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In New College’s new era, that changed.
So have many other things since January 2023, when Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, stacked the Board of Trustees at this tiny, sleepy, lefty liberal-arts college with conservatives. New College, his administration believed, had become distracted by dubious social-justice aims. With a hard-charging board majority, however, the institution would reorient toward the classical tradition, attracting more students and eradicating toxic wokeness in the process — or so the thinking went.
The changes March touted in the golf cart that day were physical rather than political, underscoring the breakneck pace at which the campus has evolved thanks to a windfall in state funding. We passed freshly painted facades, sand volleyball courts mid-construction, a greenhouse that replaced what March called a “decrepit” predecessor, and a blank plot of land where a squat building once stood and future dorms might go. Yet we could not avoid markers of the college’s ideological shift. We puttered past a neighborhood whose residents were alarmed at the prospect of a “Freedom Institute,” a multimillion-dollar center to promote civil discourse, being built across the street (the college has said it will go elsewhere). We walked by a room once called the Gender and Diversity Center, which students used to stock with their artwork and a “free store” of donated stuff. The center no longer exists and the room was empty, save for some furniture.
As we headed into the library, March referred to an August controversy that made national news, when books from the center ended up near a dumpster, presumably for disposal. A trustee cheered the move on X, writing, “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.” (A student previously told The Chronicle that she and others saved most of the books. A campus police officer and the library dean tried to stop them, but they convinced the dean they were distinct from damaged library books piled inside the dumpster.) Ultimately the center’s books “all got preserved and donated,” March told me, though he acknowledged that they took a “roundabout way of getting there.”
Two years in, New College’s transformation has followed a similarly roundabout path. The staunchest supporters of DeSantis’s maneuver saw it as monumental. In their narrative, liberal academe was being recaptured, with New College, an unmitigated progressive fiasco, as the beachhead. The most ardent critics told a different story — that conservative interlopers would callously destroy an educational institution that was doing perfectly fine before they arrived.
But New College today resembles neither the conservative dream nor the liberal nightmare. Part everyday small college and part proxy battle in the culture war, it is plagued by ordinary questions over how to boost enrollment amid extraordinary levels of outside scrutiny. While some professors still resist what they see as an intolerable intrusion of politics onto campus, others have embraced the shift. The larger political significance is never far away, but leaders’ ambitions for the college have not been fully realized.
At least, not yet. Whether New College will become a playbook for reformation of higher ed writ large, as its president hopes it will, carries greater stakes than it did in 2023. The Trump administration is wielding the power of the federal government against colleges on a scale never before seen, seeking to achieve a vision not dissimilar from the one that preoccupies the Florida politician who set his sights on Sarasota.
Trinh is one of two stewards of an archival collection maintained by students. They catalog items related to New College student government and student life, a task that’s become more difficult as the campus molts into its new form. When they hear about a space undergoing renovations, they’ll go save relevant items — like the student paintings — so they can be digitally documented. In this way, Trinh preserves the New College they knew for a little while longer.
Propped in the corner of the room is a totem of the attachment that Trinh and others feel: a pair of papier-mâchéd feet. New College has long held a reputation as a “barefoot” campus, literally and metaphorically. But after the board recomposition, signs went up telling students that shoes are required in certain places. So one student made those feet and placed them in the dining hall, to see what might happen, said Trinh, who was wearing a barefoot-style shoe. (According to Trinh, the student who did that transferred. About a quarter of students enrolled in the fall of 2022 did not return the following fall, a percentage that was much higher than prior years, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.)
Founded in the 1960s during a very different wave of education reform, New College has always welcomed the creatively defiant. An early statement outlining its vision says that students and faculty members will not “be expected to withdraw from the world,” nor are they expected “to conform to it.” That nonconformist approach extended to academics. Instead of letter grades, professors wrote personalized narrative evaluations. Each semester, students, through close advising, agreed to contracts stating what they’d achieve. But innovation did not mean a lack of rigor — to graduate, students had to complete periods of independent study, a senior thesis or project, and pass a baccalaureate exam. Undergirding these unusual features was the principle of autonomy: Put students in the driver’s seat, the theory went, and they’ll go surprising places.
Campus culture was similarly freewheeling. New College became known for its openness to drugs and alternative lifestyles, its progressive leanings, including its friendliness toward LGBTQ identities, and its apolitical peculiarities. For years, students considered the college’s mascot to be “Brownie the Dog,” in honor of a local stray, according to a bygone New College webpage. When they eventually decided to change it, they could not agree on a replacement. So they deleted Brownie’s name in the student-government constitution and a set of empty brackets was inserted as a placeholder. No choice was ever made, the story goes, which is how New College’s mascot became, until recently, the Null Set.
For Joy Feagan, a 2016 graduate, New College was a haven for any young person who ever felt “a little other.” During her first week on campus, she saw two women walk into the classroom holding hands. “I remember that feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh. It is safe to be yourself here,’” said Feagan, who identifies as queer.
Fans of the “old” New College say that atmosphere, paired with an emphasis on student agency and subject-area mastery, is what made the place special. Those attributes paid off, in certain respects. New College generally did well in rankings, finishing high on The Princeton Review’s list of top 20 public colleges for “making an impact,” which weighs factors like sustainability efforts and student government. It punched well above its weight in producing recipients of the prestigious U.S. Fulbright scholarship, and a disproportionately high number of graduates pursued advanced degrees.
New College “worked very well for the students who were self-regulated, the students who saw themselves as quirky, saw themselves as rebellious, who were willing to take risks,” said Miriam L. Wallace, a longtime professor there who is now dean of liberal arts and social sciences at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
But New College did not work well for everyone. Before the board overhaul, it had just 690 students, and its second-year retention rate was middling or at the lower end of Florida’s public universities. Its four-year graduation rate for full-time, first-time-in-college students, which hovers at around 55 percent, has long lagged behind liberal-arts colleges elsewhere. In the 2010s, when trying to answer why undergraduates dropped out, college leaders identified student culture as a factor. While students welcomed some ideas and identities, according to the leaders, they could be dismissive and punitive toward others, particularly on an email forum where disputes erupted and spiraled. In a 2017 survey of students, faculty, and staff, a third of participating students said they’d seriously considered leaving due to campus-climate issues, including the feeling that the college was an echo chamber, according to the report. “New College is not an accepting atmosphere,” one survey respondent said. “It is accepting of those who accept their views.”
Even Trinh, who misses the sense of empowerment that the “old” New College gave students, told me the degree of autonomy had drawbacks. Because the student body was so small, and students had so much influence on campus goings-on, the stakes could feel especially high for interpersonal interactions. “It was easy for things to go wrong, I guess,” Trinh said. “You could really mess up, socially.”
New College, the institution, also struggled. Money, or lack thereof, was often at root. In 1975, the University of South Florida absorbed the college, which was private at the time, because it was near bankruptcy. Twenty-six years later it was spun off into a standalone institution and designated as the state’s honors college. That brought more direct exposure to the Florida Legislature, which provides a significant portion of its funding and has been controlled by Republicans for a quarter century. Gordon E. (Mike) Michalson Jr., who was New College’s president from 2001 to 2012, remembers a lobbyist’s advice for meeting with lawmakers: Find a way to refer to the liberal-arts college without using the word “liberal.”
Still, New College had a few strong advocates among state legislators who wanted to see it grow in size and stature. In 2017, the college was awarded an initial $5.4 million toward a plan to reach 1,200 students in the near future — a headcount its first president envisioned, but one the institution has never approached. At the time, New College’s vice president for finance and administration called the investment “transformational.” But rather than transform, enrollment declined. At a February 2019 board meeting, a trustee offered a frank assessment: “This place is on fire.”
Not making good on the promise to grow seems to have compromised the college’s credibility with lawmakers, who already scrutinized how much money the state was sending its way relative to how few degrees it awarded. (Most of New College’s students come from in state and pay very low tuition compared to what private liberal-arts colleges charge.) In 2020, a representative proposed a bill that would merge the college with another university. “Spending is not caring,” he said at the time. “Spending more efficiently is.” The bill died, but for those who read the tea leaves of Florida politics, its existence was not a heartening sign.
In 2021, New College hired a new president, Patricia Okker, with increasing enrollment and stabilizing the college for the future as existential priorities. She launched the “New College Challenge,” a yearlong effort to reimagine physical spaces on campus with an eye toward institutional “resilience.” David Brain, then a professor at New College, was optimistic about the initiative, which he co-chaired. At the start of the challenge, he said, his goal “was to see an article about New College in The New York Times.
“A year later, it’s like — no, that’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
For DeSantis, who would soon campaign for president on an anti-woke platform, the opportunity to create a “Hillsdale of the South” was appealing as politics and on principle. (Hillsdale, a Christian, classical liberal-arts college in Michigan that has become influential in conservative spheres, does not accept state or federal funding to maintain its “institutional independence.”) And in his view, New College was primed for a remodel. Talking points from his office distributed to at least three trustees and obtained by a Reuters journalist describe the college as straying from its days of academic excellence by allowing “identity essentialism” to run roughshod. The document highlighted the college’s stated commitment to DEI, its gender-and-diversity center, and the gender-studies program, which, it said, led students who graduated to “dead end pathways and political activism.” Other listed problems included New College’s piddly endowment and its lack of “connective thread” to Florida’s work force. To right these wrongs, New College needed new leaders who were willing “to make difficult and urgent decisions.”
At its first full meeting, the board fired Okker. In the coming months it abolished the DEI office and voted to begin dismantling its gender-studies program even as the director of that program sat on the board as the faculty trustee. There was heated protest from students, alumni, and parents who castigated trustees for in their view not attempting to understand or appreciate an institution before laying siege to it. On occasion their rhetoric was extreme, drawing comparisons to Nazi Germany. (After spitting at Rufo, a student was charged with misdemeanor battery, which was later dropped.)
But the new members did not waver. A year into the transition, I asked one of them, Mark Bauerlein, an emeritus professor of English at Emory University and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30), if he worried about friction between trustees and the professors and students who opposed their decisions. He answered, simply, “Nope.” When I asked why not, he replied, “Why should I?”
A different sort of trustee, I said, might compromise or move slower, to account for the gap between his vision and that of those who work there. To Bauerlein, that approach is all wrong. New College “is a failing institution,” he said, noting its low enrollment yield — the percentage of admitted students who choose to attend, seen as a proxy for an institution’s perceived value — which dropped from 50 percent in 2002 to 14 percent in 2022. When charged with fixing failure, “there comes a point where you say, ‘Well, look. We think this is the right thing to do, and I can explain why we are doing this, but we’re doing it,” Bauerlein said. “And it’s not a debate.’”
The new trustees were in agreement as to who should lead New College into its future. After firing Okker, an English scholar who spent her career in academe, the board effectively hired her opposite: Richard Corcoran, a heavyweight Florida politico. Corcoran had served under DeSantis as the state’s education commissioner during the Covid-19 pandemic, mandating K-12 schools to reopen and fighting against mask requirements. During his eight years in the Florida Legislature, including as the Republican speaker of the House, he was known as a bruiser and a tactician unafraid of making enemies. A fellow Republican lawmaker once gifted him a pair of red boxing gloves, saying that Corcoran had “flat picked more fights with more people than anybody I’ve ever seen before — some of them justified,” according to a Tampa Bay Times profile.
Corcoran considers his outsider status to be an advantage. He has expressed doubt that a career academic who sees the faculty as “their brethren” is a suitable choice to lead a university. Unlike his presidential peers, he told the Herald-Tribune, he is comfortable “shaking up static systems.” His plan to shake up New College — which he details in his new book Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses — was, among other things, to revamp the curriculum, hire “additional world-class” professors, and raise more money. In a chapter that opens with an epigraph from George Orwell’s 1984, Corcoran writes that he knew changing New College’s bureaucracy would be “an enormous battle, and the temptation to compromise would be powerful. However, I was all in. This was a fight that meant something.”
Corcoran hired a raft of administrators to join the fight. According to his book, in a year’s time, every leadership position at New College had been replaced, along with more than 100 of the college’s employees, many of whom, he notes, will remain here when he’s no longer president and DeSantis is no longer governor. “Personnel,” he writes, “are policy.”
Bruce Abramson is part of the new guard. Then the executive director of new student and graduate admissions, he occupied a crucial role in growing enrollment, which is Corcoran’s North Star. In November, Abramson and I met at a campus cafe that was run by New College students before shuttering and is now occupied by a local vendor with the slogan “Faith, Food, and Family.” Abramson wore aviator sunglasses, a sharp blue blazer, and spoke in the cadence of a native New Yorker. He brought with him a book he wrote, The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America. (He dislikes the title, he told me shortly after sitting down, but the publisher convinced him it’d sell copies, “which it didn’t.”)
In the book, Abramson blends a critique of “progressivism” that’s overtaken American institutions and his personal disillusionment with higher ed’s “credentialed elite,” which was forged as he earned a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in computer science at Columbia University in the 1980s and subsequently taught at the University of Southern California. More recently, Abramson worked as a consultant on intellectual-property issues. Splitting his time between Manhattan and Hollywood, Fla., he told me he’d never heard of New College until he read an article about the board changeover. He thought, “I’ve been waiting 30 years for someone to say they’re going to fix higher education in America. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let them do it without me.” He said he tapped his network, pitched himself to Corcoran as a troubleshooter for complex problems, and arrived in Sarasota the day before he started his new gig.
The complex problem Abramson and others at New College are trying to solve vexes small liberal-arts colleges across the country: How do you attract more students when interest in the humanities is on the decline and career readiness is often their parents’ ultimate concern? To Abramson, part of the answer is promoting what New College already does well, like giving students plenty of individual attention. Though he’s critical of what he calls the “woke-and-trans-friendly” branding niche that the “old” New College occupied, Abramson is not as strident as the college’s harshest detractors. The place has an “incredible skeleton,” he told me. This is an irony that pervades the “new” New College — its current leaders have criticized progressive excesses in academe, in some cases portraying New College as the exemplar, but now they have to sell that same college to potential applicants.
To make the sale to Florida high schoolers, New College is trying things like holding a creative-writing competition and hosting debates, Abramson told me. It’s also focusing on recruiting students who attend religious academies, charter schools, or are homeschooled, according to a plan Abramson wrote, which notes that any student “whose idea of a ‘safe space’ includes safety from disturbing ideas is outside our target market.”
But for shorter-term gains, New College embraced another strategy: sports. Weeks after Corcoran became interim president, the college announced it was creating an athletics department. It’s an odd marriage with New College’s quirky quintessence. While on campus, I admired trophy cases that displayed accolades for success at college improv and at the party game Twister. But for Corcoran, if increasing enrollment and retention were the objective, “it was basically a no-brainer” to try to join the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, he writes in his book. Currently, New College’s athletics website lists 17 sports teams — 18 if you count esports — and aims to have as many as 30 by 2034, according to a business plan approved by trustees last year. (By then, the college hopes to enroll 1,800 total students — more than double its current count. In this ideal future, about 36 percent of those students would be athletes.)
The strategy worked. Since instituting athletics, New College has welcomed “record breaking” incoming classes. But it put additional strain on campus housing and, some argue, came at the expense of academic performance. Data obtained by The Chronicle through a public-records request shows athletes who enrolled in the fall of 2023 generally did worse on the ACT and had lower GPAs than their incoming peers. Despite this, according to the Herald-Tribune, which first reported that gap, they earned a disproportionate number of merit-based scholarships. Those who question New College’s embrace of athletics argue it’s altering the student body for the worse, as more students attend not because they were enticed by narrative evaluations or small class sizes but because they want to extend their athletic careers. (“Are there students coming here to play ball who would otherwise not come here? Sure,” Abramson told me. “But they have to be committed to the program, or they’re not going to make it.”)
Right now, New College’s student body is in a liminal period, as one cohort recedes and another ascends. There are the vanishing “Novos,” mostly older students who enrolled before 2023, and the growing ranks of “Banyans,” mostly younger or transfer students nicknamed after the college’s new mascot, which under Corcoran changed from the Null Set to a “fierce-looking, flexing” banyan tree. (The species on New College’s campus are considered “strangler” figs. They often grow by wrapping aerial roots around a host tree, competing with it for sunlight and nutrients.) Walking around, it’s easy to spot who is who. Someone shorter, wearing dark colors and a pair of Grinch slippers? That’s a Novo. Someone taller, dressed in workout leggings, with a ponytail? That’s a Banyan.
On a November weekday afternoon, the divide in the dining hall was stark. At one table sat Fernando Espinal, a baseball player and transfer student originally from New York who wore branded athletic gear and drank a smoothie with a friend. It was Espinal’s first semester at New College. He told me he picked it because the NAIA’s Sun Conference, to which the college now belongs, is strong in baseball, and his goal is to play professionally. If that does not pan out, he’d like to become a police officer and eventually an FBI agent. At his previous college he was majoring in criminal justice, which is not an option in New College’s system composed of areas of concentration, so he switched to psychology. When we spoke, Espinal seemed to like New College well enough — he prefers the Florida climate to the cold, he’s doing well in his courses, and his dormitory is “not bad” — but he did not know if he’ll stay until he graduates. It depends on his athletic eligibility. As for his social life, he said, he only hangs out with his teammates.
Nearby, Braedan Stuart, a senior from central Florida who wore a maroon T-shirt and a black jacket, ate his lunch alone next to a window. It was Stuart’s last semester at New College. He told me he chose to go here because when he was in high school, he was, on paper, an honors student but also pretty lazy and had “a lot of dissatisfaction with the way I was being taught.” New College’s emphasis on charting one’s own path appealed. Stuart is studying mathematics and plans to go to graduate school, and he’ll miss New College — or at least the iteration he attended — once he’s gone. As for his social life, when he’s not spending time on his academic work or at his two on-campus jobs, he’s usually in his dorm room, painting miniatures. Most of the people Stuart knows either left after the board recomposition or have already graduated. “These days,” he told me, “I don’t have too many friends.”
The board also approved over McDonald’s objections a new core curriculum that prioritizes the Western canon and is oriented around the Greek principles of “Logos,” for the humanities, and “Techne,” for the practical sciences. (A prior presentation endorsing this vision includes images of Isaac Newton working on a MacBook, Thurgood Marshall interacting with a robot, and Benjamin Franklin flying a drone.) Early on, New College faculty members were involved. In May, they approved a new general-education framework that included the Logos and Techne alignment. But in the intervening months, “significant changes” were made with little faculty feedback and no transparency, according to an email signed by four faculty members who served on an ad hoc general-education committee before resigning from it after the board vote. (At the meeting, an associate provost noted that the college was up against a tight deadline to comply with a new state law that regulates general-education curricula and contested that professors were left out of the loop.)
All told, the meeting “went pretty terribly,” McDonald told me, “but as expected.” He knows his perspective is unlikely to sway votes, but he felt a duty to present it anyway. He’s part of a cohort of New College professors who did not resign, retire, or take leave after the overhaul occurred — as more than a third of faculty members reportedly did — but stayed to try and preserve what they think is New College’s beating heart.
That group bristles at the idea the college was a “failure” pre-2023. McDonald is particularly insulted by the narrative that professors were indoctrinating students with woke ideas. While in his office, I read aloud a quote from Corcoran’s book in which the president claims that under his stewardship, New College “went from one of the most progressively captured universities in the country to the freest university in the nation.”
Some students — at least among the “Novos” — argue the institution has become less free since Corcoran’s arrival. They point to what they see as limitations of their avenues of expression, like that they can no longer hang posters and flags in their residence-hall windows — a policy the college says is for student safety — or cover their mailboxes in stickers, a campus tradition. When I visited, a sign above the mailboxes warned against the practice, adding, “Cameras In Use.”
I asked McDonald what he thought about Corcoran’s claim. “The mind staggers,” he said. “I think I’ll leave it at that.”
Despite the distance between the president’s views and his own, McDonald’s opinions about all that’s happened since Corcoran’s installation were not uniformly negative. That’s true of many people I interviewed, including those deeply opposed to DeSantis’s maneuvering. Some see value, for example, in the addition of athletes, who bring viewpoint diversity and mental toughness to the classroom. When I visited, I sat in on a small group discussion about The Odyssey, and three athletes were clearly the most prepared and engaged of the bunch. One of them, Ada Sliwka, a freshman lacrosse player who’d jotted notes in red ink in the margins of her book, contributed to the discussion about the theme of hospitality by saying her grandma always told her never to show up to someone’s home empty-handed.
Others appreciate the Socratic Stage dialogue series, which recently hosted Stanley Fish, the noted literary theorist and a “presidential scholar in residence” at New College, in conversation with Judith Butler, the gender-studies scholar. (Remarks of support for the dialogue series were made before the college defended but eventually postponed an event featuring the comedian Russell Brand, who was charged with rape in Britain.)
Some faculty members and students are grateful for, or at least don’t mind, the physical improvements to campus, too. As McDonald put it to me, “I see no political bias in more paint and better flowers.”
And what professors feared the most — mass firings and meddling in classroom instruction — has not happened. In February 2023, Rufo, the most vocal trustee, wrote on X that “we will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments.” So far, just one program, gender studies, has been killed off. In April 2023, the board at Corcoran’s request voted to deny tenure to five professors who had sought it early, which was not uncommon at New College. Many worried the move was a portent. But a year later, the board granted four of those five professors tenure. (The professor who was denied tenure filed a lawsuit against New College’s board in 2023, which is ongoing.) As one faculty member told me, “We do not live in the absolute worst-case scenario.”
Yet there’s no question the balance of power has shifted. Professors complain of decisions being made without them, without explanation. Hiring — a major priority of Corcoran’s — is a major source of frustration. In May, two faculty leaders expressed concern about a process that had “replaced faculty expertise with administrative fiat.” According to a letter they wrote, in 43 instances that academic year, New College’s leaders either shoehorned candidates into on-campus interviews, rejected job offers that’d been recommended by search committees, or made divisions extend offers to candidates who were “unqualified or did not fill the needs of the discipline,” by and large without explaining why.
An October memo from the then-interim provost makes plain Corcoran is the one in charge, which is consistent with a 2023 state law that says public-university presidents are the “final authority” for full-time faculty hiring and are “encouraged to engage in faculty recruiting as appropriate.” In his book, Corcoran writes that New College’s collective-bargaining agreement says that “there is shared governance and that administration is to consult with the faculty. I follow it to the letter. Yet this has never meant — and the contract does not read — that faculty are the only decision-makers.”
All of this hiring means New College’s faculty, too, is divided between the newbies and the old guard. The new additions are generally more comfortable with the college’s tacking toward the Western canon and away from DEI commitments. Bruce Gilley, a political scientist perhaps best known for backlash to his article, “The Case for Colonialism,” is one such scholar. He was hired as a visiting presidential scholar in residence and wrote an essay for The American Conservative about his excitement to join the New College “Reconquista,” a term that refers to the campaign by Christian forces to take back the Iberian Peninsula from Muslims who had occupied it in the eighth century.
Professors who were around before the “Reconquista” generally fall into three groups: Some keep out of the fray entirely. Some push back against New College’s new direction. (At least for a time. April was McDonald’s last board meeting as a trustee. “I no longer believe that I can make improvements on behalf of the faculty,” he told me recently. “I’m not the person for the job.”)
And some, like David Allen Harvey, lean into it. A history professor who once chaired the faculty, Harvey and I met one morning in his office, at the end of a private staircase overlooking the Sarasota Bay, in Cook Hall. He wore a dark red polo and pressed his fingers together as he spoke. From the outset, Harvey’s approach was pragmatic. “My career, my legacy, everything is wrapped up with New College,” he told me. “I’m not willing to see the place fail.”
So he found common ground. Now dean of the Great Books program, he’s currently shepherding into existence both an online degree and an in-person area of concentration focused on those works. The area of concentration will go into effect next fall. The online degree program has hit speed bumps. An early 2024 announcement of its creation said it would feature content from a venture started by Joe Ricketts, the billionaire DeSantis donor. Faculty members rebuked it, saying the process excluded them. As of April, no students are enrolled in it, and there is not a projected launch date. And while the partnership with Ricketts’s organization is “ongoing,” Harvey said, it became clear “we’re going along parallel but distinct paths.”
I asked Harvey if his choice to collaborate affects his relationships with his colleagues. Yes, he told me with a polite smile. Though “if the relationship with some people has deteriorated, it’s because they don’t want to talk to me,” he said. “I’m always willing to talk to them.” That Harvey is a persona non grata among some at New College was driven home when I got breakfast in November with Magdalena Carrasco, an art-history professor who arrived here in 1977. She named Harvey as someone she considers, essentially, a turncoat. If you cooperate with New College’s new leaders, Carrasco told me, “what you do is to help normalize what is extraordinary behavior on their part. You make it passable, make it seem reasonable.”
Unlike many of his peers, Harvey views the board overhaul and resulting administrative shakeup not as an incursion to be resisted or a tolerable situation to be navigated, but as “something of a lifeline.” Lawmakers who’d once toyed with the idea of New College being subsumed by large university are now awarding funding in quantities prior presidents could not have fathomed, he said. And the reason for that good fortune is the governor and the Legislature support Corcoran’s mission. “We couldn’t have the one without the other,” Harvey said. When I suggested what he was describing sounds not unlike a classic devil’s bargain, he agreed that there was perhaps a “Faustian” element, “with the caveat that I don’t think anyone in here is the devil.”
When Harvey first met Corcoran, he’d heard so many negative things that he approached the meeting with trepidation. But he said the president came across as a born salesman, who recognized there were accomplished professors already on staff, and who was energized about making New College one of the best liberal-arts colleges in the country. “I got home and my wife asked me, ‘How did this go?’ And I said, ‘Well, call me crazy, but I kind of like the guy.’”
I was curious if I’d kind of like the guy. He’d been described to me as funny and personable but also sometimes defensive and prickly, and he dislikes the mainstream media, which has adopted a critical posture toward New College. His book is dedicated to news outlets’ “boundless hubris, steadfast dedication to avoiding self-reflection, and unshakable commitment to ignoring any fact that does not support their predetermined narrative.”
At the beginning of my trip, March, the communications director, told me that Corcoran “looks forward to connecting with you” at a faculty cocktail reception. It was held under string lights in the courtyard of the fine-arts complex, before a Socratic Stage dialogue about capitalism. I spotted Corcoran there dressed in a navy blue sweater and Adidas sneakers. I introduced myself and asked if now was a good time to talk. He referred me to March. When I asked again, he said my news outlet had published 10 stories about New College that were all inaccurate. At one point he used the term “blatant lies.” I asked if we could talk about those supposed inaccuracies, to which Corcoran replied, “Sure, pull them up.”
When I started to take my phone out of my pocket, Corcoran said that we were not on the record. I insisted that we were and said that I was doing my job. If we’re on-the-record, Corcoran replied, then he had no comment. “Keep doing a great job,” he added, sarcastically. A little bit later, March arrived at the reception looking slightly frantic. Unfortunately, he told me, the president would not be available for an on-the-record interview at this time.
Soon I took a seat in the auditorium. About 45 minutes after our initial encounter, Corcoran came inside, too, and chatted with the speakers who were gathered on stage. He then stopped to talk with me, briefly. Things went better this time. He asked if I’d conducted any good interviews outside. I said I had. “Just not with me,” he joked. He asked me my name, and I told him (again). “I’m Richard, by the way,” he said with a smile. Then he walked off.
Right after the board overhaul, money rained down on New College. In May of 2023, Corcoran stated the institution had secured nearly $50 million in new state dollars (some was for that fiscal year and some was for the following one). That was thanks to DeSantis and to Corcoran’s lobbying efforts, according to his book. Though lawmakers he met with were “skeptical of the institution’s track record,” he writes, they “ultimately were willing to make a one-year bet on the promise” of what New College could be. But some of the shine came off the apple that fall, when a bold business plan drafted by the college circulated among “concerned conservatives,” according to The Capitolist, a Florida news and analysis website, which depicted the plan as both vague and a fiscal pipe dream. (The document, which mentions a bass fishing team and a master’s degree program in educational leadership that would use New College’s transition as a “unique laboratory,” notes that it is just a “snapshot” and might not reflect final decisions.)
The next legislative session’s appropriations came with strings attached. Though New College was again allocated millions more than it had received in the past, a $15-million portion was placed in reserve. To unlock it, the college would need to submit a “detailed” business plan, subject to approval from the governing board, that specified how the college would boost enrollment over the next five years and how it would measure its progress. That was Corcoran’s objective in September: Present the plan, and get the money.
But after the president ran down the college’s achievements at a rapid clip, including that “we have pretty much eliminated” toxic cancel culture on campus, Eric Silagy, a board member, raised a more existential concern, one that’d dogged the college in the past: how much money the state was allocating to educate a teeny number of students. By Silagy’s calculation, the ratio of appropriated funds to headcount at New College was more than nine times the university-system average. He questioned the soundness of approving a plan that puts the state on a path to spending even more money, as well as why the state’s designated honors college was placing so much emphasis on athletics.
Corcoran disputed Silagy’s calculation and his conclusions. All told there was about 40 minutes of back-and-forth between Silagy, Corcoran, and other board members, which the board chair insisted was not “awkward” but an example of “civil discourse and debate.” The plan was ultimately approved, though Silagy aired his concerns about payoff relative to cost again in January.
It remains to be seen what 2025’s legislative session will bring. And New College is not solely reliant on state money. Among other funding sources is its foundation, which presides over about $44.5 million in investments. Much has been made among New College critics about alumni canceling donations to the institution in protest, whereas supporters of the move predicted it would entice a different sort of patron to open their wallets. At the request of The Chronicle, Larry Ladd, who was once the director of budget and financial planning at Harvard University and is now affiliated with AGB Consulting, looked at the audited financial statements covering July 2022 to June 2024. Based on those documents, there is “limited evidence of a dramatic improvement,” Ladd said, but the foundation “appears to be a stable operation, without significant changes from year to year.”
In his book, Corcoran depicts the direct-support organization as ineffective before his arrival, and he’s exerted more control over it since. In November, trustees granted the president the power to remove foundation board members if he deems it in the foundation’s, or the university’s, best interest. The next day, he dismissed one member. Another resigned at his request. Both had expressed concern over how the foundation would help cover the college’s mounting expenses, which include athletics and Corcoran’s salary. (Under Florida law, private funds must cover a public university president’s compensation greater than $200,000. Corcoran’s base salary is more than double his predecessor’s, at $699,000, not including a potential annual bonus of up to $200,000 and an accrued retention payment of $200,000 for every year he remains president until 2026, in addition to other perks.)
In articles about the departures, the college has cited an internal audit that found years of operating deficits and negative cash flows, among other problems. One former member did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment. The other, Susan Burns, directed me to an April op-ed she wrote asserting that questions from board members about finances went unaddressed by foundation staff. A third member, who’d chaired the alumni association, has since resigned as chair and from the foundation board, citing the college administration’s “mismanagement and wasteful spending.” (Sydney Gruters, the foundation’s executive director, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Miller arrived in 1970 as an incoming freshman who was “more smart-ass than smart.” He became enamored with the place and spent his career leading the college’s environmental-studies program, retiring in 2014. In 2023, he and others created NCF Freedom, an organization that monitors developments under Corcoran and attempts to fight against the ones it disagrees with, though it hasn’t had much success with the latter objective. “We’ve filed complaints, and we don’t get anywhere,” Miller told me before I visited. “We get rationalizations.”
That day in November, Miller wore his white hair pulled back in a ponytail underneath a sun-bleached baseball cap as we walked around campus. His imprint was everywhere. He pointed out tiles he designed that decorate the face of a building and oak trees that he said he and his wife, who once ran the environmental-studies program with him, recommended being planted in the 1980s. Some of their trunks are too thick to wrap your arms around now. Before meeting Miller in person, I wondered why he dedicated so much time to scrutinizing and criticizing the transformation of a place he left years ago, especially now that attention and the energy to resist have dwindled. Walking with him, I realized the degree to which everyone who worked here or went to school here was able to make their mark on this small, singular college in innumerable ways — for better or for worse — since it opened its doors 60 years ago. That agency, more than anything, is difficult to relinquish.
On the west side of campus near the bay, dirt crunched under our shoes as we walked up to the half-built sand volleyball courts. Tarps were laid down; poles jutted out of the ground. Behind those courts is a new field of bright green grass, perfect for kicking a soccer ball. If you’re a supporter of Corcoran’s vision, you look at those athletic facilities and see the resuscitation of a beleaguered institution. If you’re a doubter, you focus on the beauty that’s no longer there. To make room for the courts and the field, the college removed trees, including cabbage palms. Some of them were more than a century old, according to Miller, who published a book about the plant in 2021. Much of this land had been treated as a nature preserve — its protection was written into the campus master plan in place before Corcoran arrived. Residents of the abutting neighborhood were aghast and tried to stop it. When they couldn’t, they held a memorial service.
Later, Miller directed my attention to a tree that was still upright amid the construction, encircled by orange plastic fencing. Its trunk was twisted, like pulled taffy, and its branches splayed outward at odd angles, like broken fingers. Toward the top was an osprey nest — likely the reason the tree, a slash pine, could not be cut down, Miller told me. Though it stood proudly, it was dead. But it was not in danger of toppling anytime soon. When a slash pine dies, he’d explained minutes before, it sheds its needles and twigs, and its softer outer layer of wood decays. What’s often left behind is a central core, saturated by resin, which is surprisingly hard. To demonstrate, Miller picked up a plank lying on the ground near a couple of ladders and a bucket, and he swung it into the tree. They collided with a thwack, neither giving way.
