New College of Florida

Because their reminders are shit.

Locally, the New College of Florida, the once liberal arts college, the premier liberal arts institution that was taken over by Ron DeSantis and is now being turned into a Christian athletics program.

They had a massive banner.

I mean, 25 by 25 foot.

and we can model that for our students.

So I was just over at New College Franklin this past weekend for their convocation and to get my youngest settled in there.

And Nathan Johnson, who is a professor there, a Faulkner grad, He gave the address at the convocation and he used a wonderful phrase, I thought, to describe this posture.

He called it an attentive receptivity of the soul.

He's...

He was subsequently awarded the title of Emeritus Fellow at New College.

Again, you've never heard of him.

He wasn't all over the papers for weeks.

Anyway, um, and one of the colleges that they did it at was the...

I think the, the formal name of it is, uh, New College of Florida.

It's a fairly smallish, uh, college, couple thousand kids.

But the Free Press sent somebody down there to check it out a couple of years after that, uh, that vow was made and the restructuring took place.

I have better ideas.

You do yours, then I'll do mine and, and let's do it out in front of the students.

I don't wanna silence anybody, and that's what they're figuring out at the New College of Florida.

It's working fine.

Speaking of corruption.

Corcoran, who is the president of New College, who has run New College in the ground.

Yes, it is leprosy.

He has paid a million dollars for PR contracts for the university, even though they have a full PR staff.

Okay.

I don't know if those people are PRing, but I'm not seeing anything for new college.

Anyway, he has paid, it was like $400,000 for one, $400,000 for the other.

And it was the former chief of staff of this, and it was the former of this, of that, whatever.

I think folks may know I've started a podcast called The Palm Court Pod about education.

the experiences of New College alumni and what's been happening at New College of Florida.

And I know that there was a lot of really great work that you and the team at Penn were doing there.

So thank you for your service in your previous gig.

And, you know, interestingly, this is reminding me, I did have Jeff Hunt from Legend Labs on a little while back, and, you know, he was talking about crisis communication.

And that was kind of, honestly, it was eye-opening to me to then be thinking about the role of a university president in 2026.

If you aren't already engaging in a crisis and issues management firm, you want to at least have one on speed dial because it's a much more combustible situation nowadays where you know pretty much any campus could suddenly be pulled into the collective conversation about this culture you know i think about new college as another example where like you know you're trying to just operate and deal with the challenges of today and then suddenly something might explode and then you have to deal with crisis communication.

And if you don't have that foundation of storytelling, if you aren't sort of at a strategic level trying to build that trust with your community and beyond, you can really be caught off guard by the complexities of leading a university in challenging times.

You know, like Chris Rufo wants to try to reform them.

He's doing that New College of Florida.

I don't...

I think they're, I think they're utterly incapable of reform, but I'm willing to change my mind.