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Outrage grows after New College trashes hundreds of books
By Jessica De Leon,
2024-08-16
Outrage is growing after New College of Florida trashed hundreds of books on Thursday, including many from the school’s former gender and diversity center.
With the Fall semester not yet underway, there were not many students on campus to witness the act, but those there were angry.
One student, Natalia Benavides, took action.
“We said, 'We have to save them all,' so we started picking up books and putting them in piles, sorting them,” Benavides said. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, what matters most is that these books are saved, and I can’t believe this is happening.'"
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Benavides called SEE Alliance— Social Equity through Education Alliance —a nonprofit that works with students, organizes the youth vote and provides resources to advocate for human rights, including the LGBTQ+ community.
Members of SEE Alliance rushed to the school late Thursday morning after the call for help.
“A lot of these books were taken specifically from the gender and diversity department and creates a very clear visual that New College wants to put gender and diversity in the dump,” SEE Alliance founding executive director Zander Moricz said.
“The New College Library is following its longstanding annual procedures for weeding its collection, which involves the removal of materials that are old, damaged, or otherwise no longer serving the needs of the College.”
The university also cited Florida Statute 273, claiming it precluded them from “selling, donating or transferring these materials, which were purchased with state funds. Deselected materials are discarded through a recycling process when possible.”
But the books tossed from the library on Thursday weren’t recycled. Members of SEE Alliance said they followed the truck hauling the books to a nearby landfill, sharing videos and photos of the books along with trash.
“To see something like this is disgusting and disheartening because there was no communication between administration and students. There was no community. There was no attempt to do anything with this,” Moricz said. “This could have been a win for the community. This could have been thousands of free books to people who need them, and instead, it is a dump, it is in a dump, it is next to trash.”
Benavides said it was not the first time she had seen books end up in the trash and that students were not given an opportunity to buy the books as had been done other times.
“In an academic institution, any school, any place of higher education, it’s wrong to throw away books, I think, in any capacity when of course there’s someone who wants these books. They don’t need to end up in a landfill,” she said.
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