Dispute over the core curriculum at the New College of Florida

As part of a statewide effort to modernize general education courses, New College of Florida is making sweeping changes to its core curriculum. Faculty members say these 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 come as a result of recent legislation that prompted universities across the state to do so drop numerous general education coursesmainly related to sensitive political and social issues. Despite protests 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 “distorts significant historical events or embodies an identity politics curriculum,” as well as those that “are based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent to United States institutions and were designed to maintain social, political, and economic.”

Critics say New College, which already has ongoing curriculum changes unrelated to SB 266, is going further than the law requires. They blame a group of conservative trustees, Gov. Ron DeSantis, appointed in early 2023 to reimagining NCF along the lines of Hillsdale Collegea well-known private Christian institution in Michigan. One of their first actions was hire former GOP Rep. Richard Corcoran as president. Now critics say NCF leaders are drastically changing the core curriculum, limiting course options with little buy-in from faculty and input from outside influences behind closed doors.

Sudden redesign

Three years ago, in the fall of 2021, NCF launched the platform “Chart your course” core curriculum.described as “signature program,” unique to New College, which allowed students considerable flexibility in selecting general education courses.

“Many students have a negative attitude towards education; they just want to get these courses out of the way,” said one current New College professor, speaking on the condition of anonymity Inside the Higher Edition. “But for us, because students had such a wide menu to choose from, I think they probably found the gen ed courses more interesting and were more motivated.”

Three years later, KFK is rebuilding the 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 the Americas, a Latin American Film Studies class, and a section on feminist writings from Africa will apparently no longer count toward general education credits. In some cases, students have no choice at all; to meet KFK’s humanities requirements, the only option currently is a half-semester course Odyssey. (When NCF put the class into beta testing last fall for inclusion in the core curriculum, the implementation was so sudden that officials had difficulty finding guest lecturers to teach it).

Faculty members fear that the lack of options limits student independence and that the new curriculum makes NCF the same as other members of the State University System, where it has traditionally distinguished itself because of its small size and quirky nature.

Some argue that both lawmakers and recently appointed NCF administrators share responsibility.

“At New College, they have not only complied with the restrictions imposed by the Legislature, but have gone further to limit the choices students have, which is the opposite of what has come before and is contrary to the mission of the school,” an anonymous faculty member said.

Another KFK professor, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that while faculty “were committed to creating” the new curriculum, “the ever-changing demands of the administration made the process chaotic, with a lot of goal shifting, starting all over again and abandoning good proposals.” The source added that while faculty actually approved the core curriculum presented last spring, administrators later modified it without their input, waiving the required writing classes in favor of another elective. They fear that the choices for this subject will be limited “to subjects that fit a particular ideological mold.”

Faculty member Amy Reid, who served on the NCF board at the time, opposed the modification at the June meeting. She said this represented a “significant change” and argued there was “no justification for unilateral changes” once the department had approved the curriculum framework.

Despite Reid’s objections, trustees approved the proposal.

New College did not respond to multiple requests for comment Inside the Higher Edition. However, various administrators and superintendents have spoken publicly about the core curriculum revision, offering insight into the philosophical underpinnings of the changes.

In August, NCF board member Chris Rufo typing City newspaperdescribed the ongoing curriculum reform as a “hard work of reform” aimed at transforming New College into a classical liberal arts college, as requested by the governor. Rufo argued that “New College has the opportunity to create a curriculum on par with our private sector counterparts like Hillsdale College and show that public universities do not have to succumb to leftist ideological appropriation.” With enough political will, they can govern themselves on completely different principles.”

Co-founder Mark Bauerlein, typing Federalist last year he argued that university-level curricula had veered off course across the country, emphasizing “shallow diversity” over developing core values.

“It’s a matter of students’ health. “Liberalism and progressivism have targeted the institutions and ideals that once provided young people with a purposeful blueprint for their lives (nation, church, community, family, tradition, Western civilization, American way),” Bauerlein wrote.

He concluded that “a steady, consistent, better core is one way to provide them with what has been lost. We need this not only at New College, but at every liberal arts college in America.”

Dark beginnings

According to New university documentsthe new core curriculum is built around two concepts: “logos” and “techne”. Logo it is described as “the interconnection of reason, language, logic, reflection, communication, order and meaning.” techne emphasizes “the importance of applied knowledge: creating, experiencing, analyzing, experimenting and solving.” Materials for the modernized curriculum include graphics of Socrates wearing a virtual reality headset, Benjamin Franklin flying a drone, and Thurgood Marshall talking to a robot.

NCF described the new curriculum as a combination of reasoned speech and applied knowledge that will “provide students with a transformative and coherent learning experience,” according to the draft plan. “While these courses will inherently build community among students, Interim President Corcoran strongly believes that New College must provide an exceptional academic experience that bonds all New College students together, both within their cohort and year after year, and has successfully implemented them into life after graduation.”

Although not publicly attributed, some of the concepts for the new NCF curriculum appear to have emerged from conversations between Corcoran and former Harvard lecturer David Kane.

Public records obtained by Inside the Higher Edition show that Kane contacted Corcoran and other officials in April 2023, seeking a job running NCF’s data analytics program and planning a major curriculum overhaul rooted in classical education. In an email to Corcoran, Kane identified himself as someone who taught data science at Harvard University before being “removed for typically nonsensical reasons” – a nod to the controversy surrounding racist blog entries He allegedly wrote what prompted Harvard to let his contract expire in 2020 and Simmons University to cancel classes in 2022

His emails to Corcoran show they met last April and also spoke by phone.

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

“The main flaw of NCF (and most other universities) is that they do not prepare students for the modern world. They graduate without the opportunity to create or do anything of value, anything that someone else would be willing to pay for. Are the students guilty? NO! NCF is at fault,” Kane wrote in his proposal. “It is our responsibility to ensure that every student graduating has the ability to do/do something of value, as measured by the wages offered by his or her fellow citizens.”

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

Some details of Kane’s proposal later appeared in the KFK documents, such as the emphasis on “techne” – a phrase that appeared more than twenty times in his message to Corcoran. However, a careful analysis of Kane’s (and his external publications on NCF) shows that although administrators clearly adopted some of his ideas, New College did not implement the radical changes he recommended. Instead, Corcoran and company seem to have relied heavily on his ideas.

(Contacted by Inside the Higher EditionKane declined to discuss his exchange with Corcoran.)

Except for DeSantis at a press conference last May Corcoran told local news outlets that the new core curriculum will not mean the end of individualized programs at the university. But faculty say that’s exactly what happened: Student opportunities have been limited 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 exactly the same limited curriculum, but even more limited than anywhere else in Florida’s public universities and colleges – how are we any different?” said the first anonymous faculty member. “At this point we are smaller, we have worse food, moldy dorms and the same activities as everywhere else, with even fewer options. It limits access to knowledge and makes it extremely homogeneous, which will make it difficult for universities to stand out.”