This is the first of a two-part series on the New College of Florida takeover written by Juliet Schulman Hall, a journalist for MassLive. I encourage you to read the second part of the series in my subsequent blog post. Mindful of Braaten's (2025) recent contention that the University of Texas at Austin is the next "ground zero," allow me to comment briefly on scalability.
The New College of Florida is small enough to be treated like a political laboratory: a tight board majority, rapid leadership turnover, swift program eliminations, and a campus culture re-scripted through hiring, messaging, and symbolic moves (the “marketplace of ideas” framing, the compact talk, the virtue-signaling).
The two-part series that I encourage you to read (Part 1 below) clarifies that this kind of overhaul is not a gentle “rebalancing” but a high-speed replacement project—one that students experience as narrowed intellectual range, faculty experience as constraint and uncertainty, and alumni track in reputational and academic decline. That’s why it functions as a blueprint: not because it is educationally coherent, but because it demonstrates how quickly governance power can be converted into curricular and cultural power.
But scaling that model to a massive institution like UT-Austin is a different proposition altogether. UT is not one campus culture or one honors-college ecosystem; it’s a sprawling research and teaching infrastructure with dozens of academic units, thousands of faculty, complex accreditation and compliance obligations, and an economy of partnerships and talent pipelines that depend on stability and trust.
The New College playbook doesn’t “scale” into a clean institutional redesign at that size—it scales into administrative overload, legal exposure, and talent flight. You can mandate slogans, reorganize offices, and punish disfavored fields, but you cannot easily reproduce the controlled, boutique conditions of a small college without degrading the machinery that makes a flagship institution a flagship—research capacity, recruitment, philanthropic confidence, and national standing.
So when Braaten calls Texas the new ground zero, his sharp argument isn’t that UT can be remade into New College overnight. It’s that UT can be targeted in ways that make it harder to function as a modern public university: continuous policy shocks, politicized oversight, chilled teaching and research, and incentives that reward ideological performance over academic excellence.
In other words, the scalable product is not “reform.” It is institutional fragility by design—a strategy of deliberate weakening that coerces universities into self-censorship, strips them of intellectual capacity, and breaks them down slowly enough to deny responsibility while thoroughly hollowing out the public mission they were created to serve and losing the very public value it was built to deliver.
Reference
Braaten, A. (2025, December 15). Academic freedom on life support: Inside Texas, the new ground zero of a national crackdown on higher education. ScheerPost. https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/15/academic-freedom-on-life-support-inside-texas-the-new-ground-zero-of-a-national-crackdown-on-higher-education/
How a small Florida college became Trump’s blueprint to threaten higher ed in Mass.
Updated: Dec. 01, 2025, 9:35 p.m. | Published: Dec. 01, 2025, 5:49 a.m.
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| The campus at New College of Florida has undergone drastic changes in the past two years amid a politically conservative takeover. Now Trump is using the same playbook to change higher ed in Massachusetts. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for Masslive.com) |
By Juliet Schulman-Hall | JSchulman-Hall@masslive.com| MassLive
This article is the first in a series examining higher education under the Trump administration.
Along the winding roads surrounding New College of Florida on a recent cold November day were the scattered remains of blue-and-white protest signs from two years ago. Standing between palm trees and moss-draped oaks near the Sarasota Bay, the signs read: “Your Campus is Next.”
The student-made signs spread in 2023 as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis transformed the state’s only public liberal arts college into an increasingly politically conservative institution. The majority of board-of-trustees positions are now in conservative hands, gender studies and diversity, equity and inclusion work was abolished, the college broke ground on a divisive new collegiate athletic program and more than 100 of the college’s fewer than 700 undergraduates left the institution at the time.
Two years later, higher education leaders and community members recognize the transformation of New College of Florida as a blueprint for the Trump administration to push universities in Massachusetts and across the U.S. toward conservative values.
Under political pressure from the Trump administration, Harvard University has made changes similar to those at New College. The federal government demanded in April an overhaul of Harvard’s leadership structure, admissions and hiring or face billions in federal funding cuts.
A key force in changing Harvard and New College has been Christopher Rufo, an opponent of critical race theory and a member of the New College Board of Trustees, who was appointed by DeSantis in 2023.
In November 2023, Rufo said New College was the “opening move in a conservative counterrevolution.”
Rufo didn’t respond to MassLive’s requests for comment. DeSantis declined to be interviewed.
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| Professor David Ellis teaches International Political Economy on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 12, 2025. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for MassLive) |
Richard Corcoran, New College’s current president, went on to write a book about how he “took on powerful progressive interest groups, broke their monopoly and paved the way for higher education reform across America.”
Corcoran, an attorney who served as Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives from 2016 to 2018, was appointed by DeSantis to serve as Florida’s commissioner of education from 2018 to 2022.
He embraces the comparison between New College and the Trump administration’s pressures on higher education.
“That would be a very high compliment. I can’t pat myself on the back; the trustees wouldn’t want to pat themselves on the back,” Corcoran told MassLive. “I think we’re just trying to create an environment where the marketplace of ideas thrives, debate thrives and civil discourse is exemplified.”
Students flee to Hampshire College
Student Senate President Libby Harrity was caught up in the chaos of chanting crowds surrounding Rufo as he walked through New College’s campus in May 2023. Harrity spat in his direction, later explaining it “as a way of showing him my disgust with his actions and his refusal to engage with the student body.”
Soon after, Rufo claimed that Harrity spat on his shoe and threatened criminal prosecution — unless Harrity left the institution, Harrity said.
“This is a normal protest act that people do. And they decided that they were going to use that to accuse me of a crime so that they could get rid of a queer student leader on campus,” said Harrity, who was a sophomore at the time.
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| Libby Harrity was once Student Senate president at New College of Florida, but transferred to Hampshire College in Massachusetts amid the school's politically conservative takeover. (Courtesy photo) |
The tension on campus that day wasn’t just because of Rufo, but also due to DeSantis using the New College campus as a backdrop for signing a bill into law that banned state and federal money from being used for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
With the threat of criminal prosecution looming, Harrity took a public offer to transfer to Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts in 2023.
More than 50 New College students — about 8% of the undergraduate student body in 2023 — traded the warm weather and palm trees for winter coats as Hampshire became their landing spot.
On paper, Hampshire was similar to New College, both small colleges with an alternative feel, narrative evaluations instead of traditional grading and large LGBTQ+ student populations. But Hampshire wasn’t the same for Harrity.
“I loved Hampshire’s community. But nothing can take away the pain of losing New College. It was a place unlike any other. Hampshire could never be it,” Harrity said.
Hampshire wasn’t the first pick of any New College transfer, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t leave their mark on Hampshire, reminding the community of the importance of academic freedom, Hampshire President Jenn Chrisler said.
“You can’t learn that way if you have an educational environment that is constrained to only one point of view,” Chrisler said. “And that’s a really consequential and important thing for us to hang on to at Hampshire, and I think for higher ed to hang on to altogether.”
On a November afternoon, Chrisler pointed to a permanent exhibit in the college’s library from a New College transfer. In an indentation in the wall was a print replica of a student’s mural of birds that the New College administration painted over, she said. The small print was paired with a New College motto.
A plaque hung next to the exhibit, asking Hampshire students to “remember us.”
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| Jennifer Chrisler is the president of Hampshire College. (Courtesy photo) |
“It’s crystal clear, I think, what’s happening. And that is in some way, the very small mirror that was happening at New College of Florida, that was like an early version of this bigger moment that we’re in for higher ed,” Chrisler said.
Connections with Mass. aren’t a coincidence
The Trump administration’s focus on higher education — and the emphasis on Harvard — was born in part out of a push by Rufo, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing New York City think tank.
“I’ve been working on these issues for five years. At the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting. And now, fast-forward five years, some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly become reality.”
Christopher Rufo, conservative higher education activist
In April, Rufo called higher education the “first field of battle” in an ideological war between the political left and right.
“I’ve been working on these issues for five years. At the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting,” Rufo told The New York Times in April. “And now, fast-forward five years, some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly become reality. They become policy. They affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds.”
Before working at the Manhattan Institute, Rufo was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that was behind Project 2025. Released before last year’s presidential election, the 900-page blueprint envisions a federal government with expanded presidential power.
Despite initially distancing himself from the plan, President Donald Trump has largely adhered to it, particularly in the field of education, where he has signed executive orders to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and to ban critical race theory, an academic framework that examines how racism is ingrained in society.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Education didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Vice President J.D. Vance has also been advocating for a conservative overhaul of higher education. In a 2021 speech, then-U.S. Senate candidate Vance called universities “the enemy” and “fundamentally corrupt.”
“We should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left,” he said.
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| Christopher Rufo talks to faculty and staff on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., on Jan. 25, 2023. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images) |
Rufo notably led a campaign in 2024 against Claudine Gay, the former president at Harvard and its first Black president. After facing accusations of plagiarism from Rufo and following a controversial congressional hearing on antisemitism, she later resigned.
The uprooting of leadership at Harvard was eerily similar to the firing of Patricia Okker, the first female president of New College of Florida, a year before Gay’s resignation, Juliana Paré-Blagoev, an alumna of both New College and Harvard, said.
“Seeing that that could happen there out of the blue, let me know that it could happen anywhere,” Paré-Blagoev, a board member of a New College alumni group, Novo Collegiate Alliance, said. “It was shocking. I cried out of a sense of frustration and misunderstanding. How could I have been so wrong about the way the world works that this happened?”
Rufo was a leading member of the New College Board of Trustees. The DeSantis-appointed members “voted in lock step” without much discussion, according to Matt Lepinski, a former faculty member of New College who abruptly resigned from the board in April 2023.
“I was very much in the middle of it,” Lepinski said. “I was attending these board meetings. I was voting against firing the president. I was voting again against the disbanding of all of our inclusion activities that tried to build community amongst our diverse set of students. I was supportive of the provost, so yeah, this was, it was a difficult time.”
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| Former New College of Florida faculty member Matt Lepinski resigned from the college and took a position at the University of Tampa, a private institution. (Juliet Schulman-Hall/MassLive) |
Disillusioned by the changes at New College, Lepinski decided between leaving academia entirely and joining a private institution that the state government wouldn’t be able to sway as much.
“I absolutely went to the University of Tampa because they were a private school,” Lepinski said. “I was absolutely not expecting that the federal government would change operations on our campus.”
Being at a private school makes a difference, according to Kim Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
A public institution like New College is dependent on its state governor’s wishes, whereas private institutions like Harvard and Hampshire have a greater ability to fight back against government pressure, Scheppele said. And yet, Harvard is uniquely reliant on federal funding through its research.
Despite the differences, though, the end goal for the Trump administration is similar across all three, Scheppele said.
“It’s to either make them all into Trump University or kill them,” she said.
‘Throwing out the trash’
For New College, the changes were anything but slow or subtle.
On a bright blue August day in 2024, thousands of books from the college were thrown into a dumpster, many of them recognized by community members as donations to the gender and diversity center.
Zander Moricz, the founder of the youth-led organization SEE Alliance, and other organizers rushed to the campus. Police told them not to touch the books in the dumpster, but they were allowed to pick up the books that had fallen to the ground.
“We really quickly started moving those hundreds of books off the street into boxes, into bags, into cars. ‘Go, go, go, go,’” Moricz said.
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| Zander Moricz, executive director and founder of the SEE Alliance, in Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 12, 2025. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for MassLive) |
Many of those books are now housed at the SEE Alliance office in Sarasota.
“It’s a very tangible representation of Ron DeSantis and the Florida government’s attempt to take over public education in the state of Florida so that they can concentrate thinking to one ideology, to one thought process, to one party, very specifically,” Moricz said.
“We need to be prepared as we look at this potentially arriving at other universities and institutions,” he later added.
After photos and videos of the overflowing dumpster circulated online, New College said the books were removed as part of its annual “standard weeding process” for old or damaged materials. The administration noted that state rules prohibit the sale, donation or transfer of items purchased with state funds.
The administration denied that books from the gender studies program were being thrown out, stating that those that weren’t picked up were put at a book drop location by the library.
Rufo posted to X with a different narrative.
“We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.”
The discarded books were just one way the campus changed, said Amy Reid, who was the director of the gender studies program. She left in frustration over the summer, retiring from her tenured position at New College after taking unpaid leave.
Reid had been there for 30 years but was recently denied emerita status by Corcoran due to her “hyperbolic alarmism and needless obstruction” at New College.
“Physical changes to the campus — from the painting over of student artwork to the plowing under of trees on the Bay Shore, to the astroturfing of significant parts of campus, the closing of the Pride dorm and ultimately the shuttering of the gender diversity center and the trashing of the collection of books that students had curated for that center. All of those things made it very clear that the campus was under new management and no longer welcoming,” Reid said.
She decided to leave Florida, where she had raised her children and built a home, and move to Maryland.
“I am a refugee from Florida. I had to leave my job. I had to sell my home. I had to uproot my family, and here I am … That is a phenomenon that we have yet to fully reckon with,” she said. “Academic freedom, freedom of expression, the basis of higher education in the United States. These things are under attack.”
Inside the student archives
Not every part of New College’s past has been thrown out with the trash. Hidden in a locked room off the New College cafeteria was a student-created archive filled with memories of what New College of Florida used to be, evoking an activist-oriented, progressive atmosphere.
A handmade flyer for the gender and diversity center advertised snacks and an opportunity for students to browse its book and zine collection, which were later recognized in the dumpster. Photos of people wearing elf ears were wedged into folders, and protest posters lined the walls. A plush tiger found in a dorm ceiling sat crushed beneath cardboard boxes, taking over a couch.
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| The New College of Florida student archives, which house artifacts from before the college's politically conservative takeover, sit behind a locked door. (Juliet Schulman-Hall/MassLive) |
A business card explaining and defining pronouns slipped out of a student zine, and a pungent mothball smell emanated from the folds and pages of a book about the student café, then known as the Four Winds Café.
While the student archives were created before 2023, the archival collections ramped up under Corcoran’s leadership, said Andy Trinh, a New College graduate and formerly a student archivist.
Trinh and another student would try to save anything on campus before any buildings were renovated and anything was thrown out.
“It was like they went in with a wrecking ball,” Trinh said.
With many of the leaders of the student archives like Trinh graduating, the room hasn’t had additional materials or many visitors for months, one student said.
But there’s still interest. On a recent November day, students jumped at the sight of the open door as they rounded the corner next to the room, while others asked the keyholder whether they, too, could take a peek inside.
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A view of the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 12, 2025. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for MassLive) The once-organized room of folders and filing cabinets had since descended into haphazard piles and large paintings taken down by the new administration from the student center walls. |
In the left corner of the room, standing out from the surrounding papers and folders, was a bright green archivists’ journal. Flipping through its pages, the entries were short, totaling only four pages, dating from May 2024 to May 2025.
It detailed changes at the school, from the gender studies books in the dump to a mandate that plants were no longer allowed in dorm windows.
One of the last entries written by Trinh read: “Too much has happened to update the past few months.”
A place for ‘genuine academic freedom’
Meeting outside of an auditorium at New College as the sun was setting, Corcoran, New College’s president, described the Honors College as a place that excelled in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with academic prowess similar to Harvard or Yale. However, over time, the community changed, he said.
“The culture had become toxic. Students were leaving because they weren’t liberal enough. They were getting canceled. It was just a terrible environment. And so the enrollment under the previous administration was declining, and retention was awful. So students would come because they heard this great storied history of New College, and then they would be bullied and harassed, even though they were liberal,” Corcoran said.
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| Richard Corcoran, president of New College of Florida since 2023, on the school’s campus in Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 12, 2025. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for MassLive |
After struggling with enrollment at the college for years, it has been rebounding, despite dozens of students transferring out in 2023 to institutions like Hampshire.
The enrollment gains came from Corcoran’s creation of multiple collegiate athletic teams, which led to significant investments in new facilities and coaches. That programming has increased the number of male students from 199 in 2021 (its lowest in 20 years) to 385 in 2024 (its highest in over 20 years), all part of what Rufo described as an effort to “rebalance the hormones and the politics on campus.”
Some New College faculty and alumni have raised concerns about how much money has been allocated to athletic programming and whether student-athletes were accepted without regard to academic merit, which the college denies.
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| The New College of Florida baseball team practices on campus in Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 12, 2025. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for MassLive) |
A walk around the campus in November revealed more students wearing New College athlete backpacks and religious shirts or tattoos than those sporting the pre-2023 fashion of alternative, artsy outfits.
Mimi Fuller, a marine biology student, described a division between the “Novos,” the people who dress in the style of students before the administrative changes, and the “Banyans,” the students associated with the new mascot of a muscular banyan tree.
“It’s rare to see someone like me talking to an athlete or vice versa,” said Fuller, who wore a sweatshirt with old blood stains on it from dissecting a shark.
Sitting beneath a banyan tree, Fuller looked toward the hammocks surrounding it, where students would nap and then go straight to class.
Fuller had dreamed of going to New College because she wanted to follow in her uncle’s footsteps. However, instead, she has watched as the campus changed unrecognizably from when he was a student.
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| Mimi Fuller is a marine biology student at New College of Florida. (Courtesy of Ariana Jerz) |
“I think if New College wants to add athletics, they absolutely can. I think athletics are a great way to bring in money for the school.” Fuller said. “I think what they’re doing, though, is erasing the history of New College, and they’re trying to completely drown out people like me or my friends. They don’t want people like me sharing my opinion.”
Still, that history Fuller looked up to is one of unruliness in the eyes of administrators like David Rancourt, who is in charge of New College enrollment and was the former dean of students in 2023.
When he arrived at the college, he said he had to require shirts and shoes in the cafeteria, ban the use of illegal drugs and stop “naked parties.”
“Our campus is dramatically different. It’s probably more in line with social norms than it was in the past,” said Rancourt, who worked in lobbying and politics before coming to New College.
“If people want to call them (New College changes) radical, then call them radical. But I think we’ve imposed logical, common-sense rules. It is hardly a highly regulated place. Our kids have just as much fun as any other campus,” he said.
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Students make their way to and from class on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 12, 2025. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for MassLive) |
Corcoran envisions the college as a marketplace of ideas, one where all viewpoints can be represented on campus. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in 2023, he argued that New College was a haven for “Harvard refugees” as Harvard made the news for its protests in reaction to the war in Gaza. Corcoran even offered free tuition.
“Things are different at New College, where genuine academic freedom and civil discourse flourish,” Corcoran said.
Jackson Dawson, a New College senior who was recruited to join the men’s basketball team, takes that vision to heart.
He used to be afraid of loudly disagreeing with his high school teachers. However, at New College, he has been able to push back on controversial topics without being nervous about the repercussions.
“At New College, you’re able to disagree, and they allow that free speech. You’re not graded differently for how you talk. And our professors allow us to discuss different ideas,” said Dawson, who is the founder and president of the Turning Point USA chapter at New College. The chapter is part of an organization begun by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was recently assassinated.
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Student-athlete Jackson Dawson poses for a portrait on the New College of Florida campus in Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 12, 2025. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for MassLive) |
Since Corcoran’s op-ed was published, New College has continued to make news for planning to erect a statue of Kirk and for volunteering to be the first institution to sign the Trump administration’s “compact” in exchange for preferential access to federal funding.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology rejected the offer, saying that the compact was “inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”
The compact requires institutions to adopt definitions of biological sex, cap international undergraduate student populations and abolish departments that “purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” among other standards.
The compact also cites that institutions should be a “marketplace of ideas,” as Corcoran has repeatedly declared New College to have.
To Fuller, a New College student, that hasn’t been the vision she has experienced on campus.
“They do love to scream about free speech here on campus, but when they take away courses on gender studies, and they take all these things away, it’s not promoting that free-thinking, free-speech environment that they brag about. It’s free speech when it comes to what (they) want,” Fuller said.
A remaining New College transfer
The changes at New College represented a dangerous future to some students, such as Blaise Paine.
Tracing a path through fading green grass on Hampshire College’s campus on a November day, Paine crunched yellow and brown fallen leaves beneath the heels of Doc Marten boots with purple shoelaces.
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Blaise Paine poses in one of the green spaces near the Harold F. Johnson Library at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., on Nov. 19, 2025. (Sebastian Restrepo/MassLive) |
Paine was one of two dozen students left on Hampshire’s campus who transferred from New College. Three of Paine’s roommates are also New College transfers.
Rummaging under the bed and opening up a filing box, Paine reached for the acceptance letter from New College of Florida.
“It’s a pretty boilerplate thing. It’s nothing [that’s] personally handwritten. It’s what a college gives anybody — but it’s mine,” Paine said.
The acceptance letter is just one piece of New College Paine has kept. Tucked into different corners of Paine’s room are memorabilia of what could have been, including a New College sweatshirt with the college’s name flaking away piece by piece from the blue fabric.
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| Blaise Paine reads their acceptance letter to New College in their dorm room at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., on Nov. 19, 2025. (Sebastian Restrepo/MassLive) |
The hope of being able to attend New College also chipped away as the administration took down gender neutral bathroom signs and quickly transformed into a place that wasn’t safe for queer students like Paine anymore, Paine said.
It felt like every day in 2023, a drastic change at New College was announced, transforming the college Paine had signed up to attend.
Weeks before entering Paine’s first year at New College, Paine transferred to Hampshire. While Massachusetts felt like a safer place, Paine took the New College students’ warning that any college could be next.
“I hope I graduate before the Trump administration sets its gaze on Hampshire,” Paine said.
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