The rest of a very sad story at New College

The academic money pit that has become New College of Florida received kid-glove treatment in The New York Times, but it’s because nobody checked the math. There’s a cost to swapping out curriculum that produced Fulbright scholars for beach volleyball scholarships, and The Times missed it.

It’s important to set the record straight on New College, because what happened there has never been about one school. The Sarasota honors college is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ prototype for quashing campus speech and dismantling academic inquiry. There’s speculation that it is what Donald Trump plans for Harvard, according to the Tribune News Service.

Yet the Times article did not mention that after DeSantis stacked the college’s Board of Trustees with MAGA partisans and installed a political crony as president in 2023 who promptly hired his cronies, New College plummeted 59 places to 135th in US News and World Report’s college rankings. It did not report that New College once produced more Fulbright scholars than any other Florida state school per capita, and that in 2024, only about two of every 10 New College students graduated. The article parroted talking points on rising student enrollment but not the hiring of a student retention officer to try and keep students from leaving.

In the Times, New College President Richard Corcoran shrugged off $83,207 per student in operating expenses, almost four times the average of all other Florida state colleges and universities. But there was no mention of Corcoran’s equally controversial $1.3 million annual compensation package to run a school of roughly 900 students. By contrast, the University of Florida’s president oversees 61,890 students for an annual compensation package of about $3 million. And although UF is a major research institution, its degrees cost just $150,729 to produce, state records show, while New College degrees cost $494,715.

Nor did the article reference gender studies books thrown into a dumpster without notice, or the New College trustee who applauded it as “taking out the trash.”

There were no questions about how a scholarship set aside for a person of color hasn’t been given out in years, or why four of five professors approved for and then abruptly denied tenure were minorities. There was no note of a trustee’s description of mostly male student athletes being recruited to “rebalance the hormones and politics” on campus. The article missed the reopening of the campus cafe by a vendor with reported business ties to Corcoran’s wife, Anne, who uses coffee cups with a bible verse; there was nothing about the school accepting a “Christian” alternative to the SAT college entrance exam, offered by a company also tied to a DeSantis-appointed New College trustee.

The story does not question why, if the goal were only to balance liberal and conservative views, New College plans to erect a statue of hard-right ideologue Charlie Kirk on its front lawn. The article quotes two current professors but doesn’t explore why other faculty members critical of the school were too frightened to speak on the record in what Corcoran described as a campus finally open to different opinions.

Everything’s fine, the article suggested. The DeSantis takeover was simply a tweak to educational philosophy.

It isn’t and it wasn’t. There’s talk of privatising the college, in part because the spending is unsustainable. And the DeSantis takeover was as much campaign strategy as ideology. It coincided with the launch of his failed “anti-woke” presidential campaign, generating free national publicity and MAGA bona fides far beyond Florida. DeSantis isn’t done with New College. Far from it. His proposed state budget resurrects a plan to “give” New College 32 acres and 11 buildings belonging to the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus.