Reviving New College

On May 19, 2023, the graduation speaker at New College of Florida, Dr. Scott Atlas, walked up to the podium to begin his remarks. The sun was just beginning to set over Sarasota Bay, off which the campus is located, and guests were seated near the water under a large white tent. Behind Dr. Atlas on an elevated stage, faculty and administration wore their academic regalia. The event looked like many college commencements taking place around the nation that spring. However, when Dr. Atlas had accepted the invitation to speak from me, the recently appointed interim president, we had both known it would be anything but typical.

Shortly after Dr. Atlas began his remarks, yells from the audience of “Murderer!” and “Go f*** yourself!” would result in police entering the crowd to stand quietly, scanning the rows. A chorus of boos and jeers continued throughout Dr. Atlas’s 16-minute speech. He stoically read from his script, stopping rarely, except once toward the end, when many of the several hundred in the audience stood up, turned their backs on him, and chanted, “Wrap it up!” for more than a minute, forcing him to pause as the noise became overwhelming.

New College was at the center of a national firestorm and had been for four months, ever since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new trustees to its board. At the time DeSantis had made the new board appointments, enrollment hovered at around 650 students, and the university—one of 12 in the Florida system—had struggled for years with enrollment and retention. When a seventh trustee was chosen by the governing board of the Florida university system shortly after DeSantis named his new members, these seven now formed a majority of the 13-person board. Attempting to stabilize the floundering college, they quickly began making changes, including choosing me as interim president.

The goal was to return New College to its mission of providing a traditional liberal arts education. This included a recommitment to free speech and civil discourse, essential components of teaching students to think critically. Many of the university’s enrollment and retention issues arose from a cancel culture that permeated the campus, known for its radical leftist ideology.

The parents and students waiting for Dr. Atlas to begin his speech had signed on to be part of the college long before the current transition that was taking place. As a result, they had been steeped in the ideological conformity of the “old New College.” They had also been fed a steady stream of media disinformation about the purpose of the changes and the reasoning behind the decisions that were made in the weeks between the new board appointments in January and this picturesque graduation evening.

When I looked out at the crowd from my place on the stage as Dr. Atlas prepared to speak, I wondered how they would react to someone who did not align with their ideology, a distinguished medical doctor who had been a chief of neuroradiology at Stanford, along with serving as a professor for 25 years at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. However, most importantly to this audience, Dr. Atlas had served as a COVID advisor to President Donald Trump. According to ABC News, during his tenure, Dr. Atlas had “called on schools to open, endorsed the return of college football, raised questions about mask wearing and spoken out against lockdowns.”

In his calm, academic manner, Dr. Atlas began his speech with the following:

You are a very special group for many reasons—especially because you endured the craziness of the COVID pandemic…. What excites me the most about New College is its stated commitment to “ free speech and civil discourse.” This is the most urgently needed change in America today—restoring both civil discourse and the free exchange of ideas.

At the back of the tent, reporters from around the nation were packed into a roped-off area along with numerous television cameras. This group of legacy media outlets had been spinning a false narrative that the purpose of DeSantis’s appointment of the new board members was to make the college into a conservative institution. Though the reporters at the event and the crowd in front of us were not receptive to Dr. Atlas’s message of free speech and civil discourse, I knew there was another audience, the people who would be watching as the commencement was reported upon around the nation and world. The question implicit in this speech—as well as in what was happening at New College in general—was much bigger than this graduation, much bigger than New College, much bigger even than universities in Florida: What would be the future in the United States of free speech and civil discourse in higher education?

According to the mainstream press, the governor’s act of changing the leadership of the New College board was an attempt to remake a progressive public college into a conservative institution, which apparently included—according to the media’s framing—marginalizing those who identified as LGBTQ and stifling free speech. Judging from the article in Rolling Stone on the day of the graduation ceremony—entitled “Inside the Fight to Keep a Florida College Queer” with the breathless subtitle “Ron DeSantis staged a hostile takeover of tiny New College, an LGBTQ oasis. Then, students dug in.”—they were intent on continuing this storyline.

If one was a student or a parent of a New College student in the spring of 2023, the national press hung on one’s every word, eager to confirm this spin on the move by Gov. DeSantis—a favorite boogeyman of the national media. The narrative of the press was embraced by a cohort of current NCF students and faculty as well as alumni, eager to see themselves as the brave fighters defending freedom and defying the “fascists.”

As part of signaling their opposition to the change, students had held an “alternative graduation” with a progressive speaker the night before the commencement but, to get their diplomas at a ceremony, most were begrudgingly attending this one. During tonight’s event, students were still proudly playing to the media as they had the previous night, with one student handing me a copy of 1984 as they walked across the stage to receive a diploma and another wearing a hand-decorated mortarboard: “We will not be silent. We will not be good. We will not behave.” There was a flavor of youthful melodrama about it all, but the parents at the event—who were the loudest and most disruptive of any of those present—did not have youth on their side to explain their behavior.

It was undisputed that New College was home to radically left-leaning students, confirmed not just by the national media but—unlike the rest of their fictional story—actual data, including from a 2019 survey by an outside consultant hired by the college itself which revealed a student body that self-described as 3% conservative, 11% moderate, and the rest liberal or very liberal.

These students existed not just in the ecosystem of New College but in the current environment of higher education in the United States, a system that was often intolerant of viewpoints that did not follow the prescribed ideology of much of its leadership.

In a 2023 national survey, 63% of college students indicated that “shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus” was acceptable; 45% agreed that “blocking other students from attending a speech” was acceptable; and 27% agreed that “using violence to stop a campus speech” was acceptable. Another 2023 survey of college students showed similar results. Conducted annually, the poll showed that “for the first time in the history of the poll, more students support shout downs (46%) than oppose them (45%).”

In the spring of 2023, it was nothing less than righteous in the eyes of the New College community to shout down a distinguished medical doctor because he had argued during the pandemic for what were now accepted approaches. In his speech, Dr. Atlas noted that he was passionate about health policy, not politics. “My position was never political. It was solely to help the American people—you may wonder why my political party voting registration, a matter of public record, is never mentioned in the press—think about that. Maybe it doesn’t fit their narrative?” The audience might have had trouble digesting this point, as many seemed more intent on blocking out his words with their disruption. The reality was that by May 2023, many experts agreed that the responses Dr. Atlas had supported during the pandemic had been proven by a review of data in the aftermath. Even some of the biggest former proponents of the repressive policies—such as California Governor Gavin Newsom and teacher union president Randi Weingarten—would soon accept the reality that the lockdowns opposed by Atlas at the time had not been the panacea they had once believed.

However, tonight, at this graduation, many NCF students, parents, alumni, and supporters around the nation were basking in the media adulation of their fight to prevent “fascism,” bolstered by stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and more. The narrative, however, was nothing more than expert gaslighting, a textbook illustration of why the public no longer trusts the press.

It was simple data that resulted in the governor appointing a new board majority: plummeting retention rates, enrollment numbers, and test scores. The media often ignored this reality or brushed by it as if too busy to be bothered to give it much attention. While it might be inconvenient for their preferred narrative, the numbers showed that it was likely New College would have been shut down in short order by the Florida legislature if not for DeSantis’s intervention. In fact, the legislature, in a last attempt to salvage the college in 2017, had given approximately $10 million to the institution to move enrollment from 857 to 1,200 in five years. In January 2023, enrollment was around 650.

To improve the retention rate, as well as test scores and the enrollment rate, President O’Shea had asked the legislature in 2016 for money to raise metrics and received approximately $10 million in the 2017 and 2018 sessions to improve these, with the understanding that such data would begin moving in a positive direction. However, at the February 26, 2019 board meeting, President O’Shea dropped a “bombshell” that the college had begun the year with over 800 students but would likely be below 800 for the next school year—and that the retention rate had dropped “precariously.”

“This place is on fire,” Trustee John Lilly told the paper.

“We had promised the state that we would grow to 1,200 students [by 2022],” O’Shea said. “We hired a lot of new professors and things like that. We’re probably okay for a while, but we have to turn that around. We promised them we’d grow; we’d better do it.” The inference was that there would be consequences at the state level, which was understood by those with a knowledge of the governing body of the state university system—the Florida Board of Governors (BOG)—and the legislature. These entities had expectations and a fiduciary duty to the public.

In 2017, total undergraduate enrollment was 838. In 2018, it was 808, and the downward trend continued, with 703 in 2019, 646 in 2020, 633 in 2021, and 671 in 2022. In addition, retention rates also continued to be poor. Before the “bombshell” board meeting in February 2019, O’Shea had already hired a firm to, according to the student newspaper the Catalyst, “find out what was depressing retention rates.” The Art & Science Group surveyed students who left. According to the Catalyst in an October 2019 article, the survey showed “the bulk of the problem comes from the perception of New College’s social atmosphere as unwelcoming.” A spokesperson for the Art & Science Group delivered the bad news, stating, “When we look at current students, we see levels of satisfaction that are lower than we expect to see in these studies…. And indeed, at least 40% of [current students] now feel the expectations they had upon arriving here have not been lived up to. 54% of them have thought about leaving—about 30% of them seriously.”

However, it was not just the president, the associate provost, and the outside consulting firm noting the cancel culture being a significant problem in the retention and/or enrollment rate(s). The Catalyst itself took a poll to which 82 students responded—and found similar trends to what the more scientific poll by the Art & Science Group had found. More than 74% of these students had thought about dropping out.

“According to the poll, some of the answers that were obtained state the difficulty of making friends and finding a crowd to fit into, the lack of respect between students’ opinions, a feeling of being attacked and not having a voice on campus and the feeling of being very isolated,” a reporter for the student newspaper wrote. “Given this is a small campus and a majority of students are required to live on campus, any toxic environment can feel hard to escape.”

One student interviewed by email for the article stated that “I’ve seen the smallest of issues be made into horrific ordeals and bigger issues be torn apart in ways that are totally useless…. [That does] nothing but confuse the issues until nothing is clear and everyone gets hurt.”

The Art & Science Group report noted other issues with the social culture that were chasing away would-be students. Commissioned by NCF to research its market placement and issues, the firm found that admitted students (of whom many opted not to attend) indicated that adjectives strongly associated with New College social culture were “politically correct,” “druggies,” and “weirdoes.”

This political correctness resulted in a groupthink that pervaded the campus. In a 2019 article entitled “Hot Takes on the Retention Rate,” one interviewee, alum Joy Feagan who had graduated in 2012, noted that part of the problem was “this school is so much weirder than other places.” She continued that when “mainstream students get here, they still get freaked out by how weird it is and a lot of them dip. Because even though it’s not as weird as it used to be, it’s still pretty f****** weird.”

As one of the new trustees noted, it was a problem that needed to be addressed if the college was going to stop its downward trajectory. Needless to say, the “politically correct”/“druggie”/“weirdo” niche is fairly narrow, the exact opposite of a slogan any rational organization would adopt if it was trying to appeal to a broad swath of students and parents.

When DeSantis appointed the new trustees in January 2023, he made it clear he was choosing these individuals to ensure that New College would meet its founding mission to provide a traditional liberal arts education, which included recommitting to the goals of free speech and academic excellence. It was a public college, and the taxpayers would no longer be funding parts of its program that were merely leftist propaganda projects, such as DEI. There were two different issues at play: the suppression of free speech through leftist propaganda projects—such as Critical Race Theory, DEI, and gender studies—and the enrollment/retention rates linking back in part to the cancel culture. These two problems were merely different branches of the same tree, interwoven, their roots deep in the soil of radical liberal close-mindedness.

To ensure this was not a mere performative exercise, DeSantis chose trustees who had a fierce resolve to accomplish his goals. The fact that recapturing a public university had not been done elsewhere in higher education was an indicator of the Herculean effort that would be necessary.

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