A new book out this week gives a blueprint for freedom-loving governors to fight back and stop the waste of taxpayer money subsidizing public universities that are cesspools of Marxism and propaganda undermining Western civilization.
This book, which supplies a path out, is titled “Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses.” It is a firsthand account from Richard Corcoran, president of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida.
Corcoran has become to leftist university establishments what then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was to teachers unions in 2011, when he reformed them in his state.
Author, filmmaker, and activist Chris Rufo, who sits on New College’s board, wrote the forward to Corcoran’s book. The two were hand-selected by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to reform the flailing college.
New College of Florida, founded in 1960, devolved over ensuing decades into a cauldron of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and critical race theory, or CRT. These and other woke ideologies undermine the purpose of a university: to teach students how to think freely.
New College collapsed into an indoctrination center for progressive talking points, which led to dropping retention rates, enrollment numbers, and test scores. Before Corcoran took over on an interim basis in January 2023, the school was on track to shutter entirely without DeSantis’ intervention.
Corcoran proved to be a tip of the spear against leftist indoctrination while serving as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and as the state’s education commissioner.
Corcoran had worked closely with DeSantis and the Florida Legislature during the COVID-19 pandemic to reopen schools—and keep them open—and to remove mask mandates for students. He also had improved Florida public education by helping abolish Common Core, expand civics instruction, and ensure parental rights are respected in classrooms.
New College of Florida needed similar reforms when Corcoran first took the reins in early 2023.
In 2017, total undergraduate enrollment was 838; it fell in 2018 to 808. The downward trend continued, with enrollment at 703 in 2019, 646 in 2020, and 633 in 2021, before a slight rise to 671 in 2022.
Student morale at New College was depleted. Many students, including those who dropped out, reported feeling targeted by doctrinaire mobs that required dogmatic fealty to woke doctrine.
New College wasn’t alone. Corcoran, who became New College’s president in October 2023 after nine months as interim president, notes that among liberal arts colleges across the nation, for every eight Republican professors there are 100 Democrats. This environment enables cancel culture, the shouting-down of speakers on campuses, and infantile “safe spaces” filled with the secular theologies of CRT and DEI.
“In the last 10 years, DEI offices have been used to build a fiefdom within the public sector, spreading these radical ideas through administrative bureaucracies,” Corcoran writes in “Storming the Ivory Tower.”
“Parts of this basically untried theory were thereby embedded somewhat whole-cloth into these institutions, which often enforced complete obeisance to a philosophy that in many ways undermines modern constitutional thought,” he adds.
Corcoran was attacked by the national press, including The New York Times—which he should wear as a badge of honor—for returning New College to its roots of rational inquiry.
Corcoran also faced down mobs of online and in-person protesters—current and former students—who opposed his efforts at every turn, spewing vitriol in every venue possible. This didn’t deter him from shutting down New College’s DEI office and bringing sports programs to campus. These were cardinal sins, according to woke students and alumni, who were furious.
I saw a small taste of this when Corcoran invited me to speak this spring on campus about my book on mental health and recovering from childhood trauma—a wholly nonpartisan topic. A swarm of anti-Corcoran haters lobbed a barrage of hateful messages toward New College’s president and me.
Now, less than two years since Corcoran took the helm of New College of Florida, he’s turned the enrollment nosedive around and is breaking new records. He implemented protections for free speech and restored physical safety. The latter included countering antisemitism on campus amid the rising onslaught of anti-Jewish sentiment following Hamas terrorists’ massacre of about 1,200 Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, in southern Israel.
The need for campus reform is urgent and massive. During the 2020-21 school year, public colleges and universities in the U.S. spent $450 billion.
That’s an astronomical amount of taxpayer money that, in many cases, is used to pit students against their parents, common sense, and reality.
“Storming the Ivory Tower” provides the template for other states to follow New College of Florida. Will any of them courageously follow suit?
Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.
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