A Clash Over Core Curriculum at New College of Florida

Amid statewide efforts to overhaul general education courses, New College of Florida is making sweeping changes to its core curriculum. Faculty members say those efforts, driven by conservative ideologues, will limit students’ access to knowledge and undermine NCF’s founding mission as Florida’s only public liberal arts college.

The changes follow recent legislation that has prompted universities across the state to drop numerous general education courses, mainly related to hot-button political and social issues. Despite outcry from faculty, public universities have dropped dozens of courses—such as Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies, and Sociology of Gender—to comply with SB 266, which went into effect in mid-2023. It prohibits core courses that “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics,” as well as those “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

Critics allege that New College, where curricular revisions unrelated to SB 266 were already underway, is going further than the law requires. They blame the slate of conservative trustees Governor Ron DeSantis appointed in early 2023 with the goal of reimagining NCF in the image of Hillsdale College, a well-known private, Christian institution in Michigan. One of their first actions was to hire former GOP lawmaker Richard Corcoran as president. Now critics say NCF leaders are drastically overhauling the core curriculum, limiting class options with little buy-in from faculty and closed-door contributions from outside influences.

A Sudden Redesign

Three years ago, in fall 2021, NCF launched the “Chart Your Course” core curriculum, described as a “signature program” unique to New College that gave students significant flexibility in choosing which general education courses to take.

“A lot of students have a negative attitude towards gen eds; they just want to get those courses out of the way,” one current New College professor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Inside Higher Ed. “But for us, because the students could choose from such a broad menu, I think students probably found gen ed courses more interesting, and they were more motivated.”

Three years later, NCF is redesigning its core curriculum.

The broad latitude is gone, replaced by a narrow set of course options. Classes including Introduction to Sociology, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Religion in America, a Latin American film studies class and a section on feminist writings from Africa will seemingly no longer count toward general education credits. In some cases, students have no choice at all; to fulfill NCF’s humanities requirement, the only option is now a half-semester course on The Odyssey. (When NCF introduced the class last fall to beta test it for inclusion in the core curriculum, the rollout was so abrupt that officials struggled to find guest lecturers to teach it.)

Faculty members worry that the lack of options limits student agency and that the new curriculum makes NCF just like the other members of the State University System, in which it has traditionally been an outlier given its small size and quirky nature.

Some argue that both lawmakers and NCF’s recently installed administrators share the blame.

“At New College, they not only have adhered to the limitations of the Legislature, but even gone further in limiting the choices that students have, which is the opposite of what it was before and counter to the mission of the school,” the anonymous faculty member said.

Another NCF professor, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that while faculty “have been involved in the development” of the new core curriculum, the “ever-changing demands of the administration have made the process chaotic, with lots of moving of the goalposts, starting over and good proposals being abandoned.” The source added that while faculty did sign off on a core curriculum framework presented last spring, administrators later modified it without their input, dropping a required writing class in favor of another elective course. They worry that options for that elective will be limited “to courses which fit a particular ideological mold.”

Faculty member Amy Reid, who served on NCF’s board at that time, objected to the modification at a June meeting. She said it represented a “significant change” and argued that there wasn’t “any justification for unilateral shifts” once the faculty had signed off on the curricular framework.

Despite Reid’s objections, trustees approved the proposal.

New College did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed. But various administrators and trustees have weighed in publicly on the core curriculum revisions, offering insights into the philosophical underpinnings of the changes.

In August, NCF trustee Chris Rufo, writing in City Journal, cast the ongoing curricular overhaul as “the hard work of reform” intended to reinvent New College as a classical liberal arts college, as the governor requested. Rufo argued that “New College has the opportunity to create a curriculum on par with our private-sector counterparts, such as Hillsdale College, and to demonstrate that public universities don’t have to succumb to left-wing ideological capture. With sufficient political will, they can govern themselves on a different set of principles entirely.”

Fellow trustee Mark Bauerlein, writing in The Federalist last year, argued that college curricula had drifted off course nationally, emphasizing “shallow diversity” over developing core values.

“This is a matter of student health. Liberalism and progressivism have targeted the institutions and ideals that once handed the young a purposeful foreground for their lives (nation, church, community, family, tradition, western civilization, the American way),” Bauerlein wrote.

He concluded that a “fixed, coherent, superior core is one way to supply them with what has been lost. We need it not just at New College, but at every liberal arts school in America.”

Murky Origins

According to New College documents, the new core curriculum is built around two concepts: “logos” and “techne.” Logos is described as the “interconnectedness of reason, language, logic, reflection, communication, order, and meaning,” while techne emphasizes “the significance of applied knowledge: creating, experiencing, analyzing, experimenting, and solving.” Materials for the revamped curriculum include artwork showing Socrates wearing a virtual reality headset, Benjamin Franklin flying a drone and Thurgood Marshall conversing with a robot.

NCF has cast the new curriculum as a marriage of reasoned speech and applied knowledge that will “provide students with a transformative and cohesive educational experience,” according to a draft proposal of the plan. “While these courses will inherently build community among students, Interim-President Corcoran firmly believes that New College must provide an exceptional academic experience that binds all New College students together, both within their cohort and year after year, and propels them successfully into their lives after college.”

Though not attributed publicly, some concepts in NCF’s new core curriculum seem to have emerged from talks between Corcoran and former Harvard University preceptor David Kane.

Public records obtained by Inside Higher Ed show that Kane reached out to Corcoran and other officials in April 2023, seeking a job running NCF’s data science program and pitching a major curricular overhaul rooted in classical education. In an email to Corcoran, Kane introduced himself as someone who had taught data science at Harvard University before he was “cancelled for the usual nonsense reasons”—a nod to controversy over racist blog posts he allegedly wrote, which prompted Harvard to let his contract lapse in 2020 and Simmons University to cancel his class in 2022.

His emails to Corcoran show that the two met last April and also exchanged phone calls.

Kane argued in one message that “Chart Your Course has failed,” saying it was time for a new pedagogical approach with an emphasis on a classical education and great books.

“A major flaw of NCF (and most other colleges) is their failure to prepare students for the modern world. They graduate without the ability to make or do anything valuable, anything which someone else is willing to pay for. Are the students at fault? No! NCF is at fault,” Kane wrote in his proposal. “It is our responsibility to ensure that every student graduates with the ability to make/do something valuable, as measured by the wages offered by their fellow citizens.”

Kane also argued “there should be no lectures” at New College; classes should focus on discussion instead, with instructors teaching multiple sections to keep class sizes small.

Some of the details in Kane’s proposal later appeared in NCF documents, such as the emphasis on “techne,” a phrase that appeared more than two dozen times in his message to Corcoran. But a close examination of Kane’s proposal (and his outside writings about NCF) shows that while administrators clearly adopted some of his concepts, New College stopped short of the sweeping changes he recommended. Instead, Corcoran and company appear to have built broadly upon his ideas.

(Contacted by Inside Higher Ed, Kane declined to discuss his exchange with Corcoran.)

Beside DeSantis at a press conference last May, Corcoran told local news outlets that a new core curriculum would not mean the end of individualized programs at the college. But faculty members argue that is exactly what has happened: Student options have been diminished as administrators prepare to launch NCF’s new core curriculum next fall.

“For a small college like New College, that had a distinctive program and a lot of flexibility and choice, to now offer the exact same limited curriculum, but even more limited than everywhere else in [the] Florida public university and college sphere—how are we different?” the first anonymous faculty member said. “At that point, we’re smaller, we have worse food, moldy dorms and the same classes as everywhere else, with even less options. It’s limiting access to knowledge and making it extremely homogeneous, which is going to make it harder for colleges to distinguish themselves.”