Why the New College of Florida Story Matters: It's 'Ground Zero' for the Anti-DEI Takeover of Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Why the New College of Florida Story Matters: It's 'Ground Zero' for the Anti-DEI Takeover of Higher Education

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 27, 2026

If you want to understand where the anti-DEI movement on college campuses is headed, you have to understand what happened at New College of Florida.

New College is not an isolated case. It is the prototype.

As the Sun Sentinel editorial board makes painfully clear, the takeover of this small public honors college was never about “balance,” “intellectual diversity,” or improving outcomes for students. It was a deliberate political experiment—one that swapped a nationally respected academic model for ideological spectacle, managerial bloat, and institutional decay. This is not hyperbole.

After Governor Ron DeSantis stacked the board with political loyalists and installed a former state politician as president, New College fell dramatically in national rankings, hemorrhaged faculty, and saw graduation rates collapse. Costs skyrocketed. Academic programs were dismantled. Books were literally thrown in dumpsters. Faculty—especially faculty of color—were denied tenure under opaque and troubling circumstances.

And yet, readers of the The New York Times would barely know any of this. Sure, their journalists trekked to NCF, but they got the story wrong, as claimed by the editors of the Sun Sentinel in "The rest of a very sad story at New College" posted below.

That’s why this Sun Sentinel piece posted below matters. It fills in what was omitted: the math, the governance failures, the political patronage, and the culture-war theatrics.

What happened at NCF was not a modest shift in educational philosophy or governance. It was a hostile institutional capture, carefully timed to coincide with Governor DeSantis’s national political ambitions and now widely understood as a prototype—a governance model designed for export. The editorial rightly observes that this episode is increasingly viewed as a preview of the institutional regime that allies of Donald Trump would seek to impose on elite institutions across the country, Texas foremost among them at the current moment.

Sadly, I write this in the wake of the dismantling of the core academic program at the University of Texas at Austin (Valenzuela, 2026).

That is why New College is ground zero for the anti-DEI takeover of higher education.

If we fail to learn from this case—if we treat it as a Florida oddity rather than a national warning—we should not be surprised when similar playbooks appear at other public universities, under the banner of “anti-woke” reform.

This is not about one campus. It is about the future of academic freedom, public higher education, and whether universities will be governed by scholarship—or by ideology.

Reference

Valenzuela, A. (2026, Jan. 26). UT Austin is dismantling its academic core—and calling it “optimization”, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/01/ut-austin-is-dismantling-its-academic.html

The rest of a very sad story at New College

Ever since Gov. Ron DeSantis (left) appointed former House Speaker Richard Corcoran president of New College, spending has risen while the school’s academic credentials have dropped. Corcoran makes more than $1 million a year to run a school with 900 students. (Tampa Bay Times)

By Sun Sentinel Editorial Board | Sun Sentinel
PUBLISHED: January 2, 2026 at 10:36 AM EST

The academic money pit that has become New College of Florida received kid-glove treatment in The New York Times, but it’s because nobody checked the math. There’s a cost to swapping out curriculum that produced Fulbright scholars for beach volleyball scholarships, and The Times missed it.

It’s important to set the record straight on New College, because what happened there has never been about one school.

The Sarasota honors college is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ prototype for quashing campus speech and dismantling academic inquiry. There’s speculation that it is what Donald Trump plans for Harvard.

Yet the Times article did not mention that after DeSantis stacked the college’s Board of Trustees with MAGA partisans and installed a political crony as president in 2023 who promptly hired his cronies, New College plummeted 59 places to 135th in U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings.

It did not report that New College once produced more Fulbright scholars than any other Florida state school per capita, and that in 2024, only about two of every 10 New College students graduated. The article parroted talking points on rising student enrollment but not the hiring of a student retention officer to try and keep students from leaving.

Skyrocketing costs

In the Times, New College President Richard Corcoran shrugged off $83,207 per student in operating expenses, almost four times the average of all other Florida state colleges and universities.

But there was no mention of Corcoran’s equally controversial $1.3 million annual compensation package to run a school of roughly 900 students. By contrast, the University of Florida’s president oversees 61,890 students for an annual compensation package of about $3 million. And although UF is a major research institution, its degrees cost just $150,729 to produce, state records show, while New College degrees cost $494,715.

Nor did the article reference gender studies books thrown into a dumpster without notice, or the New College trustee who applauded it as “taking out the trash.”

There were no questions about how a scholarship set aside for a person of color hasn’t been given out in years, or why four of five professors approved for and then abruptly denied tenure were minorities.

There was no note of a trustee’s description of mostly male student athletes being recruited to “rebalance the hormones and politics” on campus. The article missed the reopening of the campus cafe by a vendor with reported business ties to Corcoran’s wife, Anne, who uses coffee cups with a bible verse; there was nothing about the school accepting a “Christian” alternative to the SAT college entrance exam, offered by a company also tied to a DeSantis-appointed New College trustee.

A Charlie Kirk statue

The story does not question why, if the goal were only to balance liberal and conservative views, New College plans to erect a statue of hard-right ideologue Charlie Kirk on its front lawn.

The article quotes two current professors but doesn’t explore why other faculty members critical of the school were too frightened to speak on the record in what Corcoran described as a campus finally open to different opinions.

Everything’s fine, the article suggested. The DeSantis takeover was simply a tweak to educational philosophy.

It isn’t and it wasn’t.

There’s talk of privatizing the college, in part because the spending is unsustainable. And the DeSantis takeover was as much campaign strategy as ideology. It coincided with the launch of his failed “anti-woke” presidential campaign, generating free national publicity and MAGA bona fides far beyond Florida.

DeSantis isn’t done with New College. Far from it. His proposed state budget resurrects a plan to “give” New College 32 acres and 11 buildings belonging to the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus.

But it’s no gift: New College would also absorb the campus’ liabilities. New College’s already bloated balance sheet could be saddled with paying USF’s $53 million bill for the new dorm on the property (where most dorm rooms are used by New College students). Still, the proposed transfer is strongly opposed by many USF supporters.

For its misleading omissions, the Times story deserves a flunking grade. But then, so too do the ideological architects undermining New College.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.