NCA Responds to the New York Times’ December 28th Front Page Coverage of New College
The front page of the Sunday, December 28, 2025 edition of the New York Times featured that paper’s first major story on New College in two years. We stand in that awkward space between gratitude for the Times’ interest in our alma mater, and dismay that the article serves to badly miseducate the public about the current state of affairs.
Our critique comes in two parts. As to what it did report, the Times’ story has several inaccuracies, often because it took College administrators’ accounts uncritically. But more significantly, the Times simply missed the most newsworthy aspects of New College’s situation.
What the New York Times Got Wrong
The Times openly suggested that, before its 2023 re-making, New College was home to an “ideological bubble.” It printed a statement of New College President Richard Corcoran that New College was, prior to the 2023 conservative takeover, “a little Club Med” for people who were “all ideologically the same.” Although in some sense a matter of opinion, the statement bears critical inquiry. Conor Friedersdorf’s March, 2023 article for The Atlantic examined essentially the same claims and found them lacking. Friedersdorf summarized his findings with the statement, “The populist right has portrayed New College as a notorious example of indoctrination in higher education—a narrative that does not withstand scrutiny.” With this prior report in The Atlantic being available, the Times should have taken a more critical approach and sought a variety of informants.
NCA’s Board members are all alumni of the College, from different epochs in the College’s history up until just a few years ago. None of us experienced New College as a place of ideological conformity, nor thought for a moment that our teachers, at least in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, were ‘teachers of certainties.’ The claim that New College generated ideological homogeneity strikes us as extraordinary and demands a far more serious weighing of the evidence for and against.
The Times suggests a stark difference between New College’s pre-takeover curriculum, and its current one. The Times pointedly describes how the faculty member featured in its article, April Flakne, is now teaching a course on Homer’s Odyssey, having previously had a “focus . . . on philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir, and their theories of totalitarianism, revolution and feminism.” But one of our Board members took a rigorous course in classical philosophy by the very same Professor Flakne during his enrollment in the College circa 2007. New College has long been a holdout in rigorously teaching the traditional liberal arts and has also long had a strong classics program for its size. The point for us is not that classical learning is in conflict with research into contemporary topics. Our experience is quite to the contrary: classical learning empowers people to explore contemporary topics with more mental flexibility and perspective.
The Times was irresponsible in suggesting that New College was modeled after Hampshire College, as it did in the statement “New College was founded in 1960, as a private, progressive school along the same lines as Hampshire College, an experimental school in Massachusetts that has also struggled to stay afloat.” This assertion seems—as if—crafted to deepen a culture war narrative about New College’s plight. But the founding of New College pre-dated the founding of Hampshire College by ten years. New College was founded primarily by members of the Congregational Church in Sarasota, Florida and pillars of the community such as Jane Bancroft Cook, of the family that, at the time, owned Dow Jones & Company.
New College was innovative, for being a Southern college that was envisioned as integrated from the earliest stages of planning in the 1950s,[1] and for what we believe to be profound methodological innovations in education that initially attracted a faculty and student body with qualifications rivaling those found in the Ivy League. But it was a unique product of its own Sarasota, Florida milieu. There is not clear evidence that New College’s founders would have chosen the word “progressive” to describe either themselves or the College, nor that the resemblance to Hampshire College was particularly striking.
Turning to the fast-paced changes of the last few years, the Times reported, “Mr. Corcoran said that his detractors have painted an unrealistically rosy portrait of New College before the shake up. Enrollment was flagging.” But before Richard Corcoran, New College installed a new president, Patricia Okker, in mid-2021, and enrollment increased by 5 % in Fall, 2022 and by another 6 % in Fall, 2023 (Fall, 2023 results reflect applications garnered during Okker’s presidency—she was not replaced until late January, 2023). It is plausible that Patricia Okker can claim credit for an inchoate operational turnaround at New College prior to Richard Corcoran’s administration.
What the New York Times Missed Altogether
It is hard to believe that a New York Times reporter visited New College’s campus and missed the most salient aspects of the situation, but apparently, it is the case. The Times’ entire article was culturally focused, asking, “Has one ideological bubble replaced another?” However, a shift in the ideological tenor of New College’s campus is hardly the biggest story.
Richard Corcoran is running a disastrous college, one where cost-per-student towers above all other State University System schools, there are credible accusations of financial misallocations within New College’s accounts, entering class academic statistics have plummeted from an average SAT score of 1233 in 2022 to an average score of 1153 in 2024, and New College has fallen 59 places in the relevant U.S. News & World Report ranking. The effective discount on tuition is near 90 % and the cost to the taxpayer per degree granted by New College is close to $ 500,000.
College staff are no longer higher education professionals but instead Republican political operatives. The grift goes so far that New College hired Fredrick Piccolo Jr., a failed manager of several Republican political campaigns who had once been sued by his own political candidate for sexual harassment. Just before and even while employed by the revamped New College, Piccolo exposed himself in public to random women. New College President Richard Corcoran still gave him a severance package. Perhaps explaining the sordid affair is the fact that Piccolo is the son of powerful former Sarasota Manatee Airport Authority CEO Rick Piccolo. Vice Provost David Rancourt, Communications and Marketing head James Miller, Chief Retention Officer Kevin Hoeft, Research Programs and Services staff member Katrina Hoeft, New College President Richard Corcoran himself—all are former political operatives. New College now has 33 administrators for each 100 students. Richard Corcoran’s compensation—for serving as president of a liberal arts college with less than 900 students—is over $ 1 million. New College has hired a lobbying firm where Corcoran formerly worked, ostensibly, in part, to lobby the same state government in which Corcoran used to be so highly placed (he once served as Speaker of the Florida State House of Representatives).
In August, 2024, amidst Richard Corcoran’s constant maneuvering among the Board of the New College Foundation, which manages our alma mater’s approx. $ 50 million endowment, the Foundation’s investment manager quit, stating that they had “privately, until now, questioned the integrity of the process behind the decision to retender”—referring to efforts Corcoran was making to replace them with another firm. Who was the investment manager? A major financial institution—London-based Rothschild & Co. The Foundation’s Board has imposed a maximum 3.5% annual spend rate on the endowment, but it appears that Richard Corcoran working with Foundation Executive Director Sydney Gruters—the wife of Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters—violates it.
Conclusion
In times as perilous as today’s, the public has a desperate right to know the real situation in the country’s institutions. Framing New College’s story as primarily involving questions of campus culture or even the degree to which the curriculum is made up of classical versus contemporary content creates a serious risk of distracting the reader from the equally or more dangerous phenomenon of severe mismanagement—as well as a degree of financial legerdemain, patronage hires, and inflated salaries that comes close to comprising the outright looting of what is described in the Florida Statutes as “the residential liberal arts honors college of the State of Florida.”
Facts like these could have given the public a much more useful understanding of what has happened at New College. We find it unfortunate that the New York Times’ treatment of New College’s situation was so limited in its purview and so out-of-step with the concerns that preoccupy America today.
NCA is an independent alumni organization formed in early 2023, dedicated to telling to the truth about New College while supporting current students and recent graduates. Donate Here
[1] See Furman C. Arthur, New College: The First Three Decades p. 28 (1995).
