As a Floridian, I was acutely aware of what had happened to New College of Florida. It became part of the larger battle over education in this state, stretching from elementary schools all the way through our public universities. New College was a particularly strange target. This is a small public honors college in Sarasota, with a campus that incorporates part of the former estate of Charles and Edith Ringling. It wasn’t known for athletics. It was known for taking a different approach to higher education, giving high-achieving students considerable freedom in structuring their studies and encouraging unusually close interaction between students and professors. It offered an interesting examination of what college could be. Then Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new trustees in 2023 and made New College ground zero for his administration’s effort to reshape higher education in Florida.
First They Came for My College, directed by Patrick Xavier Bresnan, documents what happened next. I really wanted to see this film, and somehow I didn’t realize it had played the Florida Film Festival until after the fact. When another opportunity came around and I was able to grab a screener, I knew I had to see it. I wanted to see what had happened from inside New College, through the students, faculty, parents and alumni who actually experienced it. For the most part, Bresnan maintains a vérité, almost voyeuristic perspective. This isn’t a Michael Moore documentary where the filmmaker constantly inserts himself into the proceedings. Instead, footage accumulated over this period is assembled into a remarkably intimate portrait of the demoralizing destabilization of an institution whose identity was being fundamentally rewritten.
Programs disappear. Gender studies is eliminated. Athletics suddenly become a priority at a college that had never built its identity around sports. Baseball arrives, which has an additional bit of irony considering DeSantis’s own well-documented history with the sport. But New College didn’t even have a baseball field when this transformation began. Money became available for recruitment and scholarships while existing students and faculty watched other pieces of the institution disappear. The documentary also spends time on faculty members who had worked toward tenure, an arduous process that can take years, only to watch the newly reconstituted Board of Trustees deny tenure to an entire group of candidates. I can’t imagine how heartbreaking that must have been. Tenure isn’t something somebody hands you after you’ve been hanging around long enough. It represents years of work, scholarship, teaching and evaluation.
That’s what makes First They Came for My College so infuriating to watch. Students speak. Faculty speak. Parents speak. Alumni speak. People continually show up at meetings to passionately argue against what is happening to their college, and yet the decisions keep moving forward. Watching these meetings, there is an overwhelming sense that public comment isn’t changing anything. Whatever resistance exists inside the room, the transformation continues. The documentary captures that frustration extremely well. Then there are moments like the infamous disposal of thousands of library books, including materials from the shuttered Gender and Diversity Center. New College maintained that library materials were being removed through its normal collection-weeding process, while the images of books piled into dumpsters became something much larger symbolically for students and critics of the administration. In a documentary about people watching their institution disappear piece by piece, those images are difficult to forget.
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t simply turn the incoming student-athletes into villains. Some of the existing faculty remind students that these kids are being used as part of this transformation, too. If you’re a teenager being offered significant scholarship money and an opportunity to attend college and play baseball, that’s an awfully difficult thing to turn down. Some of those students appear in the documentary and essentially acknowledge exactly that. Their presence becomes another piece of the larger story rather than an excuse for the film to demonize individual students. My frustration isn’t with a kid who accepts a scholarship. It’s with the priorities being established by the people deciding where that money goes.
I was very into this documentary, and I’ll freely admit the perspective I brought into it. I despised the decision to strip New College of so much of what made it New College in favor of turning it into something ideologically different. My one problem with First They Came for My College isn’t really the film’s fault. Between the events being filmed and the documentary reaching me, John Oliver devoted a June 2026 episode of Last Week Tonight to New College. Oliver was able to look at the situation retrospectively and examine not only the initial takeover but what happened afterward, including the people chosen to oversee that transformation and the consequences of their decisions. First They Came for My College is embedded in the moment. Oliver had the advantage of hindsight. Having recently seen that episode, there were places where I wished this documentary could follow the story just a little further.
Still, First They Came for My College matters because New College isn’t an isolated story. Florida has been dramatically reshaping education at multiple levels. The state’s expansion of school-choice programs has redirected public money toward private education, including religious schools, while traditional public-school districts simultaneously confront declining enrollment and school closures. Florida’s social-studies standards have also generated national controversy, particularly language directing middle-school instruction to include how enslaved people developed skills that, in some instances, could later be applied for their personal benefit. That’s the actual language, and I don’t find the actual language any less disturbing. Meanwhile, higher education has faced its own transformation through restrictions on DEI initiatives and changes affecting what universities can teach, fund and prioritize.
That’s why I hope this documentary serves as a catalyst for people to research what is happening to education around them. What are your kids learning? What aren’t they learning? What books are available to them? What programs are disappearing? What is happening at the universities taxpayers are funding? You don’t have to live in Sarasota or have attended New College for those questions to matter.
The title First They Came for My College deliberately invokes Martin Niemöller’s famous postwar statement about the consequences of remaining silent while other groups are persecuted. That gives the documentary’s title its warning: something happening to somebody else’s institution can feel distant right up until it isn’t. The film may specifically chronicle New College of Florida, but the questions it raises about political power, academic freedom and who gets to determine the purpose of public education are much larger than one tiny college in Sarasota.
First They Came for My College is a terrifying look at what can happen when a government decides that an educational institution needs to be remade according to the ideology of those currently holding power. More importantly, it captures the people who were actually there while it happened, speaking up even when it became increasingly apparent that speaking up wasn’t going to change the next vote. Whatever your politics, that’s the part worth paying attention to. Governments change. People in power change. The question is how much control we want any of them to have over what education is allowed to be.
Fresh: 8.9/10
