In May, lawmakers decided to give the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College of Florida. Despite overwhelming resistance from citizens, businesses, community leaders, faculty and students, a school with 40 degree programs that has educated tens of thousands of local students over the last 50 years and served as an essential pipeline for employers disappeared in a late-night budget session.

Its 32-acre campus now belongs to New College, a public institution Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to transform into the poster child for conservative higher education reform in 2023. The last three years have been an exercise in dysfunction and needless destruction. With about 900 students, New College now has lower educational standards (it can no longer be called an honors college), and its costs have skyrocketed to $500,000 to earn a bachelor’s degree, three times more than the University of Florida’s cost per degree with its 62,000 students. And once it takes over USF S-M, New College will quadruple its debt.

What makes lawmakers believe New College can suddenly take on the added responsibility of a greatly expanded campus and mission?

What did USF, which is headquartered in Tampa, get by giving up its Manatee campus? And why did lawmakers—including most of our local delegation (Florida House representatives Bill Conerly, Fiona McFarland, Danny Nix and Michael Owen)—say yes? We should be asking for an accounting of where the $50 million in operating and carry-forward funds earmarked for the local USF campus will be going, as well as the money donated to the USF Foundation for local students and projects.

The transfer feels like a tipping point, and the New College I hoped could survive in some fashion is also gone. (Full disclosure: I’m a New College alum and was on the New College Foundation board before the school’s new president, Richard Corcoran, emailed me that I had been “removed.” This came after I had questioned foundation finances and asked for an outside audit.)

Like every alum I know, I cherished my New College education. Since its founding in 1960, the school was paradise for intellectually curious students who thrived on independent study and free inquiry. It produced an outsized number of Fulbright scholars, was third in the nation in the number of students who went on to earn Ph.Ds. and educated generations of graduates who built good lives and careers and served their communities, many here in Sarasota and Manatee.

What exists on campus today is a far cry from that academically rigorous atmosphere that made the school unique, and it’s heartbreaking for all of us whose lives were enriched by our years there.

It’s also heartbreaking for current and future students at both institutions.

I sat next to a mother at a USF S-M rally in a packed auditorium last winter. Her daughter, who wants to be a teacher and is physically impaired and must live at home, was excited about attending USF S-M this fall. “Our plans are shattered,” she told me. That sentiment is echoed by thousands of other local students who planned to study education, nursing, accounting, hospitality and other fields while living—and often working at part- and full-time jobs—right here in Sarasota-Manatee. 

In June, John Oliver featured New College on his show Last Week Tonight in a 28-minute scathingly funny and bittersweet segment that has gone viral. The episode featured the new administration’s emphasis on athletics, its suppression of diversity and non-conservative viewpoints, and the mass exodus of longtime distinguished faculty and disillusioned students. One student said, “It feels like New College has become a political playground for what these people want the country to be. I’m upset—this is my education.”

I agree. Instead of having two strong institutions serving our region, we lost both to politics.  One has vanished, and the other, once celebrated and highly ranked, is now unrecognizable and undistinguished. We should all be upset.