Since the overhaul of New College of Florida in 2023, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration is now moving toward a potential expansion for the tiny public liberal arts college in Sarasota, by taking over educational and cultural facilities from other state universities.
DeSantis aims to have the school take over the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, which is adjacent to the school but run by Florida State University.
As to the University of South Florida, New College rents dorm space on the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus and has taken over a tract of land originally intended for the USF branch campus.
In the latest move, Florida lawmakers and New College administrators, apparently at DeSantis’s behest, are discussing having New College take over the entire USF Sarasota-Manatee campus.
Despite attempts to keep plans under wraps, the moves are arousing local opposition.
Exactly how the takeover plans would work, or whether USF would continue to have a presence in the community, isn’t clear.
One of the few officials willing to discuss the plans openly is state Sen. Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, whose district covers Sarasota County and part of Manatee County.
Gruters said in an interview this week that the academic programs now offered on the USF local campus, which differ drastically from the academic offerings at New College, could end up moving to the main USF campus in Tampa, or to the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota.
State College — a public community college catering to two-year academic degrees and workforce certificates — has campuses in Bradenton, Venice and Lakewood Ranch.
But internal documents exchanged by New College administrators said that the school would take “full stewardship of the 32-acre campus next door,” at USF Sarasota-Manatee, according to reporting by WUSF Public Media radio, which obtained emails and talking points through a public records request.
More revamping or not?
The impetus for the takeover, Gruters said, is consolidation of what he called duplicative administrative services at New College and USF Sarasota-Manatee, which are roughly a quarter-mile apart, with Ringling adjacent to New College.
State Sen. Joe Gruters
“You have campuses back-to-back there with Ringling in the middle,” said Gruters, whose wife is a vice president at New College. “I think the unification of the two or three campuses in that area makes sense.” Gruters is also running for state Chief Financial Officer for 2026, according to the Florida Division of Elections.
But it also seems a logical extension of what DeSantis has said he has in mind for the small, academically prestigious liberal arts school – making it into a conservative bastion that his former chief of staff called the “Hillsdale of the South,” referring to a conservative Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan.
That revamping began in 2023 when college trustees loyal to DeSantis fired the former president and hired Richard Corcoran, a conservative former lobbyist, state House speaker and state education commissioner.
New College trustee Ron Christaldi, a prominent Tampa lawyer and GOP political donor, said discussion of the move focuses on New College’s need for more real estate and physical facilities, not on taking over the USF Sarasota-Manatee students or academic programs.
“New College’s vision is to continue to grow and expand … and it needs more space to do that,” Christaldi said. “I think part of the state university system’s understanding is that those facilities (at USF Sarasota-Manatee) could be better used to serve that mission. … A New College prof would be teaching a New College course in that physical space.”
But Gruters held open the possibility that FSU or the parent USF could end up managing the combined facilities.
“When the governor decided to remake New College and put Richard Corcoran in charge, he gave them a lot of latitude. But FSU, USF, everybody’s interested in being the one to take over,” he said.
Contrasting missions
Despite what locals described as rampant rumors and rumblings in the community about the idea, numerous state officials refused to answer questions or respond to messages seeking comment.
DeSantis’s office also declined to comment on his intentions for the school.
But some locals and academics say the merger doesn’t make sense, in part because of the differing academic offerings of the two schools.
The have “contrasting missions,” said former New College professor Keith Fitzgerald.
New College is an academically exclusive honors college whose students typically complete a graduation thesis, something not required for most bachelor’s degrees. Traditionally, its students design their own courses of study and receive written evaluations instead of grades.
A large percentage of students go on to graduate school, and New College boasts of the unusually large percentage who get PhD.’s or prestigious post-graduate fellowships.
Its most popular majors, Fitzgerald said, are psychology, biology, political science, economics and the humanities, including English literature and languages, with strong but smaller programs in math and physics. It has few pre-professional courses of study.
Meanwhile, USF Sarasota-Manatee, partly a commuter school, “offers many programs that New College has no experience in providing,” wrote former New College trustee Brian Cody in a recent Sarasota Herald-Tribune opinion piece opposing the move.
They include nursing, business administration, hospitality management, criminology and other courses preparing students for entry into the workforce — offerings that “help keep the local economy moving,” Fitzgerald said.
Cody wrote that the move “would deprive the University of South Florida of a branch campus with new buildings, a massive number of students and an operating budget that exceeds $40 million.”
Substantial opposition
President Corcoran has publicly declared his intention to increase the size of New College’s student body, which hovered just above 700 until it increased to an announced 850 for 2024-25. That happened partly because Corcoran added an intercollegiate athletics program, which the school has never had, and has actively recruited athletes.
New College President Richard Corcoran (left) and Ph.D Bruce Gilley, a Presidential Scholar in Residence for the 2024-2025 academic year.
But those plans have encountered limited physical facilities on the New College campus. Besides renting dorm space, New College is housing students in hotels and temporary modular buildings.
New College has also acquired nine acres of the Powel Crosley Estate from the estate’s owner, Manatee County, which donated it after a previous planned donation to USF Sarasota-Manatee fell through, according to the college and to news reports.
The estate is across the county line and separated from the New College campus in Sarasota, but adjacent to the USF campus.
In 2023, New College reached an agreement to buy 31 acres of land from the neighboring Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, land already being leased and used by the college. The FAA, however, quashed the deal, saying, according to widespread news reports, that the school’s uses weren’t compatible with an airport.
The move for New College to take over Ringling has substantial opposition from museum patrons and supporters.
In a recent public letter, a group of 16 former museum board chairs and members said key donors and others oppose the move. They said New College, which is smaller than the museum, doesn’t have the facilities management capabilities of FSU or the larger school’s expertise in preservation, architecture and art history.
The Ringling complex, it noted, includes the Ringling mansion Ca’ d’Zan, the Museum of Art, the Circus Museum, the Historic Asolo Theater and Bayfront Gardens on 66 vulnerable waterfront acres.
Gruters, however, said putting the museum under New College’s administrative umbrella would not affect the museum’s operations — “You won’t see anything change at Ringling,” he said.
Morale and enthusiasm have cratered
The Ringling move is spelled out in DeSantis’s budget proposal to the Legislature, now about a third of the way through its annual session.
Gruters said he wasn’t sure legislation was needed to enact the USF Sarasota-Manatee takeover — it could be simply a transaction between state agencies, he said.
However, USF Sarasota-Manatee is established as a branch campus of USF under section 1004.341 of the Florida Statutes.
No bill has been filed to change that statute, but Gruters said it can be changed easily if necessary.
“If everybody’s in favor of it, it won’t be an obstacle,” he said. “The question is how hard does the governor want to push this.”
Gruters also said the employees of the USF branch campus “won’t have to worry” about their jobs.
Meanwhile, another controversy has hit New College: Benjamin Brown, chair of the New College Alumni Association, resigned Monday in a publicly released 11-page letter criticizing the school’s administration.
He said that since Corcoran’s installation as president, the administration has made rules that make the alumni association and the New College Foundation — which raises money to supplement the school’s state funding — into puppets of the administration, “mere window dressing — essentially a Potemkin village.”
He said alumni morale and enthusiasm have cratered, as the school has “given alumni multiple reasons to turn off and check out, managing to anger and alienate alumni of differing political persuasions and academic philosophies,” including “what they perceive as fiscal and operational mismanagement of the College.”
Brown said alumni suspect the Foundation is spending too much on athletics and executive compensation, including supplementing Corcoran’s salary, and possibly violating the terms of past donations. Currently, Corcoran’s salary is listed as at least $699,000, according to state financial and transparency records.
Corcoran responded in a written statement, “We’re grateful to Ben for his time at New College and wish him all the best in his future endeavors. We understand that the recent changes at the college, aimed at strengthening its future as an elite institution, haven’t been easy for everyone, and we respect his decision to move forward.”
About the author: William March has written about politics in the Tampa Bay area for the past 40 years. He has worked for newspapers in his native North Carolina and for the Tampa Tribune, the Tampa Bay Times and the Associated Press in Florida.
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