Institutional Matricide Beneath the Banyans: The Unmaking of an Alma Mater, the New College of Florida, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Institutional Matricide Beneath the Banyans: The Unmaking of an Alma Mater, the New College of Florida

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 20, 2026

This is a story of what I term, "institutional matricide" by Ron DeSantis and his cronies. It is searing critique of the take over of New College of Florida (NCF) by Nathan Allen—a New College alumnus, who previously served as current New College President Richard Corcoran’s Vice President of Strategy and Special Projects in 2023-24—should concern anyone paying attention to the broader restructuring of public higher education because it points to something deeper than administrative missteps: the convergence of political intervention, weakened accountability, and what the author characterizes as “performative accounting.” 

Notably, Nathan Allen ultimately resigned after observing what he characterized as financial mismanagement and outright improprieties under Corcoran’s leadership.

The Substack publication provided below, alleges that institutional leadership is not simply managing a small, struggling honors college, but actively reshaping financial narratives, enrollment metrics, and academic priorities in ways that obscure declining outcomes—falling retention, lower admissions standards, and a shift away from the college’s historic honors mission. Whether one accepts every claim or not, the pattern described—of opaque budgeting, inflated narratives of success, and dismissal of oversight—raises serious questions about stewardship of public funds and the integrity of institutional governance.

All of this begins with the installment of former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran (2016–2018), also the state's former Commissioner of Education (2018–2022) by Governor Ron DeSantis that resulted in a replacement of half of the board, not coincidentally, on January 6, 2023, exactly one year after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. They were then replaced with an admixture of real estate developers and conservatives, including Christopher Rufo who was neither from, nor lived in Florida, at the time.

Corcoran even wrote a book about this—poorly written, but nevertheless revealing—titled, Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back our Campuses. From there, the DEI officer lost their job, the Women and Gender Studies program and its director, Dr. Amy Reid, were eliminated with somewhere between 35-40 percent of the faculty leaving for other positions in Florida our out of state.

Then came the gutting of the library—shelves stripped bare as books on race and gender, dismissed as “woke,” were thrown into industrial dumpsters (Valenzuela, 2025)—followed by the destruction of a living ecosystem, including the cutting of the mighty Banyan trees brought from India around a century ago by the Ringling Brothers, whose museum stands just beyond the campus. This was not renovation. It was erasure—clearing the ground for an athletics program the college was never intended to serve.

This is me in front of a single Banyan Tree that is similar
to the ones that Corcoran razed on the NCF campus. 

It still brings tears to my eyes as I write these words. I imagine the horror of watching something so deeply loved—so carefully built through relationships, ideas, and shared commitments—be systematically dismantled in real time. Not just buildings or programs, but a way of being together: a fragile ecosystem of open inquiry, care, dissent, and possibility. 

The mighty Banyans—those ancient, life-giving beings brought from afar and rooted into this place over generations—stood as quiet witnesses to that collective life, their vast canopies sheltering all who gathered beneath them. An alma mater, after all, is a nourishing mother. And so their cutting, alongside the hollowing out of the college itself, reads as something more than loss—it is a form of institutionalized matricide, the destruction of the very source that nurtured intellectual, relational, and human flourishing. To witness its unraveling is to feel the rupture not only institutionally, but viscerally—like the loss of a home that once made such flourishing possible.

More broadly, the case of New College reflects a national trend: the politicization of higher education under the guise of reform. What is framed as efficiency, accountability, or ideological “correction” can, in practice, result in the hollowing out of academic standards, the sidelining of faculty expertise, and the redirection of public institutions toward political ends. 

The concern, then, is not just about one college in Florida, but about what happens when governance is driven less by educational mission and more by political theater—where metrics are manipulated, critique is dismissed, and the long-term public good of higher education is subordinated to the devastating impact of what I hope will be a short-term ideological projects.

Reference

Valenzuela, A. (2025, December 22). New College of Florida ‘Statement on the Removal of Books and Library Materials’ Is Not Credible https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/12/new-college-of-florida-statement-on.html

New College, USF SM, and the Bottomless Trough by Novum Collegium Fidelis

Maybe Something for Florida Legislators to Consider Read on Substack

Novum Collegium Fidelis

New College, USF SM, and the Bottomless Trough
Maybe Something for Florida Legislators to Consider

Novum Collegium Fidelis
Mar 16, 2026

“The Right is steadily cannibalizing its ability to advance good policy. Yes, it’s the grifters and psychopaths in the podcast Thunderdome, but it’s also the quiet and cynical self-enrichment happening in higher places. In retrospect, the collapse of DOGE was a major defeat.”

The New College President has made public his defense of the disastrous DOGE report, which repeated what nearly everyone already knew: New College appears more political feed trough than education triumph.

Does anyone take the President’s performative accounting seriously? After all, this is the same administration that – in its scandalous 2024 Foundation audit – couldn’t tell the difference between a loss and an unrealized loss.

This is the same administration that budgets negative tuition and that touts a “surge” in new students but doesn’t mention that 59% of all freshmen are athletes (and 19% of all freshmen are baseball players – that’s not a team; it’s a league).

So when the President starts subtracting millions of dollars in expenses because they are “non-recurring,” his argument amounts to “trust me, my dog ate my expenses.”

This fabulist’s story depends on the term “non-recurring,” which appears twice in his desperate apologia. Is the president aware that each one of those two appearances refers to different, non-interchangeable definitions for “non-recurring”? The president’s harshest critics argue that the president knows the difference and is cynically relying on the ignorance of the voters. The more generous conclusion is that he actually has no idea what he’s talking about.

If the Board of Governors or the Florida Legislature is going to entertain the President’s “non-recurring” argument, then I strongly suggest asking for the ledger data. Hire an independent auditor to re-create the college’s finances, and then compare them to the college’s submitted finances. They won’t be recognizable.

Then, in the interest of fairness (and hilarity), request that all other Florida universities reimagine their finances accordingly.

Performative accounting has a history with this administration. In the 2024 legislative session, the legislature awarded the college additional “non-recurring” millions but put that pile of taxpayer cash into an “escrow” account (which I think they invented just for New College).

Senate President Passidomo wanted details. After repeated attempts to deal with the Senate directly, the New College President handed the problem to me. He assured me that Passidomo was ruthless in her unreasonableness. She wanted to know the costs, objectives, and timelines for each expenditure. It’s unbelievable that a steward of taxpayer funds would want to know how all that money was going to be spent.

I explained to the President that it would take a few days to gather the spending details from the multiple relevant departments.

He was exasperated. “Just make it up.” And he walked out of the room.

Despite that, I made a spreadsheet and shared it with the department heads to complete (feel free to public records request it). I was fairly certain then that the Senate didn’t want a work of accounting fiction. I’m fairly certain they still don’t. But God forbid anyone actually review that 2024 spreadsheet and compare it to the college’s current ledger.

But there were earlier signs of egregious political shenanigans. A year before “Just make it up,” the Trustees entertained a presidential salary report so transparently illegitimate as to be unbelievable (included as a New College peer for purposes of setting the president’s salary were 12,000-student open-access online nursing universities and universities whose mission is to offer “flexible, career-oriented education for working adults, particularly military personnel, veterans, and nontraditional students.”)

In his most recent act of desperation, the President claims that New College appears inefficient because “DOGE reduces efficiency to a simplistic equation: total credit hours divided by full-time faculty.” There isn’t a single slide in the report that uses that “simplistic equation” to compare SUS members.

Just make it up.

There is, however, slide 20, which shows that New College’s most egregious area of over-spending is on administrative staff. So maybe don’t blame the faculty. (Check it out for yourself.)

Despite this storied history of chimeric reportage, the President can’t just subtract out expenses. Such expenses are depreciated over the useful life of the tangible asset (“useful” means revenue-contributing). Such expenses (and investments) impact the income and balance sheet statements; they don’t simply disappear (unless you’re Enron).

There’s no suggestion that the President’s process followed these GAAP procedures (just because an expense is “non-recurring” doesn’t mean it was free).

It’s doubtful Florida taxpayers care about New College’s performative accounting. Taxpayers have contributed significant sums to New College, and they’d like to know what they’re getting for their money. That the school has transitioned from an honors college to a remediation program for commuting baseball players would be disconcerting to taxpayers. Maybe the international players who make up the majority of the men’s soccer team need high school math, but why are Florida taxpayers paying for it?

And yet none of this addresses the outcomes. Freshmen student numbers (“FTIC”) remain stagnant from the pandemic years and are below numbers from a decade ago. SAT scores of matriculants are below every year from 1964 to 2022. The college’s freshmen retention has actually declined from last year, despite offering academic remediation programming (including high school level courses) that it has never before offered (because, perhaps, it’s supposed to be the honors college).

And let’s not forget about the students who aren’t recruited athletes. Last year, the number of academically-recruited students is lower than every year from 1964 to 2022, just as SAT scores are.

The president claims to need until 2028 to hit a goal of 1200, but the new student (“FTIC”) growth rate is currently under 2%, which means it’ll take until 2044 (and over $2 billion) to hit a goal of 1200 FTIC.

It’s increasingly apparent that the President is defending a Potemkin college. Governor DeSantis implemented DOGE because “taxpayers deserve better,” and public entities should “justify this spending” (all the Governor’s words). And yet, in a recent faculty meeting, the president called the state’s DOGE report “silly” and argued that the auditor wasn’t qualified. Maybe that was projection.

But really, the debate is over. You don’t have to wait until this Titanic snuggles up to the ocean floor to conclude that it has hit an iceberg.

Everyone is moving on from the obvious and abundant failures of this administration to the question: what do we do next?

The faculty, alumni and taxpayers do deserve better. Sarasota and Manatee counties deserve better. The legislature’s primary option – which, despite what the President claims, has been a topic of discussion for a decade – is to close the college. The President even took the time to address this option to the Board of Governors in September. It’s very real.

There exist factions in the legislature that believe the college is unworkable in any fashion, while others argue that the college should be privatized. Obviously the college’s trustees and the Board of Governors are incentivized to conceal the problems to mask their culpability.

But everyone else agrees that the current administration can’t be believed to act in good faith and that the current costs and their outcomes are disastrous.

So, what are Florida taxpayers to do?

As the legislature considers tethering the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus to this Titanic, maybe ask for more than “just make it up.”

And who was complaining yesterday (March 15) about “the quiet and cynical self-enrichment” and “the collapse of DOGE?” Former New College Trustee Chris Rufo.

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Nathan Allen, a New College alumnus, served as current New College President Richard Corcoran’s vice president of strategy and special projects in 2023-24.