New College of Florida Doing Great With Conservative Leadership Despite Progressive Criticism
“Most of the ideological warriors have left”
Maybe Hampshire College should have tried this approach. Too late now.
The College Fix reports:
Progressives freaked after conservatives took over New College of Florida. Three years later, it’s doing great.
Hundreds of news articles chronicled what the left deemed a hostile takeover of New College in Florida several years ago.
But despite all the hand wringing about Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s changes starting in 2023, more and more people on the ground there — even progressives — say the public institution is actually faring quite well.
Earlier this year, The College Fix chronicled how a progressive professor there begrudgingly admitted college leaders allow academic freedom to flourish; an article in The Free Press published last week reports much the same.
One centrist student said it’s not the political battlefield people claimed. The article reports leftist worries over what was billed as the new “Hillsdale of the South” were overblown:
The professors who spoke to me said that new president Richard Corcoran’s administration does not police what they teach, though some students said they have noticed fewer course offerings about feminism and race. …
New College also hardly looks like a place being “destroyed,” as Oliver claimed. On the balmy Wednesday when I walked around the lush, palm tree–lined campus, I saw students playing pickup soccer and beach volleyball on fields overlooking Sarasota Bay. …
Over 40 percent of its 105 faculty members left by the fall of 2023, though the college says that about three-quarters of the departures were previously planned retirements or sabbaticals. At least a dozen more left within the next year. Since then, New College has hired about 45 new professors, many from elite institutions, increasing the overall size of its faculty to 125.
“Most of the ideological warriors have left,” Corcoran told me. “They’ve left because they don’t want balance. . . . The people we’ve been hiring are a who’s who of faculty in the history of the college.” …
The new New College has broadened its offerings of Great Books–based courses called “Enduring Human Questions” to fulfill a new state requirement for public colleges that includes teaching the Western canon. …
Students can no longer earn a degree in gender studies because “it’s not a real discipline,” Corcoran said, adding that the subject “should be taught” in other classes as a component of intellectual history.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Ummm, and none of that is “doing great” for a college, IMO. Certainly not the metrics I would look for from a business or an institution of learning. How are graduates performing? How are students performing (on standardized results)? How is enrollment going? Those would be the 3 big metrics for a college.
Nice press release, though.
And enrollment figures. Going up? Down? Staying the same?
On the other hand, there are (as far as I am aware) no stated worries that the college is perhaps going to close or is financially unstable.
Enrollment is rising, mostly baseball players, mostly arriving in spring semesters when they don’t count against First-Time-In-College metrics. It’s even now with where the college was in 2016.. Headcount is remaining the same, because the baseball players are mostly transferring out when they realize they can’t all be starting players on a team with 90+ players.
It hasn’t been in the right hands long enough to HAVE any four=year graduates.
They have no incidents of violent encapments and violating Jewish students rights. I call that a huge win. If this change hadn’t happened you can bet the New School would have been ground zero for that bigoted behavior in Florida. Not getting taken over by the “anti-Isreal (see hating Jews)” mind virus is a huge deal, so I applaud the new school, and who knows maybe one day my children will go there for college. The tuition is relatively low and the rigor looks good.
> If this change hadn’t happened you can bet the New School would have been ground zero for that bigoted behavior in Florida.
Not sure that Joshua Epstein, who had his diploma withheld for wearing “Free the Hostages” gear to his graduation, would agree with you.
https://wslr.org/what-happened-to-the-new-college-6/
Nor Matthew Stevenson, whose Shabbat dinners led Derek Black out of his support for the KKK : https://reformjudaism.org/blog/how-shabbat-dinners-transformed-white-nationalist