A Crunchy College Goes Conservative

Subscribe to College Matters

Everything happening in the world converges in one place: higher education. On College Matters, we explore the world through the prism of the nation’s colleges and universities. Listen to College Matters wherever you get your podcasts.

Subscribe

Subscribe

Subscribe

In This Episode

More than two years after Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, installed a slate of conservative members to its governing board, New College of Florida has seen transformations large and small. In some of the first shots of what became a wider war on “woke” education, New College’s trustees ditched gender studies, endorsed a curriculum focused on the Western canon, and made the Sarasota, Fla. campus inhospitable to some faculty and students. New College is more appealing now to jocks, and it’s flush with money appropriated by Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature. But what does all this mean for the quirky institution that had long been known as “Barefoot U.”?

Listen

Related Reading:

• The College That Conservatives Took Over (The Chronicle)
• A Professor at New College Quits in Dramatic Fashion. Here’s Why He Felt He Had to Go. (The Chronicle)
• Why I Am Joining the Reconquista: Taking back power from the academic left depends on storming the public institutions, not fleeing from them. (The American Conservative)
• Will a Small, Quirky College Become ‘DeSantis U.’? (The Washington Post)

Guest

Emma Pettit, senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Emma Pettit Many of the professors there are really concerned about the leadership’s approach towards hiring, towards the curriculum, towards everything that faculty really care about. I think that they feel like those decisions are just being made without them or without as much input as they had in the past.

Jack Stripling For a few weeks in early 2023, a small liberal arts college in Sarasota, Fla. felt like the epicenter of higher education’s culture wars. In a decisive move, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed six conservative members to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees. The action was widely seen as a Republican takeover of a small public college, establishing a conservative beachhead where DEI and gender studies were no longer welcome. Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who was among the new appointees, described the plan as nothing short of an invasion, aimed at obliterating what he termed “woke nihilism.” “We are now over the walls,” Rufo posted on Twitter at the time, “and ready to transform higher education from within.” More than two years later, the story of New College has faded from national news. President Donald Trump has picked much bigger fights with higher-profile institutions, like Columbia and Harvard universities. But our Chronicle of Higher Education colleague, Emma Pettit, was curious to find out how the New College experiment is going now. In a deeply reported article, Emma dug into what’s unfolded at an institution that, not long ago, conservatives promised to transform.

Well, Emma, welcome to College Matters.

Emma Pettit Thanks for having me.

Jack Stripling Emma, you’ve done a lot of reporting of late on New College of Florida. What were you hoping to figure out?

Emma Pettit I was really interested in New College because of a couple of reasons. I’m interested in how big contentious ideas about society and culture and education, how that gets kind of refracted onto college campuses. And New College sits squarely at this huge debate over if social justice commitments in DEI has gone too far and if colleges should be able to govern themselves, even if that results in some very far left or liberal culture. And when should a governor step in and to what degree should the governor or politicians bring their will upon higher education? Pretty pressing ideas and pretty pressing questions. I was interested in New College specifically because when Ron DeSantis announced the new trustees, there were two big narratives that happened. Supporters of the move saw it as this first battle in this grand recapturing of higher education from progressive academe, which they think has run amok for the past however many decades. Critics of the move saw New College as this jewel of an institution that would be callously destroyed by people who didn’t care about it. And as a rule, I’m skeptical of big narratives, or I’m skeptical of easy narratives. And I wanted to know for myself, what happens. What happens when you try to transform and take over a college?

Jack Stripling You’ve mentioned that New College had this sort of liberal reputation in terms of its campus politics. What was the college best known for prior to 2023 when it really entered the national news?

Emma Pettit Culturally, it was known as what’s called a barefoot university, literally and metaphorically. So kids walking around barefoot and also a granola, crunchy, hippie, welcoming to drugs and exploration of identities and all the stuff that comes with that. You know, they had a mascot for a long time that was the stray dog that just appeared on campus. So it was a pretty quirky place. Its academics were also unique. So students who went there, there were no letter grades. Instead, professors gave personalized narrative evaluations of every student. Students also would agree to contracts at the beginning of every semester about what they’d learn, what they achieve. And failure, the freedom to fail, was kind of baked into the academic programming there. So it was very unique, both culturally and academically. It was small. It’s tiny. Its first president always wanted the campus to reach 1,200 students, and it’s not come close to that. Before the board overhaul, I think it was at under 700 students. So we’re talking about a tiny, lefty, granola crunchy campus.

Jack Stripling And they wouldn’t really dispute that characterization necessarily? Is that your sense?

Emma Pettit Yeah, yeah, I think they would embrace it. I think that New College students and professors, I don’t wanna give the impression that everyone thinks the same way. That’s not true at all. There is an iconoclastic and kind of defiant streak. But it’s a place where if you were known as the quote unquote weird kid at your high school, you could go to New College and be in the mainstream there. It was where the counterculture was the culture.

Jack Stripling I think I’m starting to understand. So, in reporting this story, you recently visited the campus in Sarasota, Florida. What stood out to you about it?

Emma Pettit One thing that really stood out to me when I went on this golf cart ride with Nate March, who’s the communications director there, was how much has changed. We passed construction equipment and a fire pit and freshly painted buildings and signage and beach volleyball courts that at that point in time were halfway through construction. The pace of change is pretty remarkable. That also stood out me when I spoke with Andy Trinh, who’s a student there and one of two student archivists who oversees a collection of things that students save that are related to the student body and student culture there. And Andy showed me this room where all these vestiges of the past were being stored. These huge paintings that were done by students that were vibrant and weird and interesting to look at and a little ugly. And I, on the one hand, understand why maybe they would not be anyone’s first choice to hang on a wall. And yet I loved them because they were so unique and they were part of what made the campus special. Those were all in storage at this point because they’d been taken down.

Jack Stripling Are they being taken down because the administration is taking them down?

Emma Pettit That’s what my impression was. Basically what Andy and the other archivists do, they hear about a space that’s undergoing renovation through the grapevine, nothing really official. And they go and try and save relevant items. So paintings done by students would be totally relevant items that they want to save and then catalog and those I think they might even be trying to return to alumni.

Jack Stripling So as progress marches on at New College, some of the quirky things that students did are starting to disappear?

Emma Pettit Yeah, yeah. And I, as a lover of quirk, I mourn that, you know? It was really interesting to be in this archive with Andy and to see, you know, paraphernalia from student protests in the past and signs, banners, that sort of thing — things that, you know you might think, oh, this just gets thrown away or tossed out once the day is done. But those really matter to student culture, those really matter to students like Andy, who are pretty connected to the old version of New College. It was really interesting to just be in this space where all those things were kind of shoved into one room because the campus is undergoing so much change.

Jack Stripling And this was a place that kind of prided itself on not having many rules. Are there more rules now at New College?

Emma Pettit That’s a good question. I don’t know if I could say that there are more rules, but the rules have changed and who decides them, I think, has changed. So, New College had a pretty strong history of self-governance. And what I mean by that is the student body and the student government was really active and they would have parties and they’d vote on themes of the parties before having them. And they had a really active role in student life. I think that professors who were there at this really small campus — I know I keep saying that, but like really small — so every professor had a pretty active role on committees and in kind of steering the ship of the college. Now, with the new president, Richard Corcoran, he comes from a background of, I think, top-down leadership. He is a very prominent Republican politician in Florida. He was the former Speaker of the House and he comes from this environment where, you know, rules are made at the top or by the decision makers, like that’s why they’re brought in. And I think that that is a very different culture than what New College had in the past.

Jack Stripling And some of the rules I think you did report on was that you gotta wear shoes in the cafeteria now.

Emma Pettit Yeah, yeah.

Jack Stripling You can’t necessarily hang things in your dorm room window. So there is some evidence of this beyond the broad governance changes that you might be alluding to.

Emma Pettit Yes, for sure. It was interesting. In the dining hall, I think in a natural sciences building, I saw signs that shoes are required. Now, one can easily make the argument from a food safety and lab safety point of view that, you know, we should put on some shoes when we go into these spaces. But I was walking out of the dining Hall and I did see one student who looked to me like a former New College student or how should I say it?

Jack Stripling Veteran of New College?

Emma Pettit Yes, a student who looked like a veteran of New College, completely barefoot, sitting on a couch, and I thought, rock on, fight the power. But no, I do, and I should say I understand some of these rule changes and I’m sure that the university would say that things had gotten really lax, and I think they justify a lot of their decisions through student safety and common sense. I think that they would argue that some things had kind of gone ignored for a long time.

Jack Stripling I did some reporting on New College when this first happened, but I haven’t revisited the campus in the way that you have, certainly. I know people seemed upset about coming changes, but now some of these changes have happened, and I’m wondering, are people upset about the changes that are occurring?

Emma Pettit Yeah, people are still upset about the changes that are occurring, but it’s an interesting thing. You know, the takeover happened, the board overhaul happened in January of 2023. There was a huge amount of protest and anger and sometimes I think overstatement or there were comparisons made to Nazi Germany that I think are unhelpful and unwise. But there was a huge amount of anger and protest at the beginning. And what happens over time is just, you cannot raise your fist for so long because you get tired, you know? And people leave, the people who, the students and the faculty who I think were the most opposed left. You know, they took new jobs or they enrolled somewhere else. And I was interested really in the people who remain and why they chose to do that. And I think there’s a range of opinions about everything that’s happened since.

Jack Stripling One of the narratives you said you kind of wanted to interrogate was this idea that this was a sort of liberal utopia where anybody could have any opinion and it was very open. I’m curious what your reporting showed you about that particular narrative.

Emma Pettit Right. So I was curious about that because it’s a really small campus. It’s a campus that attracted students who leaned left, certainly, who were pretty, I think even more than leaned were pretty far to the left. And it just stands to reason to me that if you have a really small group of students, you give students a ton of autonomy and they are politically like-minded or interested in a certain set of social justice ideas, it makes sense to me that there would be some censoring, some group think, some ideological conformity there. And what was interesting is going back and looking at a survey, a couple of surveys of students and also concerns that New College leaders had raised during the 2010s about why are students dropping out, and one concern that they raised was student culture, was people not being able to find an in-group, people feeling ostracized for their beliefs or their ideas. There was a 2017 survey of students, faculty, and staff. And on that survey, a third of participating students said that they’d seriously consider leaving due to campus climate issues, including the feeling that the college was an echo chamber. And I’ll just read one comment from a respondent on that survey, that says, “Several people I know of left New College because of aggressive students who publicly called them out or humiliated them, mostly online, for saying something in disagreement with their personal beliefs.” So this was a real problem. And I think it does no one any good by downplaying that as a real issue that college leaders at New College at the time before 2023 were trying to solve.

Jack Stripling You mentioned New College veterans, but I’m curious, we’re at this interesting point in the life of the college where you have folks who were there before this big change happened on the board and folks who have come after. I’m curious whether there’s tensions among those students in particular.

Emma Pettit I didn’t see tension among the students, but I definitely saw what I’d call an oil and water type dynamic. Walking around campus, it’s pretty clear who came before the board overhaul or who at least enrolled because they were attracted to the old New College and who’s a new student. And that’s pretty clear because a lot of the new students are athletes. So the college instituted an athletics program as an enrollment driver and because they thought sports would be good for the college. And so walking around, if you see a student who is wearing darker clothes, maybe with a couple of piercings, maybe with more of an alternative look, that is a Novo, or a student who was there before the board overhaul or who’s invested in the kind of the old version of New College. And if you see someone walking around in leggings, a ponytail, maybe a gold cross necklace, that’s a Banyan or someone who’s nicknamed after the Mighty Banyan mascot, which is what the mascot changed to under Corcoran, the president there. So I did not see like tension. It’s not like we had dueling factions of students. And the students are all in classes together and I’m sure friendships have been forged. But I talked with a baseball player in the dining hall who made it really clear, I only hang out with other baseball players. And I talked with another student named Braedan in the dining hall who made it pretty clear, I don’t really hang out with anyone because a lot of his friends graduated or left after January of 2023.

Jack Stripling So, remind us, what was this new board promising? What was the agenda they were bringing forward? And how have they gone about making changes in service to that agenda?

Emma Pettit So the new board has seemed largely in agreement, at least in how they vote with New College’s future. The most prominent member, Chris Rufo, promised in an interview that the college would become a haven for conservative families and a place that reflected their values. Other board members, I think, have said that they want to build on what was already great about New College. They’ve not struck as much of a political tone. Early on, the board fired the president there, Pat Okker, who was an English professor for a long time, who’d risen through the ranks of academe, had a very traditional background for the president of a liberal arts college. They replaced her with Richard Corcoran, who is a long-time Florida politician. He was education commissioner under DeSantis during the Covid-19 pandemic. He is a former Republican speaker of the house. He was known as a very formidable politician. Someone who got his way and who was able to make things happen in the legislature. And yeah, he doesn’t have the typical background that you would expect from a liberal arts college president. He thinks that’s a good thing. He thinks that he’s bringing a lot of other skills to the campus. The board has also endorsed and voted on a curriculum, a gen ed curriculum, that focuses on the Western canon, these principles of logos and techne. They did away with the gender studies program. But other than the curriculum, those were some of the flashier moves that happened within the first eight months or so. So they’ve done some things with curriculum, they’ve done some things with leadership. My sense is the day to day is really guided by Richard Corcoran, the president. But I think the goal more broadly is to make the school more appealing to families that have students in charter schools, homeschools, religious academies, places where I think it’s safe to say the former New College wasn’t really maybe looking for students and that’s like more appealing to conservative or moderate families. But building that type of recruitment and establishing those pipelines, I think that that’s something that takes a really long time, like establishing and embedding a new curriculum, that’s a long-term project. One interesting and surprising thing that’s happened more in the short term has been the focus on athletics. And very shortly after Richard Corcoran was made the interim president, the college announced that it would create an athletics department. I think they list something like 17 or 18 sports on their website now. And that has been a huge push and change both culturally and just in priority. And you can see it on the physical campus. I mean, I walked past batting cages. I could hear the crack of the bats whenever I was on campus doing interviews. You can see the sand volleyball courts. There’s a grass field. So yeah, that’s been a huge, huge focus.

Jack Stripling And this might’ve been a place that a young person who wasn’t particularly jock-y would feel welcome. And now we’ve got this critical mass of athletes as part of this enrollment strategy, as you mentioned. Doing away with gender studies, emphasizing Western civilization. You get rid of an English professor as president, put in a politician. There’s a broad suite of changes here that seem quite interesting and intentional. I am curious though about the faculty. We know that some of them left when these changes happened. Is this a place that’s now just stacked with conservative professors?

Emma Pettit So I wouldn’t say that, or actually, I should say, I don’t know that. So unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of data about the shifts in the faculty numbers and the departments in which they were hired and the focus of those departments. So it’s been reported that of the roughly 100 faculty between the spring of 2023 and the fall, 36 professors retired, resigned, or they took leave. And that that leave might not have been permanent. So we don’t know exactly how many permanently left, but a chunk of them did. And for a college that has, you know, a hundred or less faculty members, that’s a huge number and that’s a huge change in culture. And I believe that the college announced last fall that it hired around 40 faculty members. Some of those are not permanent hires. Some of them I think are visiting presidential scholars in residence. But still, that’s a huge sea change. So you’ve got these newcomers, you’ve got this old guard, and that in itself is a culture clash. So we know of at least one professor who’s gotten some attention, Bruce Gilley, who’s a political scientist. He is known maybe to your audience for some backlash to an article that he wrote, “The Case for Colonialism.” And he was hired as a visiting presidential scholar in residence. And he wrote an essay for The American Conservative about his excitement to join the New College “Reconquista,” as he terms it. So he’s really invested in the project and the grander, I guess, political aims of the project. But it also stands to reason that people who are joining the New College faculty maybe aren’t as committed, you know, it’s a tough hiring market. Sarasota is beautiful. You know it’d be nice to work at a liberal arts college. I don’t think we can really conclude that all the new faculty are completely on board or as, I guess, enthusiastic as Professor Gilley is, but it stands to reason that they’re generally more comfortable with the college tacking away from DEI commitments and more towards the Western canon.

Jack Stripling You mentioned that some professors have left. One of those departures happened in a rather dramatic fashion. In 2023, the faculty chairman, Matthew Lepinski, announced that he was leaving after a contentious board meeting. We have a clip of that moment, which is pretty striking. Let’s hear some of that:

Matthew Lepinski So thank you, all of you. I’m very concerned about the direction that this board is going and the destabilization of the academic program. And so I wish you the best of luck, but this is my last board meeting. I’m leaving the college.

Board speaker Uh meeting’s, meeting’s adjourned. Thank you.

Jack Stripling As college trustee meetings go, that qualifies as a pretty dramatic moment. There’s a video of the meeting and Dr. Lepinski, who was an ex-officio member of the board, rather abruptly gathers his things and walks out of the meetings. He’s stone-faced and determined. Did you get a sense that there are many faculty remaining like Lepinski who harbor serious concerns about where the college is headed? Or are people falling in line now?

Emma Pettit Yeah, I think there are people who do harbor serious concerns. I think those that do think that New College has a really unique academic programming — the no letter grades, and the narrative evaluations, and the things they love about the college they see at risk and completely threatened by this new leadership. So I’ve seen an interesting split, you know, some professors that remain totally lean out and want nothing to do with the new administration. And they keep their head down. Some professors, I think, fight against the new direction in ways that they can and try and work, I guess, collaboratively, but try and steer things towards what they think is best for New College, which is a lot of times away from what the leadership wants. And then there are some professors who’ve leaned into it, who think that the new leadership is not a sign of terrible things, but is maybe just the result of New College’s own failures. And one of those professors who’s in that latter category is a guy by the name of David Allen Harvey. So he’s a history professor. I met with him in his office. He was the chair of the faculty at one point in time. And he told me that his approach to all of this was pragmatic. He seemed like a practical guy. And he explained that he made his career at New College. He didn’t want to see the place fail. It also helps that he studies the history of modern France and Germany, so kind of fits into the focus on the West that leadership wants. And he’s now dean of the Great Books Program. And he differs from his colleagues in several ways. He basically thinks that the board changes and the new administration is not something to be resisted and is not just like a situation to tolerate, but he called it something of a lifeline. You know, he explained to me that lawmakers who’d once considered shuttering New College or rather it being, you know, merged with a larger university, they are now awarding gobs of money to the college, you know, to become better and to fulfill this mission of becoming one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. And the reason for that, he said, is because the legislature and the governor support Richard Corcoran’s mission. They support the president’s mission. We couldn’t have one without the other. So that’s his perspective. I spoke with a lot of faculty members who feel very differently. One of them is Magdalena Carrasco. She’s an art history professor who arrived at New College in 1977. And she named Harvey as someone that she kind of considers essentially a turncoat or someone who’s turned against his own colleagues. She expressed strong skepticism that the idea of collaborating with New College’s new leaders would lead to anything good. She told me that what that does is you help normalize what is extraordinary behavior on their part, you make it possible and make it seem reasonable. And I spoke with a lot of faculty members for this story. I think a lot them would agree with parts of what Carrasco said. They also might agree with part of what Harvey said, but I think that many of the professors there are really concerned about the leadership’s approach towards hiring, towards the curriculum, towards everything that faculty really care about. I think that they feel like those decisions are just being made without them or without as much input as they had in the past. And I think they think the things that they think make New College special are really under threat, and time will tell whether those things eventually kind of break over time.

Jack Stripling Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling So I am curious about the leadership. We’ve talked about Richard Corcoran, his background as a player in Republican politics in the state of Florida. Did you have a chance to talk to him when you were down in Sarasota?

Emma Pettit Kind of. So yeah, I really wanted to speak with him. I was really curious what he would say about the college’s priorities, just how things were going so far if they aligned with his vision. He also came out with a book very conveniently the month that I was visiting, Storming the Ivory Tower. It is dedicated to mainstream media and their hubris. So I was interested in how he would approach me as like a journalist for a mainstream outlet. So we met at a cocktail reception for faculty. I was told that we would get some time there. When I approached him, he unfortunately redirected me to the communications director and I asked if we could talk again. And then he said that, you know, me and my news outlet had published like 10 inaccurate stories about New College and I asked to talk about the inaccuracies. And I started to pull the phone out of my pocket and he said that we were off the record. Which is not how that works. And I said, we’re on the record and I was doing my job. And he said that if we’re on the record then he had no comment and keep doing a great job was his, I guess, parting words there. So yeah, it did not go as well as I’d hoped.

Jack Stripling Sounds a little prickly.

Emma Pettit He had been described to me before that interaction as someone who could be prickly, someone who can be defensive, but also someone who would be charming and someone who could be funny. So I kind of thought that I had coordinated this whole visit with the communications department. I’d made very clear that I wanted to interview the president. I had gotten access to other people on campus that were part of the administration. I thought that I would be met with the more charming side, but I was not. And then a little bit later, though, we spoke again briefly. This time I was in the auditorium before an event and he was walking by me and stopped to talk, and he asked if I’d conducted any good interviews outside, and I said I had, and he said, just not with me. And I said, I’d still love to. But that unfortunately did not persuade him. But yeah, we had a nice exchange. He asked me my name, and he told me, you know, I’m Richard, by the way. And then he walked off. So, you know I think I saw two different sides of him in the span of like an hour, which as a reporter, you know, if you’re not gonna give me an interview, you know you might as well do that.

Jack Stripling Well, and as you say, he’s sort of positioned himself as anti-media. The subtitle of his book is How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses. So he has fully embraced this idea of sort of storming higher education, taking it back from the woke left. He’s not running away from that image, it doesn’t sound like.

Emma Pettit No. No, no, no. And so much of the subplot of that book or the I guess the plot of that book is the media, and is the critical posture that they adopted towards the New College transformation, which is true. Like news outlets were very, very critical, skeptical, and I think looking for, you know, evidence of things going wrong. I mean, we work in newsrooms, like things going wrong is a better headline than like, things going medium or things going boring. So I get it. And he also, in his book, had a couple of examples where I thought, yeah, I think that’s unfair framing. Or I think there were some questions that were not asked that should have been. So I wanted to talk with him about it because I like getting a little meta. Like, tell me what we collectively, the media, has gotten wrong about New College. But unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to do that.

Jack Stripling Yeah, and what was happening, I think what made it newsworthy in part, was the degree to which the people involved in it were saying the quiet part out loud. There was no gray area about what the folks coming in here were trying to do, their narrative that the college was broken, and that part of the reason that it was broken was because of its politics. Do you agree with that?

Emma Pettit I think that that is completely the outward posture and some of the outward messaging. I mean, there were these, in the story, these talking points that were circulated by the governor’s office that basically say, this was a campus run amok or destroyed by its own social justice commitments, and that’s why it couldn’t get the enrollment that it wanted, and that’s why it was slipping and it had all these issues. And New College did have issues; it totally did, and it had issues with some of the student culture stuff. I think for people who are on campus, it was pretty difficult to hear just like, you are a failure over and over and over again, and to be kind of drafted as these like soldiers in a culture war that they did not ask for.

That being said, I think the internal rhetoric sometimes differed from the outward rhetoric, right? You know, it’s one thing to talk about wokeism run amok and this college kind of being a failure, or we want to storm the ivory tower. But you actually got to work with all the people who are still there. And you know, I think sometimes internally the messaging was, hey, we, uh, want to build on what you guys are already doing well here. One really interesting person that I spoke with was Bruce Abramson, who has a new title now, but at the time was the executive director of new students and graduate admissions. And he’s a critic of progressive academia or what he sees as the excesses of progressive academia. But he was complimentary of some of the professors that he’d met at New College. He thinks the place has an incredible skeleton. Like he seems like someone who got onto campus and saw a lot of good things going on there, you know? It just shows that like your narratives can become complicated when you actually meet people and you talk to the people who’ve been invested in this campus for decades.

Jack Stripling Right, right. I think that that’s a really good point about how the hot outward rhetoric and the actual work of governing within an institution often differ. I do think another thing that raised eyebrows was that people who were supporting this action were saying, we want this to be the next Hillsdale College. This is a private conservative Christian liberal arts college in Hillsdale, Michigan, that’s famous for not accepting any federal money. So the idea that you’re going to take a public liberal arts college and turn it into something that looks a lot like a private Christian college, I think for some people was anathema.

Emma Pettit Right. So Corcoran takes issue with how the news media ran with that Hillsdale comparison, but it didn’t come out of thin air and it wasn’t just reporters who were saying it. James Uthmeyer, who was then Ron DeSantis’ chief of staff and is now Florida’s attorney general, made that comparison. He told The Daily Caller that the administration wanted New College to be something like “the Hillsdale of the South.” And other officials ran with it too, including Florida’s education commissioner and the governor’s communications director. All that said, Corcoran blames the media for inferring that these Hillsdale comparisons meant that the governor had designs to make New College into a conservative Christian institution. In his book, he says that if reporters had, quote, “bothered to follow up with the people who made these comparisons, they would have known that the goal was only to establish a great liberal arts institution.” But, you know, you’re choosing Hillsdale for a reason. If you meant classical liberal arts college, you could have said something like St. John’s. It was meant to make a point.

Jack Stripling I’m curious about the report card so far. We’ve got a couple years into this experiment. The biggest argument that New College was broken had to do with its enrollment. They couldn’t make that number budge in a meaningful way, and conservatives would say that that was because of the politics. We’ve talked about that. But is there any evidence that this new group of leaders have turned things around in the past two years, relative to enrollment specifically?

Emma Pettit There is. The latest, I guess, federal data is from the fall of 2023. New College then had 732 students, which was up from the previous year, pre-board overhaul at 690. A couple of things to know, a ton of students left. I think around a quarter didn’t come back between the two falls, you know, pre- and post-takeover, but they went from, yeah, 690 to 732. So that’s about a 6% increase. And then we don’t have federal reported data for the fall of 2024, but at the start of the most recent academic year, the college said in a press release that it had surpassed 850 students. So yeah, that’s an upward swing.

Jack Stripling But far short of where they say they want to end up. What’s the broader goal?

Emma Pettit Yeah, so they’ve staked out goals for themselves. I think right now they would say that they’re on the pathway to hit their goals. They have a goal of 1,800 students by 2034. I, a higher education reporter, not someone who works in enrollment, but just as an observer, would call that ambitious. I would call it that incredibly ambitious for a college that has never approached 1,200 students. 1,200 was the magic number that its first president wanted and New College hasn’t come close to that. If you’re trying to get 1,800 students on a campus that is a residential liberal arts college that is going to be a massive transformation.

Jack Stripling And part of how you do that is with money from the state or money from donors. I know that there’s a critique out there that the money really started flowing once they got their board in place, once there was ideological conformity, that’s the narrative you hear that, oh, now the legislature likes New College. They had gotten some opportunities before. They’d gotten some money before to try to turn things around. But is the spigot just fully open now?

Emma Pettit Yeah, they’d certainly gotten some money towards this plan to boost enrollment back in I want to say 2017. The amount of money they’re getting now totally depends on when you count, how you count, all that boring stuff. But it is I think fair to say hand in fist more than they were getting pre Richard Corcoran before this takeover happened.

Jack Stripling So, the New College story felt significant at the time of the board takeover for a few reasons. Ron DeSantis, people may not remember this, but was an ascendant figure in the Republican Party at the time. He was widely seen as a legitimate rival to Trump for the party’s presidential nomination. A lot’s changed since then. But what’s happening at New College was sort of the centerpiece of DeSantis’ anti-woke agenda. Now the idea of stacking a small college board with conservatives might feel kind of quaint as a broader anti-woke action. The Trump administration is forcing colleges as powerful as Columbia University to do what it wants. There’s enormous federal pressure to root out DEI at colleges all over the country. Within that broader context, why does the New College story still matter?

Emma Pettit Yeah, I certainly get what you’re saying. I mean, looking at the past 100 days or so, it’s like, my God, I don’t know if we could have predicted the way that the Trump administration is trying to bring higher education to heel. I think it still matters for a couple reasons. I think it still matters because the ideas that animate the changes at New College are the ones that animate the Trump administration, right? It’s the idea that universities and colleges have become completely captured by Democrats, by progressives, by people who are very, very opposed to conservative ideas and to conservatives in general, and that that has been allowed to take place for so long and there needs to be a huge recapturing of higher education writ large. And there’s arguments that, you know, woke ideas, DEI, social justice issues, et cetera, have corrupted the mission of these institutions, have made them focus not on, you know academic excellence and merit, but on these fuzzy, squishy discriminatory practices and priorities that are doing a disservice to the country. That’s the argument. That’s the argument that you find at New College. That’s the argument that you find and the federal government right now. So I think it really, really matters to understand. Hey, here’s one campus that was thrust to the center of these clashing ideas. How are things going? And I think that the answer to that question I think is complicated. And I hope will complicate readers’ perspectives and maybe expectations of what’s happened.

Jack Stripling So certainly a canary in the coal mine, in terms of where higher education might be headed. But also an interesting story in and of itself. I’m so glad you looked into it, Emma. It’s fascinating.

Emma Pettit Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me to talk about it.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com.

We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.