The board of trustees at the New College of Florida voted to abolish the school’s gender studies department Thursday, marking the latest effort by the conservative trustees to redirect the college’s mission.

The board, which was filled with conservative trustees by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) earlier this year, voted 7-3 to eliminate the gender studies department, 27 years after it was first established in 1995.

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Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the New College board, said the decision to eliminate the department made the school “the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of queer theory and gender pseudoscience into academic life.”

Rufo, in an op-ed for City Journal, further explained that the decision to eliminate the department was linked to the board’s goal of reorienting the Sarasota college’s mission back to a “classical liberal arts education” and that concepts presented in gender studies “are explicitly opposed to the classical conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

“The decision of the New College board of trustees to initiate the termination of the university’s gender studies program sets a new historical precedent,” Rufo wrote. “Academia’s continued decline is not inevitable. Civic-minded leaders, deriving their power from the people, can use legislation, appointments, and board governance to reorient public universities away from left-wing nihilism and, once again, toward higher principles.”

Rufo and other members of the board that were recently appointed by DeSantis have taken numerous steps to push the school away from its reputation as a bastion of left-wing politics. Within weeks of their appointment, the board fired the university president and installed former Florida Education commissioner Richard Corcoran, a DeSantis ally, in the position on an interim basis. Reports have surfaced that numerous faculty members have also elected to leave in the months since the trustees took over.

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The decision to eliminate the department was condemned by PEN America, a liberal free speech advocacy group. In a statement, PEN America Freedom to Learn Program Director Jeremy Young compared the trustees’ vote to the actions of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who previously pushed for the elimination of gender studies departments at Hungarian institutions.

“The New College board’s abolition of gender studies is a repressive act that echoes the actions of a repressive foreign government,” Young said. “Indeed, it is an exact copy of what Hungary did in 2018, in a ban that irreparably damaged intellectual freedom in Hungarian universities. Banning academic departments for the viewpoints they reflect is the ultimate violation of academic freedom. Gender studies has been part of American higher education for decades, and the program received a statement of unanimous support today from every member of the New College faculty.”