In January of 2023 Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new trustees at New College of Florida in Sarasota, and they immediately set about to change the state’s public honors college. They first replaced the school’s president, Dr. Patricia Okker with Richard Corcoran — he’s a former Republican speaker of the Florida House and Florida Education Commissioner — and increased his base salary by nearly $400,000 more than Dr. Okker’s. They also abolished the office at New College that handles diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and shut down the school’s Gender Studies program, among many other changes.
One of the new trustees is right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who is best known for his work campaigning against Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. At the time Mr. Rufo tweeted: “We will be shutting down low-performing ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.”
As all of this was playing out, a team of filmmakers which included New College alumni were documenting events on campus, from the Board of Trustee meetings to just students spending time on campus. They also shared time with the student staff of the school’s newspaper, The Catalyst, which has since shut down.
Now, the new documentary film “First They Came for My College” is making the rounds at film festivals, including premiering at the prestigious True/False Fest in Columbia, Missouri and playing South by Southwest. It will be screened at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando, which kicks off this weekend. We talk with the film's director and one of its producers.
Guests:
Patrick Bresnan is a filmmaker, and director of “First They Came for My College.” He directed and shot THE RABBIT HUNT which premiered in the US at Sundance and in Europe at the Berlinale. The film won over 20 awards including the Cinema Eye Honor. He co-directed and short SKIP DAY which won the grand jury prize at The Directors Fortnight at Cannes. He co-directed, shot and produced the feature film PAHOKEE which premiered in competition in 2019 at Sundance. The following year he was a cinematographer on the Sundance winning feature BOYS STATE. His feature NAKED GARDENS premiered in the 2022 documentary competition at Tribeca and in Europe at IDFA. His short THE PASSING won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.
Harry William Hanbury is a documentary filmmaker, journalist and former high school history teacher, and is one of the producers of “First They Came for My College.” Hanbury is a New College alumnus himself, class of 1993.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Mike Kiniry
From WGCU News, this is Gulf Coast Life. I'm Mike Kiniry. Thanks for joining us. In January of 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed 6 new trustees at New College of Florida in Sarasota, and they immediately set about to change the state's public honors college. They first replaced the school's president, Dr. Patricia Ocher, with Richard Corcoran. He's a former Republican Speaker of the House and Florida Education Commissioner. and increased his base salary by nearly $400,000 more than Dr. Ocher's. They also abolished the office at New College that handles diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and shut down the school's gender studies program, among many other changes on campus.
One of the new trustees is right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who's best known for his work campaigning against critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. At the time, Mr. Rufo tweeted, "we will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time. Some current students will self-select out. Others will graduate. We'll recruit new students who are mission-aligned."
As all of this was playing out, a team of filmmakers, which included new college alumni, were documenting events on campus, from the board of trustee meetings to just students spending time together. They also shared time with the student staff of the school's newspaper, The Catalyst, which has since shut down. Now the new documentary film telling that story, "First They Came for My College," is making the rounds at film festivals, including premiering at the prestigious True/False Festival in Columbia, Missouri, and they played South by Southwest.
It will be screened at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando, which kicks off this weekend. I spoke last Thursday with the film's director and one of its producers. Let's hear that conversation now. Patrick Bresnan is a filmmaker and director and producer of the new documentary film, First They Came for My College. Welcome to the show, Patrick.
Patrick Bresnan
Thank you so much. What an honor to be here.
Mike Kiniry
And Harry William Hanbury is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and former high school history teacher and one of the producers of First They Came for My College. And he's a new college alumnus himself. Welcome to the show to you as well, Harry.
Harry William Hanbury
Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here.
Mike Kiniry
So I'd like to start with a bit of background on each of you. Let's start with you, Patrick. Tell us just a bit about yourself. and the focus of the work that you do.
Patrick Bresnan
Sure. I've made the majority of my work with my wife, Yvette Lucas, in Central Florida, Palm Beach County specifically. We worked for about four years in the little village of Pahokee, Florida, making short films about high school kids and a feature film called Pahokee that played at Sundance. And then after that, we wanted to make something a little bit more radical. And we stumbled into a nudist resort in Loxahatchee, Florida. So we made a feature film about a Florida nudist resort. And I also lived part-time in Austin, Texas, where I met a wonderful new college alum named Holly Herrick, who is the head of the Austin Film Society. And she reached out to me one day and said, my college has been taken over by the governor, and I need you to go on a shoot and document it. And so the New College film will be the third documentary feature length that I've made in Florida.
Mike Kiniry
I was going to ask you how it came across your radar, and you just explained it. Had you ever been to New College or know anybody besides her who'd been there before getting into this project? Did you have some kind of background knowledge already?
Patrick Bresnan
You know, I didn't even know about New College. If I had known about it, I would have most likely gone to college there. I went to college in San Francisco because I thought it was the kind of the most exciting, radical place I could go to college. But if I had known new college kids and about the school, I would have definitely applied.
Mike Kiniry
Harry, tell us a bit about yourself and the work that you do.
Harry William Hanbury
Yeah, so I've since graduated from Duke College with a degree in philosophy and sociology. I ended up working in documentary and did documentaries for 20-some years. A lot of, so the pinnacle of my career was doing investigative short films. I was one of the founding producers at an outfit called Retro Report, which is a great organization. They've now produced hundreds of shorts that revisit big news stories of the past. And I did that and then decided to change gears in life. I became a, I got a master's degree and became a high school history teacher. And so I left teaching actually during the pandemic and was taking care of my elderly in-laws. And then all of this happened at my alma mater. And I started talking to people saying, someone's got to make a film about this and it can't all be me. So I need help. And thankfully, Holly was the first person I really talked to. And she knew Patrick. And we put together this amazing team with student filmmakers and some other filmmakers who helped like Kim Snyder, who was first on the ground there in addition to some students. And yeah.
Mike Kiniry
Why did you choose New College when you looked for a school? And can you give us just a sense of what the experience was like for you?
Harry William Hanbury
I chose New College because it was cheap and very well regarded. At that time, it was on some list. I don't know exactly what the list was, but it was like a public Ivy. It was ranked one of the best public colleges in the nation. And my parents were police officers. We didn't think that we would qualify for financial aid, which may have been mistaken. But so I was looking at like the academies. I visited the Naval Academy in West Point and ended up going to do college kind of on a fluke. I didn't really know a whole lot about the culture. I may have read somewhere that, you know, it was a little countercultural, but But I was a very conservative kid coming out of Catholic all-boys military school, and they gave me a scholarship. And what I discovered was that it was an extremely open-minded and welcoming environment for students from all different backgrounds. It was especially great for working class students, because as we used to joke at the time, that the unofficial slogan of the school was an Ivy League education for the cost of a good stereo. So it was a really inexpensive place with eight to one student faculty ratio and world-class professors. I mean, you know, my favorite philosophy professor, Doug Berggren, had gotten tenure at Yale when he was in his 30s, you know, was just a brilliant, brilliant guy. And so I would, go and do a tutorial with him one-on-one talking about Aristotle and Plato. I mean, where else do you get that? And yeah, it was a wonderful experience. I changed majors a few times. I got to experience, you know, a lot of different kinds of intellectual inquiry in an environment that was kind of like graduate school for undergraduates. You know, it was very tailored to self-driven, students who had a strong intrinsic motivation to learn.
Mike Kiniry
Toward the beginning of the film, there's a student who says that it's a community that's just built differently around radical acceptance. From what you've just said, I would guess that rings true to you.
Harry William Hanbury
Yes, and I want to really stress that was a project, especially driven by students over decades. When I was there, I was a closeted kid in high school, and I came out in my second year. My first year there, the biggest campus organization was Students for the Freedom of Sexual Expression, which formed to basically caravan to the National Gay and Lesbian March on Washington. So at least 1/4 of the school student body was, if not, gay or lesbian or bisexual or trans, at least very supportive of it. And that has only grown over the years. It's become known as a kind of a haven for, queer and trans kids, but also kids who are just a little different, a little eccentric, maybe bullied in high school, maybe a little bit on the spectrum. just, really interested in whatever, organic chemistry or, ancient history or you name it, and don't fit in so well at some of the bigger schools where, there's much more anonymity and less sense of a kind of a welcoming community for eccentric and u
Mike Kiniry
So I want to get into the film, like how you made it and some of the things you touch on, but let me try to do a summary and you let me know if I missed anything major. So as Governor DeSantis spun up his so-called war on woke, New College was brought to his attention. He even says in the documentary that he was not aware of it until the Speaker of the Florida House told him about it. He decided to make an example of it, brought in a new board on January 6, 2023, immediately fired the existing president, and basically began redesigning it from the ground up, including things like a sports program, no more gender studies program. How did I do?
Harry William Hanbury
That's about right. They eliminated gender studies. They drove out over about two years, nearly half of the faculty who were there before the takeover. and tried just all sorts of different schemes to take over the school and radically transform it. But I think one of the stories that I really want to lift up is the extent to which their most ambitious plans didn't quite work out the way they intended. And there was a lot of resistance. It was sort of like, I think, like the Iraq invasion was shock and awe, you know, it didn't really work out the way the Bush administration anticipated. And I think that new college. they had a plan to have a completely online degree in great books funded by this billionaire, Joe Ricketts. And that just sort of went ****. You know, there are a lot of things like that the administration tried. And so some faculty and students resisted by leaving. And I, you know, hats off to them. And some faculty and students resisted by staying and trying to hold on to as much of the vibrant and inclusive and intellectually curious culture that existed at New College before the takeover. And I think that really needs to be celebrated because it's not simply a story of defeat. They didn't roll over us by any stretch.
Mike Kiniry
Well, let's get into the film and how you all made it. First of all, Patrick was the name of the film an easy decision or how did you come to that name?
Patrick Bresnan
It wasn't an easy decision. I think because I hadn't gone to New College, I didn't have the emotional attachment to it when I first arrived that Harry and some of the other producers did. I spent two years trying to get access to Richard Corcoran and the administration and to cover their athletics programs, but it was next to impossible. So over that two years of filming, I started to see the wear and tear of this new administration on the faculty, on the students, on the safe spaces on campus. So a big part of going to a college like New College is that there are very safe spaces where you can read books that you might not have access to in a high school. garden environments where you can connect with nature. And kind of rapidly, the administration started taking these spaces away from students, moving students off campus into hotels. And once they threw away the library books and what I believe purposefully destroyed the student food forest, it really started to feel like what we're seeing is fascism. And it took me two years to come to that.
Mike Kiniry
Richard Corcoran, who you just mentioned, he's a former member of the Florida House of Representatives, was Florida Education Commissioner, was interim president at that same board meeting in 2023. And as I understand it, is still president. And he got a $390,000 salary increase from the earlier president, right?
Harry William Hanbury
It actually amounts to even more than that. It's like a $7 million contract over the five years or so. he's making like well, above $1,000,000 a year where the previous president was making, less than 1/3 of that, maybe 1/4 of that. And just since we're talking about him, Rodrigo Diaz, a fellow alum, wrote a brilliant op-ed in the Sarasota Herald Tribune a while back, comparing the track record of President Oker, who was fired by the board that DeSantis appointed, and President Corcoran. And in every major metric, you know, the SAT scores, ACT scores, the number of Bright Futures scholars, all of these are down. They're actually the lowest number of Bright Futures scholars at any point since they started the scholarship program. The school has historically been a very strong, one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars in the nation, and this year there were zero Fulbright Scholars. So, you know, he claims to be, you know, inaugurating this academic renaissance, and it's just a con game.
Mike Kiniry
I'm talking with Harry William Hanbury and Patrick Bresnan. Harry is a producer of, and Patrick is the director of, a new documentary film called First They Came For My College. It's making the rounds at film festivals right now. It'll be screened at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando, once on Saturday, April 11th, and then again on Thursday, April 16th. It tells the story of the takeover of New College of Florida in Sarasota beginning in 2023. New College was founded in 1960 to be a different kind of university for exceptional students. It's part of the Florida State Public University System. It's the state's honors college. Governor DeSantis installed 6 new board members in early 2023 to try to change the school's fundamental nature. This new film shows some of how that takeover unfolded through the perspectives of students and faculty members. If you'd like to engage with the show about this topic or any of our episodes, find us on social media. We're WGCU Public Media on Instagram and Facebook, and you can always find the show and everything we do here at WGCU on our app for iPhone and Android. Patrick, how did you build trust with the people who you followed? followed. And as I understand it, you got some of the footage from students who had phones.
Patrick Bresnan
Yeah, so we had a little bit of trust when we first came in because so much of our team was made-up of alumni. And I had Harry with me on the first couple of shoots and there was just a lot. They were so interested in what it was like when he went to school there and what teachers he studied with. and Harry also being a journalist, one of the first places we started filming with was the Catalyst Student newspaper, because they were covering this in real time. There were the New York Times, MSNBC, Fox News, news outlets from around the country were there. But what was so exciting was sitting there in the Catalyst Student newspaper, filming the students, dealing with these stories in real time as they were occurring on their campus. So we worked with the student journalists and we invested a lot in getting them off of campus, taking them out to dinner, taking them out to lunch, and really focusing on developing a rapport and a sensitivity to the situation they were in.
Mike Kiniry
And the Catalyst, the student newspaper, was shut down at the end of 2024, as I understand it.
Harry William Hanbury
Actually, it was closed with the agreement of the editor-in-chief and the faculty sponsor who retired, Maria Vesperi retired that year. But actually, the three previous editors-in-chief of the student newspaper have created, along with Maria, a new journalism organization called Old School Catalyst. And one of them, the editor-in-chief, actually now works at CNN. So They're really hoping for a new chapter, especially now that the Catalyst and all of its courageous work during the takeover is getting a lot more attention thanks to the film.
Mike Kiniry
That Professor Maria Vesperi, I think her name was or is, she seemed like she was willing to be on camera talking. Were some faculty not because of potential repercussions?
Patrick Bresnan
There was an incredible amount of fear when we started shooting. Maria Vesperi and her husband have worked in ethnographic filmmaking, and Maria saw right away the importance of having this documented. Because we had Maria's support, we didn't put an incredible amount of pressure on other professors because they were under so much pressure. They didn't know if they would lose their jobs. Some of them were losing their jobs. Teachers were losing their students. And it was the stress of adding a camera crew into the classroom on top of that is something that I'm personally not comfortable about asking for. The next teacher we did get access to recording with was the head of the janitor studies program, Amy Reed. She started to see that it was imminent that she would be dismissed or her program terminated. And so then she opened up her world and what she was going to the cameras. So those two professors had incredible courage.
Mike Kiniry
And she's no longer at New College. I looked her up. She's, I think, in Illinois or Indiana now.
Harry William Hanbury
Amy is now the director of the Freedom to Learn program at Penn America, which is an amazing organization. And basically she's documenting attacks on freedom of speech and academic freedom on campuses around the US. So she just published a terrific report called America's censored campuses, which is really worth a look.
Mike Kiniry
How'd y'all get connected to Josh? He seemed like he was an interesting character who came in with one perspective and seemed to be modified by the experience, by art.
Patrick Bresnan
Yeah, so I would see Josh around campus and he dressed, you know, almost like something out of the X-Files in a suit and tie. kind of like a Tom Selleck mustache. And he was always smoking outside of the cafeteria. I kind of assumed he was a new professor who had come in with the takeover. And like I told you, a lot of the filmmaking was made possible by being with students in these safe spaces like the garden. So when there was nothing to shoot, I would go hang out in the garden. And one day a student said, you need to meet this guy, Josh. He wrote an op-ed about touring the campus. And in the op-ed, he says that he's come to New College to join the fight because he feels it's the right thing to do at this moment in time. So it was a very intimidating op-ed. And when I realized he was only 21 when he wrote it, I thought, yikes, you know, is this a Nick Fuentes type? But I went up and introduced myself and he was very soft-spoken, very kind. He loved photography. I was wearing a camera and I invited him out to breakfast. And we did with many of the students, we just, we broke bread. I really liked him. And I said, your perspective is very interesting. I want to understand why you came here. And if I gave you an iPhone, would you be comfortable filming some of the activities you do on campus and your own personal story? And he said, sure. And we gave him a phone and that kind of began the relationship.
Mike Kiniry
He tells that story. He's sitting at a table outside and he's drawing and he tells a story about it was the first time he'd drawn anything since he was a little kid. And I just thought that was a really interesting angle for a character like him in a film like this in a situation like that.
Patrick Bresnan
It's amazing. And that scene is made possible because of our student filmmaker partners. That scene was shot by Calypso Camacho. And she was there studying art and Russian literature. And she was head of the film club. And when I met her, she was just dying to work on the project. And so that's another student that we gave her a phone. All of the students were paid above a living wage for their work on the film. And she would send me, I'd say, an hour or so of footage a week. And it was just so enjoyable to see the world that they were living in and to incorporate that into the story.
Mike Kiniry
How many times have you screened it so far? I know it played at South by Southwest, and I think I found one other screening for sure. But how many times have you shown it?
Patrick Bresnan
All in all, we've shown the film six times. So we premiered at one of the best documentary film festivals in the country called True False in Columbia, Missouri, home of the really fantastic journalism program there. And then we brought it to Austin. And in about 10 days, we will have our Florida premiere at the Florida Film Festival at the Enzian Theater in Orlando.
Mike Kiniry
How's it been received so far? What kind of feedback have you gotten?
Harry William Hanbury
It was like a dream come true to be at true false. And to be in these theaters, we were in a 300-seat theater, then a 330-seat theater, then a 1,200-seat theater, all sold out. And in every screening, we got standing ovations or two standing ovations. I was delirious. So we at least got two standing ovations on one occasion. And people both there and at South by Southwest told me that this was their favorite film of the festival, that this was the most important film they'd seen at the festival. So I think the country is really hungry for this because all of us associated with New College, students, faculty, parents, alums, have been kind of living in the future. Our school was the very first school to be attacked in this way. And now that cancer has metastasized especially since the re-election of Donald Trump. And people are trying to figure out what to do, how to fight back. And so I think our film is a really hopeful message because it shows people who are kind of the first to be hit by this blitzkrieg actually like not rolling over and standing up and finding joy and, you know, going to their, you know, spaces where they could celebrate diversity, equity, and inclusion and artistic freedom and academic freedom. So I think that was really resonant with a lot of people, and it's been incredibly gratifying to see it.
Mike Kiniry
The new college student body president, Libby Harrity, says toward the beginning of this film that the students they were attracting, the new students, many of which were like baseball players, were just as much pawns in the bigger political game as the students who were already there. And I felt like in some ways that kind of captured an underlying theme of the film. Does that make sense?
Patrick Bresnan
Absolutely. I mean, I spoke to over 10 athletes, and they were sold something that never came to fruition for them, that first group of athletes. There were no athletic fields for them at New College, so they spent a lot of their days in transport to a local high school that had better facilities than New College. They thought they could study things like finance, The academics at New College are rigorous. So they did not know what they were getting into. This is the honors college. The students who we worked with and who filmed with us, many of them were valedictorians of their high school. They graduated New College in three years. These students were that intelligent and are that intelligent. So I had a lot of sympathy for the athletes. They had a scholarship and a laptop, and that's what they were given. Many of them didn't get into UF or FSU, and this was just like a... place to be for a year so that their parents wouldn't be too upset with them, but it was very difficult for them.
Mike Kiniry
What's next after the Florida Film Festival? Do you have the festival run mapped out?
Patrick Bresnan
Well, we have an incredible festival run. Like I said, I had a feature film, Pahokey, that premiered in competition at Sundance. And the festival run for this film is even better than that film. So we go from Florida We're playing a wonderful festival in North Carolina called River Run. From there, Harry and I fly to Boston, where we'll present the film in an 800-seat theater on the 23rd. And then from there, Harry and I fly to Ashland, Oregon, where we have 3 screenings and a panel at the Ashland Film Festival. And then from there, we fly to one of the most prestigious festivals in the country, the San Francisco International Film Festival. There's a number of festivals, Washington, D.C., and so on after that, I can't announce yet. But This has been very well received.
Mike Kiniry
Is it too early to ask about distribution options or just in other words, when might people who don't attend a festival be able to watch it?
Patrick Bresnan
Sure. Distribution is incredibly difficult. We're having conversations with Magnolia Pictures, Watermelon Pictures, ITVS, POV, and PBS. it will probably take us six months to land the right partner.
Mike Kiniry
Well, we're pretty much out of time. I'm going to give you a chance for any final thoughts, Harry, and then I'll let Patrick wrap it up.
Patrick Bresnan
Yeah, we have a wonderful website, a newcollegefilm.com. If there are programmers in Fort Myers or Naples that would like to program the film, You can visit there and find an e-mail address. We have spent an incredible amount on bringing students and faculty to film festivals across the country so that they are telling their story directly to the audience and not me. So if you want to support the film, you can find ways to support through the website. And yeah, we're very grateful for your interview.
Mike Kiniry
And Harry, you get the final word.
Harry William Hanbury
Just that there's also a signup form on the screenings page that lists all of our upcoming screenings and also a place where if you would like to request a screening in your hometown or on your campus, you can fill out that form. Even if you, know, if you're not the person who organizes all this, at least sending a lead our way, we'd really appreciate that. We're trying to collect as many of those as possible. And yeah, my, I guess my final word is that I hope that this film can catalyze a massive movement to defend higher education and reimagine it, because higher education really hasn't been all that people want for quite some time. And I think that some very opportunistic people took advantage of that and have laid siege to it, as one of the trustees famously said. And I hope that we can sort of speed up the process of processing this trauma, all the bewilderment that happened to us when this happened to our little school. for all the people out there who are experiencing this around the country right now.
Mike Kiniry
Harry William Hanbury is producer of the new documentary film, First They Came From My College. Thank you so much, Harry.
Harry William Hanbury
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Kiniry
And Patrick Bresnan is the director and producer of the film. Thank you so much for your time as well, Patrick.
Patrick Bresnan
Thank you so much, Mike.
Mike Kiniry
First They Came From My College is being screened at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando this weekend on Saturday the 11th at 5.30 P.m. and then again next Thursday, April 16th at 4 P.m. You can find a link to the film's website and the Florida Film Festival's website on our website, wgcu.org/GCL. If you missed any of the show, you can always hear episodes in their entirety on our website. Our show today was produced by yours truly. For now, thanks for listening. I'm Mike Kiniry. This is WGCU FM Fort Myers 90.1, WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM. We are NPR for Southwest Florida.