NCF has been in the news this week.
Those that have toured the school, attended or graduated, what type of changes would you like to see (or not see)? Enrollment is down 20% over the last 3 years, so something needs to change.
Sounds like the exact opposite type of school that most current NCF students would like to attend. OTOH I am sure there is demand for a Hillsdale type school in the south/florida.
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Who needs to add when you’ve summed it up perfectly? 
(Not saying folks can’t add - just that my thoughts are already posted.)
From the article:
goals for New College that he laid out in a tweet: Restructuring the administration, developing “a new core curriculum,” eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion policies and restructuring academic departments.
Eliminating DEI policies? DEI policies are for all, including people with fringe religious and political beliefs…
And why must pendulum swings be so radical? Why can’t they just bring a pendulum to the center? Rather than trying to flip New College, which has the reputation of being pretty far on the left, to be pretty far on the right, what about making it half and half so that students can make up their own minds? Or 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 with left, center, and right? Frankly, I’m really over extremism.
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I think such a small school needs to be way to the right or way to the left to attract the fringe students. Most schools that small have some particular appeal - religion, art, very open curriculum, etc. Being so small, a school can’t offer everything to everybody, so they focus on what they can do.
NCF has been offering a very specific program to a targeted applicant pool. It is costing them a fortune to do that and only serving ~700 students, many who aren’t from Florida. I don’t think ONE student from my kids’ high school even considered NCF. Even my kind of spacey, theater and fine arts interested kid, who would have done well at an LAC had zero interest in such a small school with no sports, Greek life, or, in her opinion, fun.
SW Florida already has a very conservative college, Ave Maria. It is not a public school, but it is there.
I think this move is purely monetary. The board is to get the costs down, and if it changes the school, the governor doesn’t care. I don’t think the school would survive as a conservative LAC. Stereo-typically, conservatives want their small schools to be religious and their big schools to have sports.
Sorry to jump in on this thread. I grew up in Sarasota, but no longer live in Florida which, when I read this kind of news, I’m honestly quite thankful for.
One thing to mention in this discussion, however, is context. This is what is happening at all levels of education - perhaps in Florida generally, but definitely in Sarasota County specifically. Look what happened to Dr. Asplen who was railroaded into resigning from his position on the school board. It’s part of the same picture we’re seeing here with New College. It’s happening at all levels. It really saddens me.
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It’s especially ballsy to express a goal of making the public NCF a “Hillsdale College of the South.” Hillsdale is not only a private, religiously-affiliated college; it’s one of the few that takes an absolutist stance against accepting any public money. (Quote from Hillsdale’s website: ““To maintain our independence in every regard, Hillsdale does not accept one penny of state or federal taxpayer funding — even indirectly in the form of student grants and loans.”)
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Beyond the politics, the State needs to ask if it’s actually getting value from this college. Per the state legislature report:
“The state cost-per-degree at UF is $21,598, compared to $197,681 at New College…”
Nearly 10x the cost of State Flagship may not be sustainable.
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This, I take no issue with. Yes, there are differences in scale which can affect costs. To say that the school is too expensive and that they want to close it, fine. But the shenanigans that are taking place with respect to the board and everything else? No thank you.
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New College is no longer even close to how it started so many years ago. It is not regarded as an “honors college” in the least anymore. It’s main claim to fame these days is Friday/Sat night parties known for drug use. Most serious students don’t even consider it anymore. So this is actually a plan to switch direction and save a public school before closing it.
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I got curious and took a look at the New College site and clicked around a bit as I have for dozens of schools during this college choice journey. First stop is usually the majors my kid is interested in. Right away I noticed that the college catalog of New College is…a Google Doc!
I know that a tiny school is going to have to cut corners in many ways, but couldn’t someone have clicked the “export to PDF” option? Especially when all of the “areas of concentration” link to it?
This just screams “run away!”, and I can now clearly understand why a shakeup is needed.
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It’s one thing to say that a shakeup and/or change of direction is needed, or that Florida simply isn’t willing to sustain the cost-per-student of a tiny public college. Fair enough. But installing theocratic leadership at a public institution is another matter altogether.
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This isn’t theocratic anything. It’s taking academics back to academics.
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As long as the academics being taught fit what DeSantis wants to be taught. Can’t stray into other issues, even if those other issues have a lot of data and intelligent people supporting them.
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LOL. If you want to sign up your kid to weekly drug parties go right ahead.
If you as a taxpayer want to support that–do it. Send your kid and support the school.
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That’s funny. My youngest went to a Top 10 Weed loving school (or whatever official title they give it) also in FL and didn’t once even try MJ according to him - and with his dedication to a “green,” “off the grid,” “healthy,” lifestyle, I believe him. Interestingly enough, he also still got a great education and turned out into a wonderful young man!
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But was it NCF?
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Just skimming through the undergraduate catalog…a couple of interesting items.
First, it has a nice overview of the college’s history. It included this bit:
In 2018, New College adopted a ten-year strategic plan focused on increasing student enrollment by 50%. New College received state funding for this plan and used these funds to improve support for student success, hire additional faculty, and emphasize career preparations.
The enrollment has dropped from around 850 in 2018 to the low 600’s (20% drop). Four years into the plan (funded by the state) and it’s a disaster. As the history of the school explains, the school was ALWAYS design to spend more per student. But low enrollment plus low graduation rates drive up that cost and make it unsustainable.
I will be wondering how the new Board plans on improving enrollment and graduation. Also how will they handle NCF’s unique degree program (Areas of Concentration/Senior These/ Independent Study Projects/ Baccalaureate Examination (usually in the form of an oral defense of the senior project).
Under each area of concentration, it list several example senior theses (which are required for graduation).
OMG 
Representative Senior Theses in Art:
- Access: Graffiti Through a Privileged Lens
- Analog Aliasing: The Glitch and Self-Representation in the Digital Age
- The Art of Self Defense: An Exploration of Art as a Spiritual and Political Means for Manifesting Black Power
- I Must Be Burned Alive: Performance, Queerness, and Martyrdom Through the Lens of St. Sebastian
- In/Visible Identities: Illusion, Abstraction, Politics, and the Phenomenology of Stateless Being
- Lo Que Quedo de Ti: Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Awareness Through Art
- More Than Just a River of Grass: A Scientific and Artistic Exploration into the Florida Everglades
- Re: Vision - 20th Century Poster Making in the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean
- Symbiosis: Illustrating the Transnational Genre of Anime and a Need for Diversity Within Animated Media
Ok, maybe Art isn’t the norm, lets look at those listed next for Art History. That must have a focus on the classics? Right?
Representative Senior Theses in Art History:
- Milk, Blood, and Tears: Maternal Images of the Virgin in Art of the 14th and 15th Centuries
- Just Being: The Drag King Book and Negotiated Meaning
- From the Kitchen to the Dining Room: Domestic Labor in the Second-Wave Feminist Installations Womanhouse and A Woman’s Place
- Poikilos, Polish, the Perception of Color, and Polychromy in Ancient Greek Sculpture
- Fashioning the New Woman: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Illusion and Agency of Feminine Performance
- Performance Art and the Disruption of Colonialism in Museums
- Reconstructed Femininity, Self-Constructed Subjectivity: Little Magazines, Anti-Fashion, and the Mechanomorphic Female Engineers of New York Dada
- Store Windows as Public Art: Lucy Lippard and Printed Matter, 1976-1986
- The Singing Tower of Florida: Materializing the Progressive Era at Bok Tower Gardens
- Staging Sadomasochism: Images of Bondage in Man Ray’s Surrealist Photography, 1929-1932
- The Visual and Material Culture of the Cult of Saint Thomas Becket
- Reconstructing Greek Identity and Exploring the Self: The Early Works of Yiannis Tsarouchis (1910-1989)
- More than Just Looking: An Analysis of Institutional Critique in the Works of Kara Walker
- On the Edge of the Volcano: Science and the Sublime in Joseph Wright of Derby’s Views of Mount Vesuvius
- Käthe Kollwitz’s Experiments in Printmaking: Intensifying the Expression of Maternal Loss
Ok, ok, lets look at the actual “Classics” Concentration.
Representative Senior Theses in Classics:
- Ancient Greek Prostitution
- Martyrs and Murderers: Women of Euripides
- Oracles, Advisors, and Poets: Constructing Authority in Herodotus’ Histories
- The Hero in Chinese and Roman Epic
- Complex Context in the Iliad: Epithets, Gnomai, and Paradeigmata
- The Galli: Transgendered Priests of Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Near East
- The Underworld in Homer, Vergil, and Dante
- Translation and Production of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus
- The Homeric Hymn to Hermes and Archaic Iambography
Other concentrations, like the sciences, look more “standard”, but that’s the first examples anyone looking at the undergraduate catalog will see.
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If they’re picking Hillsdale as their model, out of thousands of US colleges, that’s a pretty clear signal that the transformation they seek is not “academic.”
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And not how you think.
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