The New College Experiment: A Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution

For decades, the sun-drenched campus of New College of Florida (NCF) operated as a rare sanctuary. As the state’s legislatively designated honors college, NCF was famous for its academic eccentricities, eschewing traditional letter grades for written narrative evaluations. But more importantly, it organically cultivated a reputation as a fiercely safe and deeply LGBTQ-friendly institution. It was a place where queer and transgender youth, many fleeing less tolerant environments, could find both community and rigorous academic freedom.

Today, that institution is practically unrecognizable.

Driven by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and engineered by rightwing activists, the hostile takeover of NCF is not just a localized culture war pilot initiative. It is a well funded proof-of-concept. Florida has positioned itself as the testing ground for a nationwide movement — echoing the rhetoric of the Trump era Department of Education — to eradicate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, strip LGBTQ+ protections, and fundamentally rewrite the DNA of American higher education.

The Anatomy of a Takeover

The pivot began in January 2023, when DeSantis appointed six highly partisan activists to the New College Board of Trustees. The list included Matthew Spalding from Hillsdale College — a conservative Christian institution in Michigan — and Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a chief architect of the national panic over Critical Race Theory.

The mandate was explicit: transform NCF into the “Hillsdale of the South.” “Ours is a project of recapture and reinvention,” Rufo wrote in City Journal at the time. “Conservatives have the opportunity finally to demonstrate an effective countermeasure against the long march through institutions.”

In their first official meeting, the new trustees abruptly fired NCF President Patricia Okker. They installed Richard Corcoran, a former Republican speaker of the Florida House. Backed by a massive compensation package, Corcoran was tasked with overhauling the institution’s culture, faculty, and student body.

This administrative coup was bolstered by sweeping state legislative imperatives. DeSantis and the Florida legislature rammed through Senate Bill 266 and the Stop WOKE Act, effectively banning DEI initiatives across all public universities and restricting how race and gender could be taught. By utilizing state power to rewrite the rules of academic governance, DeSantis proved that the traditional buffers of university autonomy could be breached by brute political force.

Purging the Progressives

The most immediate impact fell upon the faculty. In April 2023, the Board of Trustees denied tenure to five professors who had already been approved by the previous administration. Interim President Corcoran asked the faculty members to withdraw their applications to align with a “renewed focus” on traditional liberal arts.

At a highly contentious board meeting, Kathleen Casto, an assistant professor of psychology, delivered a blistering rebuke. According to WUSF Public Media, Casto told the board: “Today, I considered the lives of five human beings who gave this place everything they had and more, who dared to dream, and I said, ‘Not today.’ A sad legacy and surely not what you had hoped to achieve as a trustee.”

The message was clear: ideological compliance was now a prerequisite for job security. Nearly 40 percent of the college’s faculty subsequently resigned, retired early, or took positions out of state. Entire departments were hollowed out.

Governor DeSantis remained unfazed. When asked about the mass exodus during a July 2023 address in Orlando, he responded with characteristic bluntness: “If you’re a professor in like, you know, Marxist studies, that’s not a loss for Florida... trust me, I’m totally good with that.”

Demographic Engineering

For students who chose New College specifically for its progressive culture, the changes were jarring. The Board moved to abolish the gender studies program, defunded student groups, and scrubbed the campus of inclusive signage.

Students mobilized, holding protests and filing federal civil rights complaints. “I’m not trying to be in an environment where I’m force-fed dogmatic, nationalistic, Christian education,” a student named Sam Sharf told The Associated Press during the early days of the transition.

To override the progressive student body, the administration turned to demographic engineering. Under Corcoran’s leadership, the college launched an aggressive recruitment campaign targeted heavily at student-athletes, offering generous scholarships. The explicit goal, as internal communications reported by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune suggested, was to recruit “normal” students to systematically dilute the college’s queer population.

On paper, the administration touted unprecedented growth and record breaking incoming classes. The academic reality, however, painted a bleaker picture. According to data compiled by The Washington Monthly, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school GPA plummeted from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024. The four-year graduation rate dropped from 58.3 percent to 47.4 percent. Consequently, the school’s U.S. News & World Report ranking for national liberal arts colleges fell nearly 60 spots.

“It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor noted anonymously to Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger band bigger cohorts.”

The National Blueprint

The events in Sarasota are deeply intertwined with a larger national imperative driven by the Heritage Foundation and the legacy of the Trump administration. During his presidency, Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
consistently attempted to roll back civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students, framing universities as indoctrination camps.

The New College takeover represents the tactical evolution of that rhetoric. Conservative strategists realized that starving universities of federal funds was inefficient; capturing the administrative state at the local and board levels was faster. The Heritage Foundation, the architect behind the conservative manifesto “Project 2025,” openly celebrated the newly purged NCF as a “great option” for conservative families in a recent report.

By banning DEI, pushing out progressive faculty, and overriding the autonomy of accreditation boards, Florida has provided a step-by-step manual for other red states to follow. If federal anti-LGBTQ and anti-DEI policies gain further traction, the New College model is primed to be scaled.

In the span of just two years, a vibrant, academically rigorous haven for LGBTQ+ youth was dismantled. Its progressive student body was alienated, outnumbered by a state-funded influx of ideological recruits. Florida has proved that an entire college’s culture can be overwritten by administrative fiat. The blueprint is drawn, waiting for the next state to pick it up.
 

This story originally appeared in the June 4 edition of The EDU Ledger magazine.