- November 21, 2024
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During Richard Corcoran’s eight years in Florida electoral politics, including a stint as Florida House Speaker, he worked fast and went bold. A fitting strategy for a father of six comfortable quoting Steve Jobs and Winston Churchill in the same conversation.
As Florida speaker in 2017 and 2018, Corcoran, among other battles, led moves to significantly shrink the budgets of Enterprise Florida and Visit Florida — jobs and tourism agencies championed by then Gov. Rick Scott. The political titans, both Republicans, got into some punchy verbal squabbles back then. Scott questioned Corcoran’s motives. Others considered it a typical Tallahassee power play.
In a January 2017 interview with the Business Observer, Corcoran said the arrows were worth it because he was taking on the status quo. “They teach you in law school,” he said, “that when you're right, pound the facts, and when you're wrong, pound the table.”
Corcoran, now interim president at New College of Florida in Sarasota, is again going fast and thinking bold. And again his positions have led to factions. The New College board appointed Corcoran to the interim position Jan. 31, replacing president Patricia Okker, whom it fired.
The hiring of Corcoran, who was Florida Education Secretary under Gov. Ron DeSantis from 2018 to 2021, came three weeks after the governor launched a major transformation — some critics called it a hostile takeover — of New College.
Fresh off his big gubernatorial election victory, DeSantis named seven new board members in early January and tasked them with reshaping New College. “In Florida, we will build off of our higher education reforms by aligning core curriculum to the values of liberty and the Western tradition, eliminating politicized bureaucracies like DEI, increasing the amount of research dollars for programs that will feed key industries with talented Florida students and empowering presidents and boards of trustees to recruit and hire new faculty, including by dedicating record resources for faculty salaries,” DeSantis said in a statement.
DeSantis backed his words with Florida’s wallet: he proposed $15 million to “overhaul and restructure” New College, “including support for student’s scholarships and hiring faculty.” The Legislature approved the proposal in the most recent state budget.
New College, on 110 acres directly on Sarasota Bay, was founded in 1960. It’s since had a mostly triumphant, yet occasionally tortured 63-year run. In 1975 it joined the state university system as part of USF. In July 2001, it became independent and was designated by the Legislature as Florida’s Honors College.
U.S. News & World Report consistently ranks New College as a top five public liberal arts college nationwide. And it's made multiple best values in college lists going back to the 1990s. The school, which requires a senior capstone/thesis and doesn’t give traditional grades, offers more than 50 undergraduate majors in arts, humanities and sciences; a master’s degree program in data science; and certificates in technology, finance, and business skills.
Yet Florida Rep. Randy Fine, R-Palm Bay, proposed a bill in 2020 that would have folded both New College and Florida Polytechnic in Lakeland into the University of Florida. Fine and others at the time contended New College costs too much per student and wasn’t producing enough graduates going into high-paying jobs. (On the flip side, New College is tops in the nation for percentage of graduates who go on to earn doctorates.) Fine’s bill ultimately failed.
Looming over the platitudes and political salvos is five consecutive years of a drop in the already small student population. New College’s enrollment, according to data from the school, dropped from 885 in 2016 to 659 in 2021 — a decline of 24.65% and the lowest number in at least 20 years. (Student enrollment ticked up slightly, by 30 students, in 2022.)
That’s the situation Corcoran stepped into five months ago.
Corcoran, who says he is applying to be named official president by the board, likens the New College transformation to turnarounds other organizations have to go through to survive. You find the biggest problems, devise a strategy to fix them and execute the strategy.
Corcoran starts with New College’s main source of revenue: enrollment. “Like the keys to real estate are location, location, location, the keys to building a liberal arts school that survives is enrollment, enrollment enrollment,” says Corcoran. “And the more competitive your enrollment, the greater the quality of your student.”
Corcoran is in the execution phase of his plan, which, in one metric, is working: He projects total enrollment for the 2023 freshman class will be at least 260 students and set a New College first-year student enrollment record.
Corcoran is in strategy execution mode against a voiceful opposition. That's particularly true on social media, where even benign posts on New College’s official public Facebook page about a student winning an award quickly overflows with anti-DeSantis and anti-Corcoran comments. And in the first month or so of his tenure as interim president, national media publications, from CNN and Fox News to the Washington Post and New York Times, sent teams of reporters to Sarasota to cover the changes — often presented in an unflattering light.
In addition, a few groups have formed to counter — or in the words of one organizer, to be a watchdog over the board — Corcoran and how the new funding will be spent. Jono Miller, who attended New College in the 1970s and met his wife there, and later taught classes and coordinated the school's environmental studies program, has been active on social media regarding the changes.
Miller is also president of a group called NCF Freedom, which he says monitors both the board and Corcoran. His and NCF Freedom’s concerns, he says in an interview with the Business Observer, include questions about academic freedom and the school's governance structure, which previously included faculty in some decisions. He worries both are being eroded — and that’s happening too fast and under a culture of fear.
“”Maybe (Corcoran) is under pressure from DeSantis to get results,” says Miller, a longtime environmental activist who ran as a Democrat for Sarasota County Commission in 2008. “But to move as fast as he has, for a liberal arts college trying to be best in class, is very problematic. There are 1,000 ways a liberal arts college can fail and a few ways for it to work well.”
Dressed in blue khakis, a pink golf polo shirt and Hoka sneakers, Corcoran, in a rare one-on-one interview in late May, spoke to the Business Observer about his ideas for New College, the value of a liberal arts education and more. Edited excerpts:
Corcoran believes New College has lost its way — something even some alumni, he adds, have recognized. Corcoran says when he was in the Legislature, in 2015, New College received an “infusion of $7 million to add more faculty to have growth.”
“And the promise was, if you give us this money, you give us the capacity, go out and get these other great professors, we can grow enrollment to 1,200 (students.) But instead of going from 800 to 1,200, they went from 800 to 690. For lack of a better term, it is somewhat of a death spiral. And I think the way you get out of that death spiral, and this is what I think the governor was saying, was you have to have a new vision and a new mission, one that people can understand.”
“We're changing the culture because the culture is not healthy,” he says. “There's very limited diversity on this campus. And that would be echoed by faculty, it would be echoed by other students. I think the female to male ratio is probably more than 70% female, and 30% male.”
Corcoran projects Black and Hispanic student enrollment will rise in the 2023-2024 academic year. “All of these things are real diversity. And when I say we're going to increase African American enrollment, we're going to increase Hispanic enrollment, I'm not saying much because the enrollment of those two groups at New College has been abysmally below national levels.”
Corcoran says he's met a few times with Ringling College of Art & Design President Larry Thompson, who has led an enrollment resurgence at the school down the road from New College. A key takeaway from those conversations: provide students activities outside of academics, or in higher-ed lingo, co-curriculars. New College is doing that, including a budding sports program and a new mascot, the Mighty Banyan. “You add extracurriculars, sports, those types of activities,” Corcoran says. “That's the quickest, easiest way we've implemented something that allows us to grow.”
“If you look at exit interviews on why kids left New College,” he says, “it’s pretty much in (this) order: housing, food and cancel culture. We can fix all three.”
The first two fixes, he says, are underway. New dorms are a few years off, but the current facilities will have new air conditioners, elevators, carpets and more by the fall. The school also increased its food services contract by $500,000 and added a cafe.
Significantly more polarizing than food and beds is cancel culture — a fast-changing dynamic that can carry different definitions depending on your politics or philosophy. “I think you just have to treat every student, regardless of their background, race, anything, with human dignity. And you don't see that here.”
Corcoran cites board of trustee meetings as an example, where students, faculty and others have shouted down speakers. “Some of the stuff they're saying is vulgar. Some of the stuff they’re saying is vitriolic…and that's going to change. That won't be tolerated.”
“The criticisms will never stop, because the criticisms are not about trying to make New College the best liberal arts college in the country, the criticisms are about ‘we want our culture, and we want you to go away.’ And we're not going away.”
“My mom was British and I quote (Winston) Churchill a lot. Churchill said: ‘You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.’ Ignore the barking dogs.”
Corcoran says the attacks now pale to what he heard in summer 2020, when he and DeSantis led a move to open schools while other states remained closed for COVID.
“We produced this 43 page memo on how we were going to do it. And between July 1 and the opening of schools we had coffins put in front of our building. That was the beginning of DeathSantis. You couldn't go anywhere where you didn’t hear you were a killer, you are everything under the sun. And I remember having conversations with the governor then and, and we would joke that today is July or August, but February is coming. And I would say the same thing today. You just don't lose sight of that goal.”
