The NYT Recruiting Brochure for New College

A failing Ron DeSantis higher ed experiment gets a boost

The takeover of New College in Florida by Ron DeSantis and his appointees has been viewed, within higher education, as a failure. The goal was to convert what was seen as a liberal institution into a conservative one using government money and purges. In 2023, I summarized the state of play: “As the new semester starts, New College is an administrative disaster. One third of faculty have gone. Students cannot find classes. Students with housing contracts are being relocated to an airport hotel.”

Conditions have stabilized, but not improved. New College now spends more per student than any higher education institution in Florida by an order of magnitude, but under the new management has dropped 60 spots in the US News & World Report rankings, amidst talks of privatization given its ballooning budget. Traditionally, being given extraordinary amounts of money to implement a blueprint for change, and then failing dismally, is a recipe for being fired.

Most reporting on New College give the impression of a fuck-around-and-find-out example about what happens when right-wing ideologues actually run things, and then run them into the ground. But the New York Times is determined to throw New College a lifeline.

Reporter Anemona Hartocollis visited, and offers an impression of a college making progress in offering fair-and-balanced conservative-liberal environment. Here is a typical passage, discussing the college president Richard Corcoran:

His renewal plan consists, to a large degree, of things that any turnaround agent might have done, like recruiting student athletes and rehabbing buildings. But he has also poked at liberal sensibilities, for instance, by eliminating all-gender bathrooms for trans students.

While the headline asks if one “ideological bubble has replaced another” the piece provides little basis for such concerns, and in practice the impression is that things are not so bad. In comments on the online version of the piece, Hartocollis said: “I found that many professors and students were ambivalent about the “takeover,” concerned about becoming a political football, but finding that in practice, much of what made the college distinctive is still there.”

Every piece of reporting involves a series of choices: who to interview, how to frame the story, who is the protagonist, what evidence is used, what imagery is presented. In this piece, criticism of the experiment is mentioned, but not given equal weight. Those interviewed are on the fence or leading the changes. Attractive college athletes are fine with the campus they were recruited to.

The biggest sins are the sins of omission. Some extraordinary and newsworthy things happened in New College since the conservative takeover. But you learn almost nothing about them in a story that the Times editor put on their front page.

Fewer people read this blog than the New York Times, but let me provide some of that missing detail.

Does freedom to teach and learn matter?

The words “academic freedom” or “free speech” do not appear in the article, which is hard to fathom since Florida in general, and New College in particular, has been on an unprecedented effort to limit classroom speech. In passing, it is noted that “The school has also shed D.E.I. initiatives and gender studies.” There is a sense that there is a more conservative campus, but no dissent about it.

This is yadayadayadaing an ideological purge. Here are things that Hartocollis does not tell you.

• At the same time the College was seeking new money to fight cancel culture it was firing people for their political views. For example, the free speech organization Fire reports that “New College of Florida trustee Christopher Rufo bragged about violating the First Amendment, tweeting that the college would not renew visiting history professor Erik Wallenberg’s contract, citing his “left-wing” teaching, views, and past criticism of university leadership.”

• After New College closed it’s Gender and Diversity Center it removed books from its library, and sent them to a landfill. Presumably, this was cheaper than burning them.

• The university president unilaterally denied tenure to a cohort of faculty without reference to their record, even though they had been approved at every other stage in the process.

• The university president threatened to withhold degrees to graduating students who briefly booed and interrupted a graduation speaker with chants of “Free Palestine.” The speaker was a Ron DeDantis megadonor who has made anti-Muslim comments.

Is none of this notable? We must assume that the reporter does not consider these to be newsworthy, or that freedom to teach and learn have much value.

It is not just the environment of New College itself, but the broader public university state environment in which it operates. You would never learn that Florida is a state featuring some of the most restrictive constraints on campus speech in the country, leading the way in passing educational gag orders, such as the Stop WOKE Act, that violate the first amendment.

Florida has so politicized higher education that it can no longer recruit well qualified leaders who do not match the ideological pre-requisites of Republicans and advocates like Chris Rufo. Even after Santa Ono, the President of the University of Michigan, denounced DEI, he was denied a position to lead the lower-ranked University of Florida. DeSantis personally intervened to block the recruitment of a Dean at the University of Florida because right-wing social media influencers considered all of the candidates to be too woke.

It is hard to overstate how weird it is to have the Governor of a state decide such a position, which is basically mid-level management in higher education. It also underlines that faculty governance can only exist in Florida as long as it does not offend the online right, and the Republican government.

Faculty are afraid to talk about a wide range of subjects, such as race, gender, or anything that could be taken as criticism of the state government. State law encourages students to secretly record faculty in order to get them punished for wrongspeak. One faculty member in Florida described the new classroom environment:

Since Mr. DeSantis’s crackdown, I’ve seen my colleagues harassed and investigated for addressing topical issues, even outside the classroom. The climate of fear gives the government precisely the result it wants. Administrators and faculty members alike practice anticipatory obedience to avoid even the appearance of wokeness, stifling the sort of open and civil discussions that lead students to develop their own views.

These are the conditions under which New College operates. And to the extent that the New College campus does not reflect upheaval it is because it has aligned itself with a degree of state control of the classroom that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago, one that is not consistent with robust academic discussion or the possibility of the campus as a source of dissent. There are no ideological fights because one side has been silenced by the government.

The article does not consider these conditions. It notes that since some faculty “decamped” more have been hired: “About half of them, many with Ivy League degrees, have been hired since the shake up.”

Many with Ivy League degrees, writes the reporter and Harvard alum. Sweet Jesus. This was the detail worthy of inclusion? Who cares if the actual conditions for academic excellence and integrity are being gutted as long as the new hires have the right pedigree?

Whose voices are heard?

Hartocollis only quotes current faculty and students on the record. Things are not so bad, they say, or they are reserving judgement. To put it another way, faculty and students who have selected into the current regime, or who know they can be fired for criticizing the university or state leadership, did not provide critical comment to a reporter from the most visible media institution in the country. What a surprise!

Might the reporter have interviewed faculty who were forced out for their perspectives? She notes that “About 20 faculty members and 200 students decamped within the first six months of the makeover, according to the college.” (“Decamped” is such a polite way of putting it, don’t you think?) Other reporting identify that 77 faculty left by the fall of 2023. Do these people have emails? Might there be any value in getting their perspective? But no, the voices of those who were pushed out of the grand experiment are not worth recording.

What about interviewing some faculty off the record to gain a franker view? For example, the Inside Higher Ed reporter Josh Moody did just this, and found more critical perspectives among current faculty, including one who said.

It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme: Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts of students, and then they say, ‘Biggest class ever’ because they have to backfill all the students who have left.

Moody noted that he had also contacted trustees, the New College’s communications office, two members of the Florida Board of Governors and the governor’s press team. None responded to requests for comment from a reporter from the most visible higher education trade outlet, the one read by peers. But no such problems for Hartocollis who scored an interview with the New College President, Richard Corcoran! What luck!

Are the qualifications of the leader relevant?

Corcoran declares the old New College “was ‘a little Club Med' for people who were all ideologically the same…The changes are not about imposing one point of view on education, Mr. Corcoran said, but about creating a place that values debate.”

In a photo caption, Corcoran is identified as the former state education commissioner. That is the only biographical information provided to the reader. This leaves out a lot, to put it mildly, that might affect how you weigh Corcoran’s words, especially on campus ideology.

• Corcoran is a former politician. More specifically, he was the Speaker of the Florida House. He has spent his 35 year career working in Republican politics.

• Because of term limits, Corcoran needed a job in 2018. Ron DeSantis appointed him to be Education Commissioner. After a failed bid to become the President of Florida State University in 2021, he briefly worked as a lobbyist until a Ron DeSantis-appointed committee fired the previous head of New College and appointed Corcoran.

• Corcoran got a pay package four times larger than his predecessor, worth about 1.2 million dollars, despite lacking basic qualifications for the job.

• After he was appointed, Corcoran published a book praising DeSantis: Standing His Ground: The Inside Story of Ron DeSantis’s Rise and Battle for Freedom. With a foreword by Ron DeSantis! What a get!

• Corcoran has treated New School like a patronage opportunity. For example, a GOP lobbyist lacking higher ed qualifications was named Dean of students and then interim provost.

In short, Corcoran is a political lackey whose presence in higher education is entirely dependent on his patron, Ron DeSantis. This has worked well for Corcoran while DeSantis is in power, but given that he will be out of office this time next year, the gravy train may be coming to an end.

The money does not add up

The reporter acknowledges that New College spending has increased, but “officials defend this as largely a one-time investment, to improve infrastructure after years of deferred maintenance.” Hartocollis says the cost is about $83,000 per student, while an Inside Higher Ed analysis from October suggested it was $134,000 per student. Even if that seems like a pretty big disparity, both pieces agree that this is the highest spending of any Florida higher education institution.

However, the Inside Higher Education piece provides some benchmarks that illustrate just how much of an outlier New College is. In other institutions, the average state per student spending is about $10,000.

An analysis from DeSantis’s own DOGE commission found that New College cost about four times the average per student cost. New College is similarly a large outlier when it comes to cost per degree. None of this is mentioned in the Times coverage.

And even if you accept the deferred maintenance explanation, and that liberal arts colleges will be more labor intensive, it reflects the point that New College struggled because state legislators did not want to invest in it. Now they do, for clearly ideological reasons. Since 2020-2021, the cost of running New College have increased by about 75%. It is a DeSantis pet project, a Potemkin Campus that must be made real at any cost.

The Inside Higher Ed piece quoted Nathan Allen, “a New College alum who served as vice president of strategy at NCF for almost a year and a half after the takeover but has since stepped down.” Allen was frank about the strategic vision of the organization, which is to please Ron DeSantis.

I think that the Senate and the House are increasingly sensitive to the costs and the outcomes. Academically, Richard’s running a Motel 6 on a Ritz-Carlton budget, and it makes no sense…It’s important to keep in mind that New College is not a House or Senate project; it’s not a GOP project. It’s a Ron DeSantis project. Richard Corcoran has a constituency of one, and that’s Ron.

In a deeply-investigated piece by Kathryn Joyce, another faculty member outlined the financial logic of how to replace the students who used to pay to go to the old New College when there is no real demand for the new New College:

The only way we’re able to recruit students is by giving these full scholarships, and that requires the legislature to keep pumping money into the school. I don’t think the appetite for the legislature to keep funding this facade, this mirage, is unlimited.

This is not a sustainable vision. DeSantis has poured money into New College, and recently has pushed to gift it a new campus. State legislators are grumbling that the costs are unsustainable. The underlying point is that New College has not been operating under anything like a fiscal reality for some time now. Even if it was successful, the sheer cost makes the experiment not replicable in other states.

The pivot to athletics as campus makeover

Part of this makeover of New College relies on control of the curriculum, and the purging of faculty. It also involves changing the nature of the students. And a key means to do so is to try to turn New College away from a school for nerds and into a schools for jocks.

The new New College recruited 70 baseball players, about twice as many the University of Florida’s Division I baseball team. (You will never guess which Governor of Florida was a college baseball player!)

Why would a small liberal arts college with no sports facilities or membership of National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics go all in on becoming a mecca for sports? Two reasons.

First, the pivot to athletics is basically affirmative action for males, allowing them to extend scholarships to students who might not otherwise be accepted. This is not subtle. A review of the new type of student that New College was recruiting noted that it drove a drop in academic quality. “Much of the drop in average scores can be attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school’s $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships.”

Second, it also seeks to change the type of student going to New College. Chris Rufo explained that having too many women on campus “caused all sorts of cultural problems,” turning New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” And so “rebalancing the ratio of students” will fix this problem. Its not just the ratio, it is also the expectation that students who want to do athletics will be less likely to be concerned about the absence of gender studies.

The pivot to athletics allows New College leadership to draw a line under its reputation as being a haven for nonconformists, and instead to post images of an idealized college student. New College brochures can’t be sent to everyone, but the Times can fill in the gap with images like this:

While the Times article notes that there are more jocks on campus, it does not question this strategy, or provide any of the detail I just shared about gender goals, or effects on academic standards. Why?

When is reporting reporting and when is it opinion?

It is fair to say that the author of this piece has some form in this type of writing. When I wrote about the the successful campaing to remove Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, I noted that Hartocollis and the Times played a leading role:

Another problem in the Times is that writers about higher education aren’t actual experts on higher education. In many cases, they treat higher education purely from a culture war perspective, building on narratives of woke students and besieged conservatives. For example, Anemona Hartocollis, the Harvard alum reporter who is writing obsessively about Gay wrote warm personal profiles of a Princeton professor disciplined for having sex with students and then lying about it and his wife (a former student). She also wrote sympathetically about Ilya Shapiro, the conservative who resigned from Georgetown after being investigated for denigrating a Supreme Court nominee as a “lesser Black women.” The reporter later treated Shapiro as an expert on Black history, despite the fact he is now working with Rufo at the Manhattan Institute in their anti-DEI campaign.

Hartocollis is not just the go-to reporter to restore the reputation of conservatives on campus; she even is assigned a photographer for these jaunts, leading to some iconic images.

I prefer it when this sort of boosterism is presented as opinion, not reporting, as when the Times gave Chris Rufo a column to explain his plan to get rid of DEI and pointed to New College as a model of a classical liberal education.

When Michelle Goldberg criticized New College in an opinion piece, she interviewed Rufo, showing more journalistic commitment to hearing from dissenting views than Hartocollis offers. Rufo, the New College trustee, is not mentioned in Hartocollis’s piece, which seems surprising given that he was the primary lead of the campaign to remove Claudine Gay that Hartocollis wrote extensively about.

Campus culture and government control of speech are not equivalent threats

The article portrays the ideological lean of a campus as a problem to be fixed. It accepts the idea that New College was a liberal enclave, and what is happening now is a rebalancing. I think this view is fundamentally wrong, accepting the terms of the debate of those who see their job as to save campuses from liberalism by any means necessary.

In defending the extraordinary spending of New College, a DeSantis spokesperson emphasized the transformation “from a liberal arts school rife with left-wing indoctrination into a classical liberal arts college with an emphasis on truth in academics, civic education and academic freedom.” The implication is that freedom isn’t free, and a right-wing campus makeover is especially expensive: “Righting these wrongs has always been expected to take some time, especially with a new administration, new principles, and a complete academic overhaul” added the spokesperson.

Conor Friedersdorf, the Atlantic writer who has made a career documenting the excesses of campus wokeness visited New College in 2023, and found that “New College bears little resemblance to this caricature…In fact, the academic program cultivates a fierce and idiosyncratic independence.”

Whatever the culture and political leaning of the campus, it reflected the organic evolution of the the people on that campus, rather than a government-mandated imposition of values. The emphasis on ideological balance as a goal of higher education elides the forced nature of the New College project, the reliance on a series of coercive strategies to turn a campus against its traditions and culture. A gender studies program that students found value in is not equivalent to political appointees imposing a Charlie Kirk statute on campus.

While Hartocollis notes that more conservative faculty have been hired, she does not identify them in any detail. Nor does she engage in the point that they were hired because of their political identity, not because of their academic achievement. Which is a curious omission because her prior reporting emphasized the idea that an emphasis on identity was lowering academic standards. Some of the new faculty are advocates of colonialism, white nationalism or election deniers. They were hired not despite these views, but because these views put them in conversation with the people running New College.

Part of the reporter’s job is to give the reader enough context to understand the dynamics of the topic they are reading about. This is especially true for a longer in-depth piece like this. The balance that Hartocollis offers is a false one. She repeatedly gives the benefit of the doubt to her subjects, while excluding the voices that might undermine them. The lens she applies excludes or downplays the coercive and ideological use of government power to the point that it fails as a piece of reporting. The Times op-ed page has been consistently on the anti-wokeness beat, but readers should be able to assume that their higher education reporting be a shade better than The Free Press.