History Repeating - 1933 / 2024

 

Florida College Discards Gender Studies Books Ahead Of New School Year. The tiny state-run college endured a hostile takeover by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.

2024

When hundreds of books got hauled away in a dumpster from the library of the New College of Florida on Thursday, the tiny liberal arts college with a governing board dominated by appointees of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis once again found itself at the center of the state’s culture wars.

“We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash,” Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the Sarasota college’s governing board, posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, condemned the college for “a brazen act of censorship.”

“These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history’s darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACU of Florida, said in a statement.

Both sides were responding to accounts spread through social media that officials at the campus of roughly 700 students had sent a large collection of books from the college’s recently shuttered gender studies program to a local landfill.

But a statement by New College administrators said people were confusing two different batches of books. It said volumes taken away by dumpster came from a routine culling of the main library’s collection, largely to get rid of old and damaged books. Books related to gender studies, it said, were also placed outside the library and “were later claimed by individuals planning to donate the books locally.” [still taken away from the University]

1933

Beginning on May 10, 1933, Nazi-dominated student groups carried out public burnings of books they claimed were “un-German.” The book burnings took place in 34 university towns and cities. Works of prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers ended up in the bonfires. The book burnings stood as a powerful symbol of Nazi intolerance and censorship.

On 6 May 1933, the Institute of Sexology, an academic foundation devoted to sexological research and the advocacy of homosexual rights, was broken into and occupied by Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later the entire contents of the library were removed and burned.

The institute was initially occupied by The German Student Union, who were a collective of Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later, on 10 May, the entire contents of the library were removed to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square. That night, along with 20,000 other books across Germany, they were publicly burned in a symbolic attack by Nazi officials on their enemies.

Founded in 1919, the institute had been set up by Magnus Hirschfeld, a world-renowned expert in the emerging discipline of sexology. During its existence, thousands of patients were seen and treated, often for free. The Institute also achieved a global reputation for its pioneering work on transsexual understanding and calls for equality for homosexuals, transgender people and women. Hirschfield himself was a passionate advocate for homosexual rights and had long appealed for the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law that criminalised homosexuality in Germany.

Jewish, gay and outspokenly liberal, Hirschfeld was an obvious target for the Nazis, and the seizure and destruction of the institute on 6 May took place only three months after Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. During the attack and subsequent book burning, Hirschfeld was working in Paris. He saw the burning of his own library in a news report at the cinema. Among the texts thrown onto the bonfire at the Bebelplatz was Heinrich Heine’s Almansor, in which the author noted:

‘Where they burn [destroy] books, in the end they will burn [destroy] humans too’.