New College of Florida Was Progressive. Then Gov. DeSantis Overhauled It.

At the state school, gender studies is out. ‘The Odyssey’ is required reading. A Charlie Kirk statue is coming. Has one ideological bubble replaced another?

April Flakne strides into the classroom to teach a course on “The Odyssey,” a new requirement at New College of Florida.

She has taught philosophy at the small state college for 25 years, but this class is different — seven weeks on one classic book, required of all students. Normally, her focus is on philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir, and their theories of totalitarianism, revolution and feminism.

This class on Homer is a turnabout from all that, and marks a signature accomplishment for conservatives who want to redirect higher education.

In early 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, executed what many viewed as a conservative takeover of New College, a struggling state school. With fewer than 1,000 students, the liberal arts college had long been a draw for nonconformists, where grades were verboten and students designed their own classes and majors.

It was “a little Club Med” for people who were “all ideologically the same,” said Richard Corcoran, the school’s new president.

Under a new board and president, and as required by a new state law, the school has installed a curriculum emphasizing the traditional Western canon, with “The Odyssey” serving as a foundational text. It has created new teams for sports like baseball, basketball and beach volleyball and recruited athletes to fill out their rosters. It has hired dozens of new professors, some with conservative backgrounds and a few who are known for their vocal opposition to liberal orthodoxies, like Spencer Klavan, a lecturer at the college last year, and host of the Young Heretics podcast, about classical education.

In September, it announced that a statue of Charlie Kirk, the assassinated conservative activist, would be placed on campus.

And the college was among the first to say it would sign the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which links preferential access to federal funding to a willingness to adhere to federal policies and demands, and which better known schools have scorned.

The school has also shed D.E.I. initiatives and gender studies.

About 20 faculty members and 200 students decamped within the first six months of the makeover, according to the college.

Today, the campus culture reflects the new influx of many conservative-leaning professors and students, who are sharing classes with the old guard who tend to be more liberal. The conservative tilt is unusual for colleges with a liberal arts curriculum.

The changes are not about imposing one point of view on education, Mr. Corcoran said, but about creating a place that values debate.

But as the college continues to move toward the ideological right, Dr. Flakne and other longtime colleagues are reserving judgment.

While she has embraced her class on “The Odyssey,” she wondered whether in the future, there will be room for people like her at the college. She said that she can’t help but feel that her fate at New College may depend more than ever on politics, especially now that the Trump administration has applied the full force of the federal government against the higher education establishment.

“I’d be happy to live out the rest of my career here,” Dr. Flakne, 59, said. “But people don’t know which ways the political winds may blow.”

Required Reading: ‘The Odyssey’

New College was founded in 1960, as a private, progressive school along the same lines as Hampshire College, an experimental school in Massachusetts that has also struggled to stay afloat. The founders “wanted to free both students and faculty from the limits of lock-step curriculum and a focus on credit hours and a G.P.A.,” according to a history on the college website.

The campus straddles two sides of a highway, with stunning views of Sarasota Bay, a setting that might do Club Med proud. At the school’s dedication, the founders mixed dirt from Harvard and New College, to symbolize their high aspirations. It joined the state university system in 1975, and eventually received a state designation as an independent honors college.

Mr. Corcoran said that his detractors have painted an unrealistically rosy portrait of New College before the shake up. Enrollment was flagging. The dormitories designed by I.M. Pei were covered in mold. The bay-front grounds and the campus’s Gatsbyesque mansions were shabby from years of neglect.

His renewal plan consists, to a large degree, of things that any turnaround agent might have done, like recruiting student athletes and rehabbing buildings.

But he has also poked at liberal sensibilities, for instance, by eliminating all-gender bathrooms for trans students. And the college, along with other state universities, signed an agreement authorizing campus police to collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to enforce federal immigration rules.

Commencement has become a decidedly more conservative affair. In 2023, the commencement speaker was Scott Atlas, the former Stanford physician and adviser in the first Trump administration, who defended his opposition to lockdowns and school closings to fight the coronavirus. In May, Alan Dershowitz, the contrarian Harvard law professor emeritus, took to the podium.

David Mikics, a newly hired English professor and writer for Tablet, the Jewish-oriented news and ideas magazine, says the ideological rift at New College has been exaggerated.

“Some of my colleagues list their pronouns, others don’t,” he said. “It hasn’t been my experience that there’s a sort of war between one side and another side. I don’t even know what the sides would be to tell you the truth.”

He said he is apolitical in the classroom. Asked to describe his politics, he said: “I’m kind of a centrist, with impulses in both directions.”

Some of Dr. Flakne’s old colleagues grumble about “The Odyssey” and say that students would rather read a book that would be more relevant to their lives.

Why, they ask, teach a 3,000 year-old book?

“I hate that many of the students in the Odyssey don’t want to be there,” Dr. Flakne said of her course. But she added that she understands the desire to provide a common and cross-generational experience to students.

She said she finds “The Odyssey” to be “super approachable” for first-year students, as it raises questions about adventure, fathers and sons, marriage, identity.

“It’s a foundational book,” she said, springing to her bookshelf and grabbing some evidence — “Omeros,” Derek Walcott’s retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, transposed to the Caribbean.

And somewhat to her surprise, Dr. Flakne noted, no one has stopped her from continuing to teach about Simone de Beauvoir, even with the elimination of gender studies.

“I teach what I want to teach, because I feel able to justify it on intellectual grounds,” she said.

“I will take the consequences if there were some.”

The college is growing. There are over 900 students this year, from under 700 in 2022, according to the college. The acceptance rate of 73 percent is not particularly selective, but the college’s provost, David Rohrbacher, said students are self-selecting before they apply. The college wants to maintain a ratio of about one teacher for every eight students, a selling point. Tuition and fees are relatively low, at $6,916 in state and $29,944 for out of state students, according to U.S. News and World Report.

A walk across campus in late November finds students clustered into two groups, reflecting the campus, pre- and post-make over.

The artsier contingent of students are known on campus as Novos, Latin for the “New” in New College. The jocks are called Banyans, after the “Mighty Banyan” tree, the recently adopted school mascot. (The old mascot consisted of two brackets known as “the null set,” which captured the meta humor of the old guard.)

Lately, students say, a new term has been circulating that conveys the school’s evolving identity: NARPs, for non-athletic regular person.

Many Novo types, like Callie Flemming, a transgender fourth year student, had thought about leaving with the DeSantis overhaul.

Hampshire College, a private school with a similar alternative vibe, had offered to take them in and match their lower tuition. About three dozen students accepted the offer that fall. Ms. Flemming is glad she did not.

She still feels safe at New College, at least as safe as anywhere else in society, she said. “Most of the community that I like about New College, it’s still here,” she said.

But she is a senior, and perhaps, among the last of the Novos.

State investment has helped stabilize the school. Critics have attacked New College for extravagant spending — about $83,000 per student in 2024, the highest among state universities. But New College officials defend this as largely a one-time investment, to improve infrastructure after years of deferred maintenance. As the school grows to its goal of 1,800 students, they say, there will be economies of scale.

The administration has used some of that money to hire. There are currently about 125 permanent and temporary faculty members, up from 105 in January 2023, according to Jamie Miller, a spokesman for the college. About half of them, many with Ivy League degrees, have been hired since the shake up, he said.

As the new incarnation takes hold, several veteran professors, who asked not to be named because they wanted to protect their jobs, said the college’s quirky identity is on the way out.

But the demand for what the old New College had to offer just wasn’t there, Mr. Corcoran said.

Prospective students may not care for Homer either, but some may want to play on the new beach volleyball team. The players are from not only Florida, but Ohio, Brazil, Italy and Spain. They were wooed with scholarships, to play on sand that is fluffed twice a week, with a view of students kayaking on the bay.

One member of the team, Liv Fenstermaker, from Columbus, Ohio, said she was raised in a “very old school family,” and educated in Christian private schools.

But she does not see ideological divisions on campus: “I think everybody minds their own business, does their own thing.”

Susan C. Beachy and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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