How DeSantis Demolished Florida’s New College

By Diane Roberts

New College of Florida is on its intellectual deathbed.

Once an authority-challenging, free-thinking institution for students passionate about learning, a place where difference was celebrated and creativity encouraged.

Now, it is becoming a third-rate jock school with over-paid administrators and under-achieving freshmen, a casualty of Ron DeSantis’ culture wars.

NCF has announced it “will happily be the first college in America to formally embrace and sign President Trump’s vision for higher education,” a document called the “Compact for Academic Excellence.”

This compact has little to do with “excellence” and everything to do with coercion and control.

Universities must give up their First Amendment rights, as well as their right of free assembly. No more academic freedom: The government can assess the political viewpoints of every professor, administrator, librarian, student, and staff member, and mandate the “protection” of “conservative values.”

Kind of reminds you of China, where universities are instruments of state communism.

In its legal analysis, the Knight First Amendment Institute says the compact allows the government to “‘transform or abolish’ academic departments” and police every aspect of university life, “empowering the government to determine the approved mix of faculty and student viewpoints and the permissible subjects of academic inquiry.”

If Trump or his minions decide they don’t want anyone teaching climate science or the history of Jim Crow, they can kill those subjects stone dead.

Knight says universities may “develop ‘models and values’ different from those of the Trump administration, but only if they ‘forego federal benefits.’”

Nice little college you got here. Be a shame if the Department of Education had to investigate you for criminal wokeness and snatch back your federal funding.

 ‘Ideological differences’

New College wasn’t on Trump’s initial list of nine (much larger, much more prestigious) universities, including Vanderbilt, Brown, MIT, Dartmouth, and the universities of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Southern California, Arizona, and Texas.

UT-Austin, where an administrator was recently fired for “ideological differences,” issued a statement saying it was “honored” to be on the list and was “enthusiastically” reviewing the compact, probably with a view to signing onto the administration’s demands.

Seven of the others have said a flat “no;” Vanderbilt is a probable “no.”

But New College can’t wait to officially obey in advance. It’s already done most of what Trump’s compact mandates.

President Richard Corcoran has closed departments, shut down diversity initiatives, and attacked the college’s open, tolerant culture.

Piles of books on LGBTQ+ issues, feminism, and the Holocaust ended up in a campus Dumpster.

The books were not imposed on students by pinko profs, they belonged to a library run by students.

Something like 40% of faculty have resigned; others have been fired or denied tenure.

Some long-serving teachers have even been insulted on their way out.

Amy Reid, a professor of French and founder of NCF’s now-canceled Gender Studies Program, was denied the title of “emerita” when she left after 30 years of teaching.

Emeritus status is honorary. You don’t get any money for it. It’s just a “thank you for your service.”

Reid was beloved by students and faculty but voted against Richard Corcoran becoming president. He vetoed the honor, citing her letter of resignation in which she wrote, “the New College where I once taught no longer exists.”

He sniffed, “She need not be burdened by further association with it.”

Professor of Music and Latin American Studies Hugo Viera-Vargas had the publications, the performance credits, and the support of distinguished scholars that should have assured tenure.

Yet NCF’s president and Board of Trustees refused to tenure him. Corcoran wouldn’t consider the qualitative data, the letters from grateful undergraduates Viera-Vargas helped publish their work in scholarly journals, or his interdisciplinary approach to the history of the Caribbean.

 Seriously?

According to Corcoran, Viera-Vargas’ classes were too small, never mind that NCF advertises small class sizes as an educational plus.

Viera-Vargas taught courses on the African diaspora and how race, gender, and music inform Caribbean society: mainstream academic pursuits in the 21st Century.

But Corcoran said he wants the college to move “toward a more traditional liberal arts institution.”

Ron DeSantis and Richard Corcoran’s hand-picked trustees include Trumpists, business people, lawyers, and academics associated with the rightist Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College  and The Heritage Foundation.

Christopher Rufo, the most notorious of the lot, takes credit for creating the moral panic over Critical Race Theory and perpetrated last year’s hysterical (in both senses) nonsense about Haitian immigrants barbecuing cats on their backyard grills.

Students and faculty are supposed to take this person seriously?

Then there’s the money.

You may recall that the governor, who loses no chance to trash higher education, has set up a Florida DOGE, a Mini-Me version of Elon Musk’s barbarian bros, which is supposed to eradicate what he calls the “ideological study stuff” in colleges and universities and ferret out that good old waste, fraud, and abuse.

You may also recall that Republicans have controlled this state for 30 years and DeSantis has been in office since 2019.

Maybe he’s a little slow; maybe, as one critic said, it’s not so much “a serious policy effort and more like a bizarre attempt to stay relevant in national politics.”

The money

The governor’s attack-DOGEs found the cost of educating each undergraduate at NCF is close to $90,000 per year.

At the University of Florida, the state’s highest-ranking institution, the per-student cost is $45,000.

NCF’s president is one of the highest-paid in the state system, pulling in $1.3 million a year.

The president of the University of Florida makes $2 million.

UF has 62,000 students; NCF has 881.

What do New College students get for this lavish outlay of taxpayer money?

Sports! NCF is spending millions on athletic facilities and athletic scholarships for less-than-stellar students.

The SAT scores of the 2024 class are down 170 points from the pre-Corcoran era.

Here’s what else they get: a degree from a college tanking in the ratings.

Since 2023, NCF has plummeted 59 places.

It doesn’t exactly burnish the college’s reputation when it pulls stupid stunts like inviting actor, provocateur, and famous misogynist Russell Brand, soon to be tried on rape and sexual assault charges, to come and talk free speech.

NCF subsequently thought better of it, although it didn’t cancel him entirely.

He’s being “rescheduled.”

Nor does naming as 2024-25 presidential scholars the likes of Joseph Loconte, a Heritage Foundation fellow, and Bruce Gilley, a big fan of western imperialism.

Leconte is getting paid 165 grand for a year’s residency, while Gilley gets $130,000.

(See waste of money above).

When the Guardian newspaper asked Gilley to comment on his appointment at NCF, he responded in the finest tradition of classical scholarly decorum, saying, “F*** you, you ideological midwit.”

Gilley’s scholarship could be called “eccentric.” He argues colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to India, the Congo, and other benighted Third World hell holes.

Prof. Gilley might want to acquaint himself with the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British killed at least 1,000 Indians demonstrating in favor of independence.

Fringe academics

Or maybe take a look at the Congo under Belgian King Leopold II.

The place was a slave state, the king’s private rubber company.

At least 10 million died of starvation, disease, famine, and summary execution.

For the past two years, NCF has been pre-emptively dumbing itself down, embracing fringe academics, and suppressing speech it doesn’t like.

The college has even promised to erect a statue of Charlie Kirk.

Given all this, does it really matter if New College signs Trump’s compact?

Will anyone even notice?

Maybe when the lawsuits begin.

Lawyers of all political stripes say the compact is unconstitutional.

Even the decidedly un-woke American Enterprise Institute is horrified: “For a university to bend to this pressure and sacrifice the academic freedom of its faculty is to abandon constitutive institutional commitments essential to both education and the pursuit of knowledge.”

Here’s the thing: Young people are not empty vessels to be filled up with what Florida’s governor calls “ideological stuff.” Not Marxism, not conservatism, not gender ideology, not historical propaganda.

They do not live in a bubble where everyone is white, Christian, and straight.

Sure, there are Kirk acolytes who want to pretend we can go back to the 1950s when men were men, women were housewives, and people of color knew their place.

But for most students, conservative indoctrination won’t work.

They’ve seen racism; they know the climate is in crisis; they are aware of homophobia and other forms of prejudice.

They live in the 21st Century, not the 19th.

New College will have been destroyed for nothing.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.