Introductory note from David Kotok: We are pleased to present Part One in a multipart series examining the appropriation of two public institutions of higher education in Florida. As a supporter, contributor, and active defender of USFSM, I’m biased. I think losing USFSM is a tragic mistake in policy and a blow to the Sarasota-Manatee region. So I asked a nationally recognized, accomplished journalist to offer her observations. Andrea Riquier is an award-winning journalist who has dedicated her career to making complex economic and financial issues understandable, readable, and relevant. She has more than a decade of experience as a reporter, including at USA Today, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily, and ImpactAlpha, where she served as a contributing editor.
Andrea took up my request and offers a multipart series that reflects her research. I have not edited her findings.
In Florida, Culture-War Politics Leave Collateral Damage
by Andrea Riquier
“The war will be won in education,” said Richard Corcoran, then Florida state school commissioner, in a 2021 speech at conservative Hillsdale College. “Education is our sword. That’s our weapon.”
Just two years later, Corcoran would be in a new position, that of president of the New College of Florida, a tiny public honors university known for individualized academics and free-thinking, progressive-minded students. And by July 1, 2026, his role would be even bigger, after Florida’s legislature approved the handover of the much larger University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus (USFSM) to New College, swelling the smaller school with thousands more students, hundreds more faculty, and tens of millions of budgetary debt.
The conflict Corcoran evoked in 2021 was a culture war, and he wasn’t the only one itching for a fight. In January 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis stacked New College’s board with partisan appointees who shared right-wing views about higher education.
One of those appointees, the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, said at the time that a “hostile takeover” of the state’s higher education system was underway, adding that it amounted to the “opening move in a conservative counter-revolution.”
In an America bitterly divided along partisan lines, some of the culture-war salvos of the past years have lost their ability to shock. But while the takeover of New College was seen by many as tragic but ideologically coherent, the annexation of USFSM, which trained area residents for jobs as nurses and accountants, may have crossed a line. Hijacking higher education in the name of ideology transcends political theater, many observers say, and sets up real ramifications for the state’s finances and economy.
“When you see this kind of cronyism and favoritism, when one ideology is favored over another, it’s corruption,” said Mark Funkhouser, a longtime municipal finance auditor and advisor who also served one term as the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri.
“Corruption has an economic and social cost,” Funkhouser said in an interview. “When people don’t trust institutions, when they feel like, if you obey the law and pay your taxes you’re being played for a sucker, then people stop doing it.”
Is there ‘identity politics and indoctrination’ in higher education?
DeSantis was clear about his intentions for New College from the beginning. In a 2023 press release, he explained that he was “further pushing back against the tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination.”
Among other things, the governor wrote, he wanted to “prohibit DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion], CRT [Critical Race Theory], and other discriminatory programs and barriers to learning; and course correct universities’ missions to align education for citizenship of the constitutional republic and Florida’s existing and emerging workforce needs.”
Despite that, there are plans to erect a statue honoring the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on the new New College campus.
“Charlie Kirk dedicated his life to free speech, civil discourse, and academic freedom, and of course, we would honor someone who was assassinated fighting for those principles,” said New College Spokesman James Miller in an email exchange with the Kotok Report.
The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Higher education is an economic engine
In some ways, DeSantis was forging new ground.
Even as culture-war politics have consumed various facets of American life, higher education—particularly support for public university systems—has escaped relatively untouched, said David Hopkins, a professor at Boston College and the co-author of Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.
Public higher education enjoyed bipartisan support because of the perception that it was “good for the economic performance of the state… you were training skilled workers for the state workforce,” Hopkins said in an interview.
But the USFSM transfer met an outpouring of criticism from the college community, local residents, and business leaders, many of whom argued that the university had been doing exactly that: preparing nurses for jobs in one of the areas of the country where they are needed most and educating area residents, including some who might otherwise not get a shot at college, for practical careers in business.
In February, a community forum about the proposed move drew community members who spoke out against it. Local media quoted the chief nursing officer at a nearby hospital as saying that most of USF’s nursing students live in the community, do their rotations locally, and get hired permanently.
Asked whether the newly combined university will be able to continue training students for work as nurses and in the business sector, Miller replied, “Yes.”
“Well-funded, effectively managed higher education is an economic engine,” Hopkins said. “It’s not a coincidence that places like Boston and the Bay Area have been at the forefront of tech innovation because there’s clusters of universities there.”
Indeed, a 2020 research study found that nearly two-thirds of life sciences companies that spun out of universities stayed within 60 miles of their parent institutions.
Who funds attacks on higher ed?
While conservatives like DeSantis and Rufo often argue that higher education is contaminated by liberal bias, several scholars have demonstrated that this belief is stoked by a well-funded political machine with a specific endgame.
Efforts like the one in Florida mostly come from “right-wing and libertarian think tanks, working closely with Republican politicians, to manufacture a culture-war backlash against educators and academic institutions,” wrote Isaac Kamola, director of the national Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, in a recent white paper.
“A small handful of think tanks have played an outsized role in creating and circulating a narrative portraying faculty, administrators, and whole academic institutions as ‘un-American,’ communist, deviant, groomers, and ‘woke’ extremists,” wrote Kamola, who also teaches at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Those players have two main reasons to “delegitimize” higher education, Kamola said in an interview. First, doing so allows conservative governments to make the case that it should be defunded.
That may be the case in Florida, where the just-passed FY2027 budget cuts taxes and spending and includes an 8.5% decrease to higher education. It also teed up a constitutional amendment for the November 2026 ballot that would cut property taxes further.
Kamola also argues, however, that the forces arrayed against so-called woke higher education have an ulterior motive.
“This political machinery has attacked the Kyoto Protocol, smoking regulations, labor unions, Medicare expansion, and gun-control efforts,” he wrote in the 2021 book Free Speech and Koch Money. “It has championed the deregulation of money in politics and undermined voting rights. Elements have helped spread the Big Lie of voter fraud in the 2020 election.”
Implications of the takeover of USF Sarasota-Manatee
Several experts interviewed for this piece believe there are downstream effects from the takeover that haven’t been thought through.
“Can Ron DeSantis keep pumping in extra money to make New College thrive?” asked Adam Laats, a professor at Binghamton University of the State University of New York and the author of Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, among others. “If he’s not able to keep this going for New College, it really risks falling apart.”
Noting the governor’s likely run for president, Laats said, “Whoever gets in that seat is not likely to care as much about it as he did, and New College may end up limping along.”
State funding for New College has surged since the 2023 takeover, with one local media outlet estimating that the tally has jumped from $27 million to $62 million in the last three years.
But in the just-passed FY2027 budget, an expected transfer of $22.5 million from USFSM to New College was taken out, even as the smaller school was forced to assume its enormous debt load.
New College’s Miller told this publication that the university will not need additional state funding and said that “a request for proposals to numerous banks have been proposed, and we expect to get offers from all of them” to address the debt load.
How much more can Florida cut taxes?
But several observers think that the most concerning impact of the takeovers may be the state’s ability to do business. Mark Funkhouser, for example, believes that the ill effects of what he calls corruption will spread to the private sector, in particular to functions like licensing, permitting, audits, and inspections.
If that happens, “it could have a devastating impact on the government’s ability to function,” he said. “It requires a lot of money and effort to run a police state at every level. There would be a huge economic loss.”
Matt Fabian, president of Municipal Market Analytics and a long-time public-finance analyst, is watching the increasingly partisan politics in some conservative states with concern, especially as the federal government takes an increasingly hands-off approach in everything from disaster recovery to health care, he pointed out. States need to shoulder an increasing share of the responsibility.
“There’s a nihilism about the ideology,” he said. “In states like Florida the business model is entirely premised on low taxes, right? Is the whole reason Florida exists to shrink itself?”
After the skirmishes over higher ed, the state could see consequences such as higher municipal-bond borrowing costs, Fabian added.
“What the state might do with its public entities is now seen as less predictable,” he said. “The state unilaterally tore up the contract they had with the students, the parents, and the faculty, which just speaks to the willingness of the state to tear up contracts generally.”
Such impacts on national economies have been documented, including in a 2025 research paper titled “How Populism Harms Prosperity.”
“When a populist executive rules alongside a populist majority in the legislature, this reduces a country’s growth rate of real Per Capita Income by 3.7% below its trend,” the authors wrote. “Unified populist governments engage in protectionism, inefficient redistribution, and financial repression that undermines productivity by increasing the size of government without parallel investments in infrastructure, basic science, and education. Their policies also reduce private investment, R&D spending, researchers per capita, and patents per capita.”
Ultimately, however, the discussion about the insertion of politics into higher education—and even analysis about the economic impacts—may be missing the most important point, Laats said.
“We tend to talk about all universities, but especially New College, as if they were chess pieces,” he said. “A college education, especially at a public institution, is often a real sacrifice for a lot of families. There are human costs to the higher education games that culture-war politicians play.”
In the next installment, the Kotok Report will examine the practical cost of the USF Sarasota-Manatee takeover on the local community.
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