FL: Anti-Woke College Not Working Out So Well

You will recall that a couple of years ago, his head filled with fantasies about running for President as a smarter, more stable Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to take over small, liberalish New College and make it proof of concept for Unwoke Higher Ed. He put former Speaker of the House and then education chief Richard Corcoran in charge and sat back to watch the antiwokeness flourish.

Now Inside Higher Ed reports that the flourishing isn’t quite happening.

The gutting of anything woke-ish happened, with things like gender studies being trashcanned. Corcoran got it into his head that maybe they could beef up the athletic program (from scratch), which resulted in some aggressive recruiting of athletes who were not exactly the cream of the academic crop. In the process, New College even reinvented affirmative action. New College trustee and culture panic manufacturer Chris Rufo explained in the New York Times:

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.

Too many women equals too much liberal stuff (because for MAGA, the problem with liberalism is that it’s not manly enough, and if all of this seems to imply some misogynist ideas about the relative merits of male and female thought, well, yes) so affirmative action for dudes is more important than, say, admission based on merit.

DeSantis wanted this all to work so badly that New College got a blank check from the legislature, and Josh Moody at Inside Higher Ed reports that the school has been using that check and loading it with zeros. Annual cost per student at other Florida state system schools = $10,000. At New College it’s more like $134,000. No, that is not one my typos.

Part of the expense appears to be related to retention and graduation problems. Enrollment dipped, and New College offered guaranteed admissions to certain local students. Moody quotes a faculty member:

“It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme: Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts of students, and then they say, ‘Biggest class ever’ because they have to backfill all the students who have left,” they said.

Nathan Allen, who was VP of strategy at New College for 18 months after the takeover told Moody that he thinks legislators may be running out of patience:

“I think that the Senate and the House are increasingly sensitive to the costs and the outcomes,” Allen said. “Academically, Richard’s running a Motel 6 on a Ritz-Carlton budget, and it makes no sense.”

Costs are up, ranking is down, they can’t hold onto students, and the Mighty Banyans (really) still don’t have a winning basketball team. And nobody wanted to talk to Moody to say nice things about the school. It would appear that going woke might not be the only way to go broke.