In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis radically upended the New College of Florida in an attempt to align the university with his party’s hyper-conservative ideologies, appointing six new board members and firing then-president, Patricia Okker. The takeover involved — but was not limited to — the dissolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the college’s Gender and Diversity Center, and a mass disposal of books related to such now defunct studies. As Patrick Bresnan’s new documentary about the takeover, First They Came for My College, rightfully acknowledges in its opening moments, the state-backed appropriation could more suitably be deemed a marker of Cristo-fascism than a focus on “the pursuit of truth,” as DeSantis would have it. This distinction is made by a student within the first scene of Bresnan’s film 0 —a scene presumably shot on the student’s cellphone, which indicates, if anything, First They Came for My College’s ability to transfer agency to the oppressed — an all-too-infrequently-seen methodology of documentary filmmaking.
Appropriately, much of the film utilizes footage taken from the students themselves, and haphazardly attempts to keep a core thread of recurring subjects. Gaby Batista, the student in the film’s aforementioned first scene, for example, is hardly featured thereafter. The most notable — and perhaps most effective — way in which Bresnan establishes some core players within his film’s chronology is through New College’s student-run newspaper, The Catalyst, in which a number of newsroom discussions take place. Such occurrences hew closer to the kind of observational style at which Bresnan excels, but are ultimately squandered by a far more obvious info-centric approach. This is not to say that the film mustn’t introduce its subjects or edify its audience regarding the circumstances of its diegesis, but that the more pertinent struggles — those that cannot be learned merely by watching the evening news — are slighted in the process of divulging information. This neutral strategy is symptomatic of the film’s retrospective posture, which treats the onscreen actions solely as a thing of the past, in turn omitting the reality of the situation: that the struggles for constitutional freedoms continue today, both at New College and elsewhere.
The film, in this regard, is one glaring paradox — its very title, First They Came for My College (emphasis on the “my”), suggests a singular vantage point, a self-determinist angle, as it were, regarding the fight against absolutism. Instead, the takeover is posited as a culture war, or a war on liberalism itself, which consequently begets an uninterested fashion of filmmaking that does not seek, nor does it seem to care for, the very people whom it portrays. In other words, First They Came for My College is a more centrist work than given credit for, inasmuch as the film is both for its subjects and dismissive of them, for the students’ battle and yet a passive bystander in the end. Take, for example, the aforementioned point regarding recurring subjects: of the students whom the film features most often, nearly all of their academic/personal journeys culminate in leaving New College, whether by transfer or graduation. By contrast, Bresnan allocates little attention to those that remain engaged with their seemingly futile resistance against oppression. That is, what begins as an ostensible account of an ongoing academic and social purge malforms into the story of those who have left it behind for greener pastures. This blatant discrepancy is perhaps why one feels compelled to label First They Came for My College as partially spurious, given that its final act is one of retrospect, of sighing in relief that one’s own suffering is over, despite the fact that friends and colleagues continue to resist.
DIRECTOR: Patrick Bresnan; DISTRIBUTOR: Four Act Film; IN THEATERS: September 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
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