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For the past three years, New College of Florida has attracted a level of national attention that is unusual for a small public liberal arts college. That attention has not been accidental, and it has certainly not been neutral. New College has become a national voice in the college reform movement precisely because we are doing what so many institutions talk about but refuse to do: make significant long overdue reforms. The questions I am often asked are simple: Why so many attacks? Why the national scrutiny? Why the relentless framing of success as scandal? The answer: Conservative leadership in higher education frightens those who have enjoyed a decades-long ideological monopoly over America’s campuses. New College is succeeding, and we are succeeding by rejecting the failed orthodoxies that have dominated higher education for a generation. That pattern defines almost all of the criticism we now face. The response from extreme liberal detractors was immediate and predictable. Reform was labeled “authoritarian.” Merit was labeled “exclusionary.” Free speech was labeled “dangerous.” We are accused of “overspending,” while ignoring that our per-student costs decline sharply once one-time capital repairs are removed. We are criticized for faculty grievances filed against my administration, without acknowledging that their volume rivals institutions with student populations 50 times our size, and that filings at New College are overwhelmingly political, not academic. We’ve had to defend an onslaught of legal challenges. These frivolous filings include nineteen union grievances (for perspective the closest to us was FSU who had 18 during this time frame with 1,400 percent more faculty), three SACSCOC investigations, three federal complaints/investigations, five whistleblower complaints, three complaints to the Florida Commission on Human Relations, a stop work order from the City of Sarasota, and a complaint to the Florida Commission on Ethics. The attacks are endless. Even rankings suffer from this political problem. Our decline in US News rankings are because of peer assessment scores, which essentially ask one college's administration to vote its opinion on the academic quality of its peer colleges. It’s totally subjective - a factor openly acknowledged by US News themselves. Peer assessment accounts for 20% of ranking weight, more than any other category. Even more amusing is the bulk of those voting to lower our score are presidents, provosts, and deans from the traditionally liberal Northeast voters. (Almost 40% of our votes nationwide.) This is not about math. It is not about rankings. It is not about cost. It is about ideology and power to force it upon others. For decades, higher education has operated under an unchallenged ideological framework. DEI offices expanded. Speech codes multiplied. Dissent narrowed. Entire fields existed without accountability to outcomes or evidence. Left wing indoctrination dominated the classrooms. Even Harvard President Alan Garber admitted in a recent podcast that faculty, in-classroom activism has gone too far. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, this is what I believe about this issue, how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?” We said “heck no” to all of this immediately. We eliminated academic programs that had become wasteful, ineffective, and disconnected from measurable student outcomes. DEI bureaucracies that produced no scholarship, no academic rigor, and no demonstrable benefit to students were dismantled. Gender studies degrees that had drifted from inquiry into activism were removed. These decisions were made openly, deliberately, and with one goal: refocusing the college on academic excellence. Nobody had to tell us to do these things, we did them because they were the right thing to do. And, more importantly, it puts all other universities in the same position of having to answer - “If New College can do it, why can’t you?” New College champions free speech and mandates civil discourse. We expose students to a genuine marketplace of ideas. We teach them how to think, not what to think. And remarkably, when you do that, students from all backgrounds are drawn to it. That is the irony the critics refuse to confront. When quotas mandate diversity, they cheapen it. When merit, freedom, and excellence lead, diversity follows naturally. The liberal elite understand this threat. A successful example is more dangerous than a thousand arguments. If a small public liberal arts college can reform itself, grow enrollment, raise standards, eliminate indoctrination, control costs, and thrive, others will follow. And they already are. Make no mistake about it. That is why New College is relentlessly attacked. But we do welcome something else: scrutiny grounded in facts, debate grounded in good faith, and visitors willing to see for themselves what a revitalized campus looks like. The reality is simple. New College is not a cautionary tale. It is a case study. And the reason it draws so much attention, more than any other reason, is because of what we have and are destroying in academia. Others see it. Others are forced to follow or face criticism. And that is exactly why the attacks continue. What’s more enlightening though is doing higher education the right way produces results. Our enrollment surged dramatically. Academic metrics improved. New academic programs expanded. Athletics and residential life flourished. Philanthropy increased. National recognition followed. The truth has a way of surfacing, even when it is inconvenient. The country deserves a world class higher education system. To do so, we have to fight through the lies and the noise, but when we do, real success happens and our country benefits.
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