender studies is eliminated? That will likely make it more difficult for the college to retain and recruit excellent faculty members in all disciplines, undermining the quality of the academic program that is New College’s biggest strength while in no way fixing any of the factors that are keeping enrollment low.

But in Rufo’s telling, there is no contradiction between calling himself a champion of free speech and free inquiry and targeting departments he regards as “ideologically captured” for dissolution. “Academic freedom is a procedural value that must be oriented toward some highest end, namely, the discovery and transmission of genuine knowledge,” he emailed me. “If an academic department in a public university is oriented toward promoting partisan ideologies and engaging in political activism,” he continued, begging both of those questions, “it is betraying the highest principle of the academic enterprise and, as such, violating the implicit compact with the university and, in the context of public universities, the legislators, citizens, and taxpayers who support them with generous public funding.”

Trying to change New College by attacking “wokeness” is a bit like trying to change the NYPD by attacking white supremacy––poke around and you may find examples of either, but these are complex institutions with cultures that emerged over decades, that shaped and were shaped by individuals, most of them both well-intentioned and also prone to reflexively resisting radical transformation.

As an admirer of New College’s faculty, students, and curricular approach, and as a critic of leftist excesses in higher education, I would love nothing more than for New College to emerge as a model for transforming institutions with too little viewpoint diversity into thriving colleges. Beyond that, I would love the trustees to find ways to mitigate the Ph.D.-pipeline problem that leads to most faculties in America being overwhelmingly left-leaning.

And I’m glad to see pushback against DEI administrators in higher education, as I don’t want faculty or students at any college to be stifled by bureaucrats who impose notions of right-think and wrong-think, whether through top-down control or by leveraging social stigma. But this can happen in the guise of “wokeness” and “anti-wokeness,” and I object to both on the same grounds.

Rufo once bragged, “I’ve spent the last two years reading my Gramsci, reading my Marcuse, reading my Freire, reading my Davis, reading my Derek Bell. We’re taking those strategies, we’re reappropriating them, we’re adapting them to a new conservative counterrevolution, and … it starts with this hostile takeover of the New College of Florida and on the beaches of Sarasota.” By treating New College as a means to the end of advancing the ideological program he pursued long before arriving, no matter how poorly that program’s grievances map onto it, Rufo, more than any administrator or professor I encountered in Sarasota, strikes me as enthralled by the romance of marching through an institution in the zealous style of leftist radicals like Herbert Marcuse.

To be a good trustee, he’ll have to master that impulse. That’s no way to improve a college, let alone colleges on a national scale. Maybe there’s a failing college out there where DEI bureaucrats are ruining everything and the key is to retake power from them. New College isn’t it.

Last week, a district court judge in New York ruled on Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, a case that is likely to shape how we read books on smartphones, tablets, and computers in the future. Although the case hinged on technical details of copyright law, the source of the conflict is much less abstract. It’s a story about the halting, uneasy transition of books from paper to digital formats, and the anxiety of publishers and frustration of librarians about that change. The decision—which was in favor of the publishers—will add to librarians’ frustrations. It will impoverish readers across the country seeking access to digital books, and over time diminish the library as a democratic institution that provides broad collections to everyone.

In the spring of 2020, when nearly all libraries suddenly closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that preserves and provides open access to a wide range of media online, and which is designated as a library in its home state of California, expanded a program that allows those who have registered on its website to electronically borrow scanned copies of printed books in its possession. Although many of these digitized books were still in copyright, the Internet Archive asserted the justness of this program not only by the special circumstances of shutdowns but also by appealing to a novel concept called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL).

CDL, developed as a legal theory a bit more than a decade ago by the Georgetown University professor and law librarian Michelle Wu, asserts that libraries have a right to create digital surrogates for their collections, enabling each library to loan out either the digital version or the hard copy of any material it owns (but not both at the same time). To its advocates, CDL represents an extension of normal library operations from the physical to the digital realm, and a helpful service to library patrons. For publishers, CDL represents an unruly library practice and a threat to their profits.

On Friday, the judge sided almost entirely with the publishers. The Internet Archive “argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet,” Judge John G. Koeltl wrote in his pointed ruling. “But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers.”

The Internet Archive plans to appeal the ruling, but if the decision stands, libraries will lose the agency to digitize and lend the print books they have collected and stewarded, and instead will have to defer to, and pay, publishers for separate digital editions of in-copyright books. Over time, this ruling may change the very nature of libraries—how they operate, their finances, whom they are able to serve, and the breadth of their collections.

Nearly all forms of human expression are now consumed mostly via the transmissible bits that assemble themselves into the words you are reading. Vinyl may be having a vogue resurgence, but most music listeners use streaming services. Newspapers that survived the digital transition may still have a print edition, but most subscribers read their news in a web browser or on a handheld device.

Books, by contrast, have been stuck in a more partial metamorphosis. In 2021, about 30 percent of Americans reported that they had read an e-book, up from 25 percent in 2019. That represents a significant part of the market for books, but many people still find acquiring e-books hard, don’t like the current experience of reading them, or can’t find a desired book in a digital version.

[Read: E-books are an abomination]

If you want to read a physical book, you have many options: a local library, an independent bookstore, a Barnes & Noble, and many online booksellers, Amazon the largest among them.

If you want to read that same book in a digital edition, the options are far more limited. You can buy it in an instant from Amazon, which is even more dominant in e-books than print books, or you can borrow it from your local library, to which I say: good luck. Anyone who has used a library app such as Libby will be familiar with the long wait times for many e-books; hold queues stretch on for months—if a digital copy exists at all.

Publishers seem to be doing just fine with this friction around digital library books. After a brutal decline following the Great Recession, print-book sales are up 33 percent in the past 10 years. If the high costs and complexity of the e-book market for libraries pushes more readers to purchase print books (or e-books), that is a feature, not a bug, for the publishers.

This is a challenging state of affairs for librarians, however, who seek to serve readers of all means in equitable ways. Libraries have dramatically increased their spending on e-books but still cannot come close to meeting demand, which unsurprisingly rose during the pandemic. Because publishers view each circulation of a library e-book as a potential missed sale, they have little incentive to reduce costs for libraries or make it easier for libraries to lend digital copies.

All digital transitions have had losers, some of whom we may care about more than others. Musicians seem to have a raw deal in the streaming age, receiving fractions of pennies for streams when they used to get dollars for the sales of physical media. Countless regional newspapers went out of business in the move to the web and the disappearance of lucrative classified advertising. The question before society, with even a partial transition to digital books, is: Do we want libraries to be the losers?

Unfortunately, it is looking like they will be, and this ruling represents another serious loss. Most libraries do not even own e-books in the true sense of ownership. The best they can do is to license e-books for a limited time, or for a limited number of circulations, before they have to pay again. Even with these restrictions, e-book prices for libraries are much higher than for individuals—up to four times as much for a two-year, rather than a perpetual, license. Librarians are thus forced to make painful decisions: Should the library have a diverse collection, with a wide variety of authors and genres, or license many copies of the most popular books to reduce those long wait times? The worst part is that if libraries stop paying each year to renew e-book licenses, those e-books will simply disappear, unlike the books on the shelves.

This led to the central question behind the lawsuit: Libraries have stored and cared for physical books for decades, and if readers are becoming more comfortable with online formats, why can’t a library digitize the volumes it owns and loan the digital copies in lieu of the physical ones?

Controlled Digital Lending emerged as a powerful, appealing answer to that question. Under CDL, libraries retain physical copies of books when the e-book edition is checked out, so it is as though only one copy exists, though it exists both digitally and physically, maintaining a 1:1 “owned to loaned” ratio. The e-books are wrapped in a digital lock to prevent further copying or distribution and self-destruct after the period of the loan is over.

CDL is useful for when a reader might be distant from a library or prefer a digital edition to a print one. A good portion of many large library collections, such as my own at Northeastern University, are stored in remote storage facilities these days, while many libraries serve widely distributed community members (we have 14 campuses in three countries). Scanning and transmitting a book file via the internet is more efficient and eco-friendly than shipping a print book both ways. (Northeastern also licenses well more than 1 million e-books.)

This theory was primarily academic—literally and figuratively—until the pandemic began and the Internet Archive enlarged its CDL program. Publishers had been uneasy about CDL since its inception, but notably, despite the Internet Archive’s use of CDL for years, including before COVID, publishers filed a lawsuit only when the Internet Archive briefly went beyond the 1:1 ratio, allowing multiple copies of each book it possessed to circulate. In their public statements and filings with the court, the plaintiff publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House—backed by the Association of American Publishers, nevertheless sought to discredit CDL entirely.

This framing and timing by the publishers and their lawyers was clearly designed to put CDL in the most negative light, but if we pull back the camera to observe the wider, rockier landscape for digital books, we can understand the discontent of libraries and their interest in CDL. Libraries paid for their print books and some now wish to use them in a different format, under the same rules, rather than pay for the books again in a new medium—or, really, to rent them. And because libraries generally do not take possession of the e-book files they rent from publishers, their crucial role as long-term preservers of culture has been severed from their role as institutions that provide democratic access—a striking change.

Those of us in academic libraries have seen this film before. Two decades ago, we started to shift our collection spending to digital versions of scholarly resources. Physical journals on the shelves turned into e-journals; buying became renting. Then the publishers raised the prices for these licenses year after year, and the cost of digital surrogates quickly became a significant budget line, then a majority of spending on collections, then 90 percent or more of what a research library spends in a year for academic materials. This shift in our financial spreadsheets happened in tandem with a shift in what we have and what we do as librarians. E-journals, especially those in the scientific, technical, and medical fields, with exorbitant licenses, crowded out resources in other fields, such as the humanities.

This story arc is now being replicated at public libraries with e-books. As they argued in court, publishers believe that libraries should simply spend more on licenses. But public libraries have highly constrained budgets, and in the pursuit of shorter hold queues, this spending will naturally gravitate toward multiple copies of the same e-books, a sliver of the book market—high-demand genres, recently released books, and best sellers—thereby reducing the library’s scope.

Why not spend collection funds instead on print books? Doesn’t most of the public still prefer print to digital? That may be true for now in public libraries, but look at what has happened in academic libraries: The books on the shelves have largely turned into wallpaper as students and faculty have become more comfortable with digital formats. If public libraries follow the same trajectory, in the future they will become shells of their former selves: renters of small collections rather than owners of large ones.

In short, if Controlled Digital Lending sought to provide an alternative pathway for the possession and use of digital books, it did so only after a new, highly constrained marketplace arose that disadvantages the mission of libraries. The frustration libraries feel about this state of affairs has reached a high enough level that bills are making their way through a number of state legislatures trying to regulate the library-e-book market. Last year also saw the launch of a library-centric nonprofit marketplace for e-books, The Palace Project.

Libraries and librarians are not rule breakers, but they are passionate about their mission, and these initiatives are a sign of the intensity of their dismay. The Internet Archive is as close as we get to the aggressive Silicon Valley stereotype of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. But it is worth remembering that had the Internet Archive not started copying and preserving websites in the 1990s without such permission, a significant part of human expression over the past three decades would have been lost forever. Undoubtedly many writers use the riches of the Internet Archive for their own work and value the access it provides to multiple media. If the Internet Archive slightly overstepped in this case, suing it in response seems like an even bigger overstep, using the lawsuit to permanently discredit CDL, which some libraries see as helpful for their scattered patrons.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: The librarians are not okay]

Right now even the most retiring librarian will tell you that the ecosystem for books is out of balance, and CDL is one small attempt to level the playing field between those who produce and distribute books and those who steward them for many years after publication. A sensible compromise would be to permit the original, modest version of CDL while restricting multiple simultaneous circulations from one physical copy. With its PDF scans and broad focus, including on the long list of books that do not have digital surrogates, a library-based program for digitized books is not much of a threat to the modern, tailored e-book formats that readers prefer for recent works.

State-based legislative attempts to make the e-book market more reasonable for libraries may also fail—a Maryland bill was struck down by a federal judge last year after publishers furiously objected. Last week in court, a lawyer for the publishers argued that libraries could always go to the U.S. Congress to change the law in their favor, which seemed especially cold. Perhaps a library-e-book rider could be tucked into a bill to raise the debt ceiling? Should the publishers win across the board, publishers’ profits may improve slightly, and writers may see some incremental income.

In the long run, however, maybe not. After all, libraries are where the love of reading is inculcated, and hurting libraries diminishes the growth of new readers, which in turn may reverse the recent upward trend in book sales. This will be particularly true for communities with fewer resources to devote to equitable access. Ultimately, we should all seek to maximize the availability of books, through as many reasonable methods as we can find. The library patron who is today checking out an e-book, or a digitized book through Controlled Digital Lending—should the practice be upheld on appeal—will be the enthusiastic customer at the bookstore tomorrow.

Two years ago I published a book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. The book explores how different historical sites across the United States—including monuments, memorials, and museums—reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. After the book came out, one of the main questions I got from readers asked where public memory was being engaged with more proactively and thoughtfully than what we so often see here in America. I would frequently invoke Germany, citing the work it had done to memorialize the Holocaust. But there came a point where I realized that I was citing the memorials in Germany without having spent any time with the memorials in Germany.

So I traveled to Germany to examine its landscape of memory for myself. I visited the homes from which Jewish families were taken, the train stations from which they were deported, the concentration camps where they were held, the crematoriums where bodies were burned.

I had conversations with Jewish Germans as well as Americans living in Germany, in an effort to understand how we might place the way America memorializes slavery in conversation with the way Germany memorializes the Holocaust.

What I learned is that the story of German memorialization is complex, multifaceted, and still evolving. Just like the story of America’s.

-Clint Smith

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Caitlin Dickerson: So what did you expect to find in Germany? I mean, were you essentially going to pick up lessons for the U.S.? Were you starting to become a little bit skeptical of Germany as this ideal for reckoning and atonement? I mean, what did you have in mind as you set out on this trip?

Clint Smith: I think in part, I went to Germany to put it in conversation with the process of memorialization here in the United States.

Dickerson: I’m Caitlin Dickerson. Today on Radio Atlantic, staff writer Clint Smith on the Holocaust, America’s legacy of slavery, and what it means to memorialize tragedy.

Smith: So it wasn’t necessarily to compare and contrast as much as it was an attempt to say, okay, “What’s happening in Germany, what’s happening in the United States? In what ways are these processes in conversation with one another?” America in so many places fails to properly memorialize and remember and account for its relationship to the history of slavery; what’s a place that does this well?

Dickerson: So where in Germany did you go to try to figure this out?

Smith: I went to a range of different places, including the House of the Wannsee Conference, which is this idyllic mansion outside of Berlin where the leaders of the Nazi party got together to outline and plan the contours of the Final Solution.

Clint: I’m here standing outside of the House of the Wannsee Conference. Already by the time they met here, people had been killed in mass murders—but this is where they would plan out how they would kill millions more. There’s a profound sort of juxtaposition between the scenery and the idyllic nature of it, and the terrible thing that was planned inside of it. Behind it is this lake with sailboats that are slowly passing by. The water sort of lapping against the shore. Can hear birds and wind chimes. It’s a strange thing. It’s a very strange thing.

Smith: If you could say your name and your position...

Deborah Hartmann: Okay. So my name is Deborah Hartmann.

Smith: And one of the people that I spoke to when I went to the House of the Wannsee Conference was Deborah Hartmann, who is the director of that museum. And one of the things we talked about in particular that I found really fascinating was the need to focus on not only the victims of the Holocaust, but also the perpetrators.

Hartmann: I think we have to learn something about the perspective of the perpetrators and not only about the perpetrators but also about the bystanders, and all those who were in a way involved. And this could be the neighbor who was not a member of the Nazi party, but who was just hanging around and had a nice view out of the window seeing neighbors being deported.

Smith: Which was so many people.

Hartmann: Yeah, of course.

Smith: It’s interesting, because I think part of what this place does, in some ways, is humanizes both the victims and the perpetrators.

Hartmann: Yes. And it is important, I think—because, of course, they were human beings as well. And, you know, in the afternoon, people who participated in the mass shootings wrote nice letters to their families at home.

Smith: They killed people in the morning, and wrote letters to their family and their children in the afternoon.

Hartmann: Exactly. And this is maybe what’s so difficult for us to understand. And to live with it.

Dickerson: She’s challenging, in a few different ways, the oversimplification of narratives around the Holocaust. And also: Humanizing the perpetrators is worth doing, because actually, human beings perpetrated this. It wasn’t fantastical characters of evil, but actual human beings.

Smith: Yeah; I think one of the things that she takes very seriously in her work is ensuring that we are not falling into the trap of reducing the people who are part of this history into two-dimensional caricatures of themselves.

Hartmann: And you know, then you suddenly see that the history is much more ambivalent, and it’s much more complicated. And today, I think that the Germans actually are very proud of what they have achieved in terms of confrontation, like with the past and coming to terms. But I think it becomes difficult when they feel—I don’t know, the term in English—maybe relieved. You understand what I mean?

Smith: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Hartmann: Because then it can turn into a very problematic direction.

Smith: This idea that “We’ve already done it.”

Hartmann: I mean, here you can see: Okay, this is still very challenging, I think, for Germans. Even in the fourth generation today. How can it be okay that my family was somehow involved in those atrocities?

Deidre Berger: I mean, there wasn’t really a confrontation until the ’60s, when the young generation started asking their parents what they did during the war.

Smith: Deidre Berger is an American woman who’s lived in Germany for many years. And both in America and in Germany, she has been deeply involved in Jewish organizations and Jewish advocacy groups, to ensure that Jewish people and Jewish history are accounted for. And the two of us got together on a chilly day in October at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin.

Berger: And we had the Nuremberg trials in the late ’40s. There were the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the early/mid-1960s. And still, most perpetrators were never accused or tried or charged. And there was the attitude of “Let’s leave it behind us.”

This—this went right into the heart of families, and it tore families apart. And so they’d rather not talk about it. When I came to Germany in the mid-1980s, there was not much of a confrontation within families. So it took a very long time. A lot of the international climate was such that I think more of an understanding evolved, at least in the German political elite, of the importance of confronting the Holocaust, and also on the grassroots level.

So the 1960s is when the grassroots movement started in Germany to try and understand better what had happened in my town, what happened to the Jews. And there were quite a lot of good-minded Germans who pursued projects, who invited former members of their community who were Jewish, back to their towns. And out of this movement grew the idea that there needed to be a national monument. So it was a complicated conglomeration of interests that led to the establishment of this monument. I don’t know that there was one government who said, “You have to do this,” but it was an understanding in Germany that this was important to have a national symbol of recognition of German guilt for what had happened.

Dickerson: Clint, what does this monument—this symbol of recognition that she’s describing—actually look like?

Smith: So, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a 200,000-square-foot memorial at the heart of downtown Berlin. And when I say at the heart of downtown Berlin, I really mean it. It’s almost as if a massive memorial to slavery was placed in front of the White House. That’s sort of the first thing you notice. And it’s made up of more than 2,000 stone columns that are of different heights. And as you walk through the stone columns, it’s almost maze-like. And the ground beneath the columns rises and falls like waves, and so at different points within the space, you know, you have different amounts of light. So sometimes as your body moves down, it’ll get darker and darker.

And I think it’s a place that is meant to be haunting and overwhelming. But what’s also true is that it is a place that has become such an enmeshed part of the landscape. People are driving to work, people are walking their dogs, people are running. There are people who have obviously come there to engage with the space. And so I would see people who were crying and holding hands, sort of gently touching the stones as if it could sort of transport them back to this moment. There were also small children who were playing hide and seek—and so different people engage with the space in fundamentally different ways. And I think in some ways, that’s inevitable. But it’s also something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

There are many people who’ve commented that the very name is too passive—the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. That it doesn’t talk about who did the murdering. There are those who say it’s too abstract. There are no names on the columns, but there are also those who believe that its size and its scale and its scope is unlike anything that any other country has ever done.

Smith: Do you remember when you first came here—when you first saw it and experienced it?

Berger: Yeah, when it was opened in 2005. I find it…very cold. And I’m not sure that I need this much concrete detail with all these stones to grasp the dimensions of this crime. But different people have different reactions. I think in the Jewish community, my reaction was fairly widespread. But on the other hand, I mean—I think there was a certain acceptance and degree of relief, almost, that there was a Holocaust monument that was finally erected in the heart of Berlin, very close to the German Parliament.

Smith: Oh, the German Parliament.

Berger: And that’s just on the other side, basically. And that was meaningful.

Smith: There’s nothing that Japan has built to account for Japanese imperialism of this scale. There’s nothing that the United States has built to account for a history of Indigenous genocide or chattel slavery. You know—this sort of thing at this size doesn’t exist anywhere [else]. And so different people fall on different ends of the spectrum about whether they think it is a space that is a net positive or not, whether it’s a place that does more good or more harm. And that was one of the things that I learned a lot from my conversation with Deidre Berger and others.

Berger: I’m not complaining, I think it is quite remarkable. Let’s keep in mind that in the center of a major city, a country acknowledges its guilt at genocide.

Dickerson: Berger talks about this desire already in the 1940s among some to move on and to forget. I’m interested in that impulse. I remember interviewing David Romo. He’s a historian of the U.S.-Mexico border and actually found that it was the U.S. Border Patrol that began using Zyklon B in its own gas chambers. That helped to inspire German scientists, who then brought them to Germany, turned up the potency of—of the solution and—and used it to kill Jewish people. He talked about amnesia and about forgetting as a response to shame—on both the sides of the perpetrators, but also the victims. It sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about just how dangerous that can be.

Smith: Yeah;, I think that we have seen the direct implications of that. I mean, here in the United States, there was a very intentional, proactive attempt to distort and push aside the story of chattel slavery and what the Civil War was fought over. The idea perpetuated by the widows and the sisters and the mothers—who lost their husbands, brothers, who lost their sons, their nephews—that grief animated a desire to tell a very different story of who these men were and what they had died for. Because they didn’t want to remember their loved ones as someone who died perpetuating evil. They wanted to remember them with love. They began to talk about how slavery wasn’t central to the Civil War. How even if slavery had been central to the Civil War, it wasn’t even that bad; it was a benign or even a civilizing institution. And even if someone wasn’t actively perpetuating and disseminating misrepresentations about the Civil War and slavery, what there was was silence about it. And it’s interesting, because in Germany, there was its own version of silence after the end of the war—and it took generations before these monuments would be built. And this silence was eradicated.

Dickerson: Clint, you saw a lot of memorials while you were in Germany. Which ones stuck out to you most?

Smith: I remember the first time I saw the Stolpersteine, which are the brass stones that are placed in front of the former residences, or places of worship or places of work, of people who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis.

It was started by a guy named Gunter Demnig in 1996, whose own father was a Nazi soldier. And in many ways, this art project that he began seems to be a part of his own contrition.

And so these brass stones, these 10-by-10-centimeter stones, are placed in front of these homes—and they have the birthday, the death date, the deportation date of the people who were taken from these homes. This is the largest decentralized memorial in the world. And you’ll be walking down the streets of Berlin, and there will be two stumbling stones. And then you walk a little further down, and in front of another home there will be four. And in front of another home there will be seven. In front of another home, there will be 12.

Smith: Where are you from originally in the States?

Jennifer Neal: Uh, short answer: We moved a lot.

Smith: Got it.

Neal: But I tell everybody I’m from Chicago, because that’s the last American city I lived in before I left.

Smith: I met up with Jennifer Neal, who is an author and a journalist who lives in Berlin, calls Chicago home, and is a Black woman who is thinking about how Germany memorializes its past and is comparing it to how the United States is remembering its own past. And one of the things we talked about was the Stolpersteine and how prevalent they are, and in so many ways how effective they are.

Neal: I love that memorial, because it doesn’t give anybody an excuse to forget. And if you are one of those people who lives in the building that was formerly occupied by that victim, you see that every single day. And I think it’s one of the most brilliant memorials anywhere.

Smith: Hmm. Do you think that we could do something like that in the States? You know, I can’t help but wonder what a version of that tied to slavery would look like.

Neal: I mean, I’d be extremely curious to see what that looked like. I think in general, the United States hasn’t done jack shit enough to atone for slavery. I mean, where to begin? I think that’s the real question. I would love to see something along the lines of the Stolpersteine done in the United States, but I wouldn’t want it to stop there. I would want to see memorials like that all over the South and the North as well, to commemorate how slaves escaped from the South and went and moved to the North. I would love to see memorials like that to commemorate the victims who were forcibly sterilized in the United States.

I would love to see memorials to the victims of white flight and the housing crisis in Chicago. I would love to see memorials to the Great Migration. I would love to see memorials of all sorts like that. Will that happen? That’s where the question mark is.

Smith: It’s almost like if we did it, it would be the entire street—you know, because it’s 250 years. I mean, in front of Monticello. Like, what would that do to somebody when they entered that place?

Neal: Well, yeah; that’s a really powerful idea, because I know that a lot of the plantations have been rebranded as, like, venues for weddings and parties. And there are still so many people who don’t seem to understand or know why the U.S. Civil War was fought to begin with. And these plantations don’t really seem to be advertising what happened there. I think it’s also part of the problem.

Smith: But not everybody’s a huge fan of the stumbling stones or how ubiquitous they are. And Deidre Berger has her own complicated feelings about them.

Berger: Why should we be stepping on the memories of the victims? If anyone it should be perpetrators, although I’m not one for revenge or vindication, I don’t think we should step on people, whatever kind of person they were. There should be plaques on the wall. Why aren’t they? Because most of the owners of buildings wouldn’t accept, even to this day, a plaque saying Here’s where a Jewish family lived. And that’s the truth. And that’s not what people talk about. There’s a lot of reverence sometimes for this project that I’ve encountered, and people who work on it—sort of “I’ve done my penance now.” There’s enormous projections with this project on dead Jews.

Would it work in the States? I just don’t know. I’m not sure that it would, because there’s not a feeling of penance in the same way—of responsibility, unfortunately. And the time span [since the Civil War] is much further. I mean why shouldn’t we? But it’s the reality.

Dickerson: So, Clint, you went to Germany to better understand how it remembers the Holocaust and to put these two very different sets of circumstances in conversation with one another. In the United States, because of the very specific way in which slaves had been extracted from their homes and then were further separated from family, people pretty much know, right—as much as you and I do—that we’re the descendants of enslaved people. And the story often ends there.

You don’t have people who can walk around and tell their relatives’ very specific story from the beginning. I wonder if that plays a role. And can you talk about some of the other differences between the ways that they remember this past?

Smith: Yeah. You know, the most obvious is that there are still people who are alive today who survived the Holocaust. Another big difference is that in Germany there just aren’t many Jewish people left. Less than 200,000 Jewish people in Germany—which is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. And that’s very different than in the United States, where there are 40 million Black people.

Dickerson: Right. And I wonder, you know, did you come away thinking that anything like what’s happened in Germany could happen in the United States? And what would that take?

Smith: I think in the United States, it’s a question of scale, right? I mean, there are people in different parts of the United States who are building memorials and museums that are meant to directly account for this history. You know, I think about the Witness Stone Project in Connecticut, that was started by a group of middle-school and high-school educators who, along with their students—having been inspired by the Stolpersteine in Germany—would put down similar stones in places where enslaved people lived. And they’ve been doing that project for several years. It is happening.

And I think what is true is what I think is true in Germany: that the most meaningful monuments don’t necessarily have to be state sanctioned. I think so often, the most important memorials and museums and monuments are the ones that are created in local communities. And it is ordinary people who will be the ones to help this country see its history with clear eyes and honesty, even when this country tries to look the other way.

Dickerson: I mean will you continue to invoke Germany in your talks, and will you continue to think of it as a type of model for remembering the past?

Smith: I will continue to invoke Germany, though with a level of nuance and an additional acknowledgement of its complexity than perhaps I did before. And my hope is to continue thinking about this question. I’ve kind of become obsessed with how people remember the past.

Dickerson: I even wonder if this nuance makes it feel more accessible to Americans. You know, it’s not the case that all of German society rallied around these memorials, that everybody agreed that it was the right way to go. There’s something that makes it feel more accessible as a source of inspiration, knowing that it was fraught work. It still is today. And yet, you know, it’s been done again and again.

Smith: Yeah, it makes it feel less distant; it makes it feel less unachievable. You know, we’re in a moment right now where reckoning looks different than it has at any other point in my lifetime. Which isn’t to say it has been linear or perfect, or without backlash. But even amid the backlash, I think [it] still reflects an opportunity and a moment that is ripe for these sorts of memorials and monuments to come about.

Dickerson: Thanks so much, Clint. I really appreciate this conversation.

Smith: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having it with me.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez and Theo Balcomb, with editing from Claudine Ebeid. Thanks to producer Ethan Brooks and our engineer, Rob Smierciak. I’m Caitlin Dickerson.