New College Takeover of USF - The Ugly Truth

New College wasn’t reformed. It was politically vandalized.

What is happening to New College of Florida is not “reform.” It is not “efficiency.” It is not some noble crusade to improve higher education. It is a political wrecking operation, carried out in public, with the blunt tools of state power: appoint the board, fire the leadership, terrorize the faculty, ridicule the students, erase the culture, then grab more land and call the whole thing a “transformation.”

New College mattered because it was different. For decades, it was one of the rare public institutions in Florida where free inquiry did not mean obedience to the loudest politician. It was small, experimental, proudly odd, academically intense and famously welcoming to students who did not fit the state’s preferred mold. The school used academic contracts and narrative evaluations rather than a standard one-size-fits-all grading model, and the Associated Press described it as long known for progressive thought, creative course offerings and as a haven for LGBTQ students.

That, of course, is what made it a target.

Gov. Ron DeSantis looked at a public liberal arts college known for liberal thought, queer safety and intellectual independence and treated it like hostile territory. In January 2023, he appointed six new trustees to the New College board, including Christopher Rufo, Matthew Spalding, Charles Kesler, Mark Bauerlein, Debra Jenks and Jason “Eddie” Speir.  This was not subtle. The governor’s own office later celebrated the school’s “transformation,” bragging that the newly appointed board had begun terminating the gender studies program and quoting DeSantis saying the board was succeeding in its mission to “eliminate indoctrination.”

That language is the key to the whole ugly project. “Indoctrination” was the excuse. The real offense was that New College allowed students to think, live, question, organize and imagine outside the boundaries of DeSantis-style conservatism. It was a school where liberal ideas could breathe. So the state decided to suffocate it.

The first major tactic was board capture. Once DeSantis’ allies had power, they moved fast. At the new board’s first meeting, trustees voted to terminate President Patricia Okker effective immediately and began moving toward Richard Corcoran, a former Florida education commissioner and Republican House speaker, as interim president.  The Associated Press later reported that the DeSantis-dominated board approved Corcoran for an interim job paying $699,000 a year, plus housing and vehicle allowances, roughly $400,000 more than the prior president’s pay.

That is not how a healthy college changes leadership. That is how a political machine plants a flag.

The second tactic was intimidation by example. In April 2023, the DeSantis-backed board denied tenure to five professors, overriding faculty and student concerns that the move threatened academic freedom.  WUSF reported that administrators had already approved the faculty members’ permanent posts before Corcoran arrived, and that protesters gathered on campus while audience members chanted for the professors to receive tenure.

The message to faculty was impossible to miss: credentials, peer review, institutional procedure and academic judgment would all take a back seat to political control. That is not conservative reform. It is bullying dressed in a blazer.

Then came the exodus. By August 2023, the Bradenton Herald reported that 38 of roughly 90 full-time faculty members had resigned, a number New College’s own provost called “ridiculously high.”  Inside Higher Ed later reported that more than a third of the faculty, around 40 professors, left before the 2023-24 academic year.  A college is not just buildings and branding. A college is its teachers, students, trust, memory and culture. When you drive out that many faculty members in a year, you are not improving an institution. You are gutting it.

The third tactic was cultural humiliation. New College’s gender studies program was targeted. Diversity, equity and inclusion work was dismantled. The school’s identity as a refuge for marginalized students was treated not as a strength, but as a sickness. The cruelty was the point: students who had found safety there were made to watch state power sneer at the very things that had made the campus feel like home.

The most grotesque symbol came in 2024, when hundreds of books were hauled away from New College’s library and the controversy spilled into national headlines. The Associated Press reported that the governing board, dominated by DeSantis appointees, was again at the center of Florida’s culture wars after books were discarded and after Rufo posted, “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.” New College administrators said people were conflating routine library culling with books from the gender studies-related collection, but the spectacle was still devastating: books, gender studies and queer-friendly campus life turned into props in an ideological victory lap.

And now comes the next phase: expansion by seizure.

The planned transfer of USF Sarasota-Manatee to New College should be understood as part of the same political campaign, not as a neutral campus-management decision.

The USF Board of Trustees approved the transfer of its Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College, a move Axios described as making New College a larger testing ground for Florida’s conservative higher-education vision. The transfer excludes USF employees, programs, funds, research equipment and USF-assigned computers.  WUSF reported that the transfer includes buildings, classroom furniture and fixtures — but not students and employees.

That distinction matters. This is not a merger of academic missions. It is a real-estate and power transfer. New College gets the campus shell; USF students and faculty are left to navigate a teach-out while the institution that actually served them is phased out of Sarasota-Manatee.

USF’s own FAQ says that as of July 1, 2026, the campus will be owned by New College, USF will phase out references to Sarasota-Manatee as a campus, and new students whose initial offer comes after July 1 will not be able to designate USF Sarasota-Manatee as their home campus. Current USF students will be allowed to finish through a multi-year teach-out, and faculty remain employed by USF, but the long-term message is clear: USF Sarasota-Manatee as a living campus is being wound down.

The bill language makes the machinery plain. New College must pay USF $166,617 per month toward outstanding debt service until it assumes the debt, and real property tied to the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus is to be transferred to New College by July 1, 2026.  Permanent and immovable academic, administrative and residential buildings, along with classroom furnishings and fixtures, are to be transferred for New College’s future use.  The same bill blocks newly admitted USF students after July 1, 2026, from making Sarasota-Manatee their home campus.

This is the same playbook, expanded from one school to a region: take the institution, declare the takeover inevitable, then tell the people affected to be grateful for a transition plan.

The local opposition has been fierce because people understand what is being lost.

The Guardian reported that the transfer is opposed by USF students and faculty, education leaders and local business interests, with critics warning that programs including nursing, tourism and hospitality could be harmed.  WUSF reported that four chambers of commerce warned lawmakers that losing USF Sarasota-Manatee would hurt local businesses that rely on graduates in fields such as education, nursing and accounting.  Even Republican Sen. Jim Boyd of Bradenton publicly opposed the proposal, saying USF Sarasota-Manatee had served the community for 50 years and that local businesses rely on its talent pipeline.

That is what makes this so infuriating. DeSantis’ New College experiment has already consumed huge political attention and public money. A 2025 state efficiency analysis found it cost $494,715 to produce a degree at New College, compared with $72,252 at USF and $46,548 at UCF.  Instead of admitting that the ideological remake has been destructive and wildly expensive, the state is rewarding it with more physical territory.

This is not public stewardship. It is ideological eminent domain.

The point was never simply to “fix” New College. The point was to make an example of it. DeSantis and his allies wanted every professor, student and administrator in Florida to see what happens when a public institution becomes too liberal, too queer-friendly, too independent or too unwilling to mouth the state’s preferred slogans. The message was: we can take your board, your president, your curriculum, your books, your faculty and, if necessary, the campus next door.

New College was once a haven for liberal thought and unconventional students in a state that desperately needed such a place. What DeSantis has done to it is despicable not only because it damaged one school, but because it attacked the very idea that public education should contain many kinds of thought, many kinds of students and many ways of becoming an educated person.

A serious state protects institutions like that. A small, vindictive politics tries to break them.

Florida should remember what was done here. Not because New College was perfect. No institution is. But because it was alive, strange, humane and free in ways that authoritarian politics cannot tolerate. And that is why it had to be punished.