Nearly every cycle, U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan must fight off a halfway threatening electoral opponent. This time around, the nine-term incumbent faces a red monster of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ creation.

Eddie Speir, the now-former trustee for New College of Florida, filed to challenge Buchanan in a Republican primary. The founder of Inspiration Academy would not have any platform for such a run but that DeSantis made him the local face of a hostile university takeover.

Now, don’t misinterpret this. I neither think Speir poses a tremendous threat to Buchanan nor that DeSantis groomed Speir to take on the Republican co-chair of Florida’s Congressional Delegation. And while it’s tempting to ignore this, DeSantis elevated Speir months before Buchanan publicly snubbed the Governor by endorsing Donald Trump for President.

Yet here we are. Speir’s brief stint as one of six new DeSantis trustees at New College put him the center of a national news story with enormous local ramifications. With a perpetual presence in the region as a bona fide Bradenton resident, he earned disproportionate mentions in area headlines.

It started with the controversial town hall alongside new trustee Chris Rufo where the two started publicly calling to fire administrators. It continued as Speir blogged his wildest fantasies about New College on Substack, fantasizing about firing the entire New College faculty and hiring back only the ones new trustees deemed worthy. He demanded a new president and counsel for the school — and got those. And he stayed controversial by lurking the campus near daily proselytizing his Christian worldview on a public university campus.

Yet these antics proved too much even in a political environment where ties to DeSantis make even the most controversial figures invulnerable to consequence. The Florida Senate, which this year signed off on a Florida Surgeon General who manipulated science to support anti-vaxxer theories, refused to take up Speirs nomination. Rufo, who mocks students on Twitter during trustee board meetings, was confirmed.

Speir suggested Corcoran, a former Florida House Speaker, turned lawmakers against him because the trustee spent too much time on campus. I suspect Speir did himself the disservice of driving to Tallahassee and letting senators meet him. That this courtesy poisoned the well in the Capitol portends badly how a campaign will go. 

DeSantis appointed Speir once, but given the opportunity did not put him back on the trustee board, he chose to move on.

Speir left the situation without his trustee seat, but gained plenty of name ID. In today’s post-Donald Trump, there’s political capital in becoming notorious. More, Speir now bears the brand of an enemy of the establishment.

If liberals are addicted to victimhood, conservatives hold the same proclivity for martyrdom. Speir’s crucifixion by Tallahassee elite have him an audience to hear his plight, a donor base of those who hate power enough to bet against it, and a notoriety unknown before his appointment.

Persecution now drips from Speir’s Substack now as he attacks the incumbent.

“When I think of our current Congressman, Vern Buchanan, I can’t tell the difference between him and the rest of the Washington elite,” Speir wrote. “Vern Buchanan has been in Congress since 2007. And in these last 16 years, we have witnessed a shocking erosion of our individual rights and liberties. Where has Vern Buchanan been?”

I’ll leave it to the House Ways and Means Vice Chair to inform voters of his accomplishments. After mincing past primary opponents like Martin Hyde and James Satcher, it’s unlikely Speir will pose a greater threat.

But no one should forget what raised this nuisance to the size it could gnaw on Buchanan’s heels.

Jacob Ogles is contributing senior editor to SRQ MEDIA. 

Screenshot courtesy The Florida Channel: Eddie Speir testifies at the Florida Senate.

Editor’s note: This is part 1 of a three-part series.

We dodged a bullet. And I’m not just referring to New College.

By the late 1980s, Japan’s global domination seemed evitable. The Japanese bought Rockefeller Center, Columbia pictures and nearly half of the best real estate in central Los Angeles. Almost all of the world’s largest banks were in Japan, and greater Tokyo had a larger GDP than all of Britain. Japanese companies ruled the planet and their consumer electronics dominated every market. Meanwhile, Apple was on the road to becoming a near-bankrupt producer of technical oddities.

Yet today, Apple’s market capitalization is greater than Japan’s entire consumer electronics and auto manufacturing sector, and the idea of Japanese economic hegemony seems like a faraway dream. Many suggest that Japan’s real estate bubble bursting is the culprit, yet this doesn’t explain how a nation that led the world in engineering and manufacturing could fall from dominance to near irrelevance. 

In 2016, Foreign Affairs summarized the problem. The first shock came in the early 2000s as Japan’s grip on the consumer electronics market loosened. The final blow came in 2015 when Japanese universities were ranked below several other (non-Japanese) universities in Asia. The University of Tokyo, Japan’s Harvard, was ranked seventh — in Asia. 

A major employment agency concluded the Japanese had the largest skills mismatch in the entire Asia-Pacific region. Japanese universities were producing endless engineering and business majors, yet those graduates didn’t have the skills employers needed. Ultimately, the Japanese realized the cause of their fall lurked in their education system.

Reforms had been attempted. In 2009, the Japanese government aggressively funded education reform, but this only created new university fiefdoms that contributed no change to the overall system. More efforts ensued and the problems grew worse. From an outsider’s perspective, the dilemma was obvious: Japanese students consistently ranked at the top in global science and math metrics, yet their humanities programs atrophied into near irrelevance.

Observing this divide between overachieving STEM majors and the nation’s economic problems, Deputy Minister of Education Suzuki Kan observed “Japanese people are good at solving questions that they are given. But with the digital economy, that work will be replaced by artificial intelligence. So human work will be totally changed — becoming creation, creation, creation. Not routine work.”

Kumiko Aoki of the Open University of Japan noted Japanese education turns students into “robots” and that “imagination, serendipity, and how to learn are the things that are not being taught.” She continued, “The goal of education hasn’t been to equip people with tools but rather to make people passive and obedient.” 

We – New College and America – dodged a bullet. We have regularly been chided for our idealism. America, after all, believes in the liberal arts and the well-rounded student. After World War II, the industrialized world grew infatuated with the promise of an engineering managerial future. Universities – particularly public ones – began to offer a miasma of degrees to fulfil the promise. And yet, the increasingly idiosyncratic idealism of the liberal arts refused the dustbin of history. There was something undeniably American about declining to track 14-year-old students into quasi-technical lifelong careers. There was something incorrigibly American about liberal arts colleges balking at the lure of management and engineering degrees. We dodged the bullet precisely because we refused to abandon our ideals.

The practical wisdom of that idealism is well-evidenced by Japan’s thirty-year-stagnation and Europe’s perpetually lagging economy. American education may be accused of idealism, but idealism has never paid so well.

Is it the absence of these ideals that caused the fate of Japan? Was it idealism when Einstein said, “The more I read the Greeks, the more I realize that nothing like them has ever appeared in the world since.” Was Steve Jobs an idealist when he observed, “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” Jobs, like America’s liberal arts colleges, may have been an idealist, but his ideals were expressions of truth. Japan found that out the hard way.

Even as many of our public universities have – often belatedly – recognized the value of a distinct liberal arts curriculum, we are still in danger of relegating this beating heart of American innovation to some curiosity for the nostalgic.

New College will reinvigorate that beating heart and respond confidently to the question: how does a college equip people with the tools of imagination, serendipity and how to learn? Perhaps more so, how does a college marry technology with the liberal arts so that we may achieve great success but not at the cost of our idealism – or, in the case of Japan, a prosperous reality. 

Richard Corcoran is interim president New College of Florida. Nathan Allen is vice president of Strategy and Special Projects and an NCF Alumnus. 

Photo courtesy Wikimedia: Main Building of Institute for Solid State Physics of the University of Tokyo.