“Politically correct”, “druggies” and “weirdoes”: Review of ‘Storming the Ivory Tower’ by Richard Corcoran

• This blog is a review by HEPI’s Director, Nick Hillman, of Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses

The tone of this new book by Richard Corcoran on ‘Florida’s most left-wing public university’ is set at the very start with a tribute to the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers for their ‘unshakeable commitment to ignoring any fact that does not support their predetermined narrative’. It continues into the Foreword, contributed by the US conservative Christopher Rufo, which argues for ‘institutional recapture’ and ‘reconquest’.

The main text begins, however, with a paean to ‘liberal education’, a defining feature of western education but also a particularly good way of describing some higher education in the US. It then recounts how, in early 2023, the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, appointed six new trustees (including Rufo) to oversee the New College of Florida, which is the smallest institution in the State University System of Florida. The institution had only a few hundred students but was also a place that the American right thought had lost its way and needed saving.

Oversight versus autonomy

It is easy to forget on the UK side of the Atlantic, where we tend to associate university success with university autonomy, how much power state governors have over university systems in the US. The American model is akin to letting Andy Burnham decide who should govern the various universities in Greater Manchester. Or more pertinently perhaps, given the politics of the people involved, letting Andrea Jenkyns, the Reform mayor of Lincolnshire and former Minister for Universities, choose the board members of Lincoln University and Bishop Grosseteste University (soon to be renamed Lincoln Bishop University).

Those who choose the trustees of an institution indirectly choose who should manage that institution as it is trustees who hire and fire leaders and hold them to account.  And in the case of the New College of Florida, DeSantis’s six new trustees helped to install the author of this book, Richard Corcoran, as the institution’s President in 2023.

Corcoran’s core argument is that the changes wrought by DeSantis were necessary to rescue a failing institution to which those students who did enrol struggled to feel a sense of belonging. Admitted students (some of whom never actually enrolled) told researchers that the New College of Florida’s social culture was ‘politically correct’ and shaped by ‘druggies’ and ‘weirdoes’. Corcoran (rightly) points out this is ‘the exact opposite’ characterisation that ‘any rational organisation would adopt if it was trying to appeal to a broad swath of students and parents.’

At just 650 students, the New College of Florida was only around half the size the local legislature had expected and, indeed, was smaller than the average secondary school in either the UK (1,000+ pupils) or the US (c.850), rather than boasting the typical enrolment of a higher education institution. That made a quick turnaround more feasible and Corcoran claims victory near the end of the book, arguing that, ‘In a mere 10 months, New College of Florida went from one of the most progressively captured universities in the country to the freest university in the nation.’ (This claim is caveated a little though, when Corcoran takes a dig at some of New College’s longer-serving staff: ‘I still have a small handful of faculty members who believe in leftist indoctrination.’)

DEI, gender studies and 7 October

The story of the takeover / recovery of New College is told via chapters looking at:

• DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), which we are told was costly and ineffectual or even counter-productive;
• gender studies, which we are told has no place within the liberal arts; and
• the campus battles after the 7 October attack by Hamas, which we are told exposed the power of ‘unseen, unknown, unelected people who reside in large part in and around academia.’

The chapter on gender studies looks at the growth of the discipline and its arguably un-evidenced approach – especially towards the treatment of children with gender dysphoria. A succinct way to summarise it would be to say JK Rowling would likely approve of the chapter. But Corcoran ends with an important thought about why the way such issues are treated in academia matters: ‘The real concern is not just the suppression of free speech, but what happens in society when dialogue around important issues is summarily dismissed.’

A later chapter focuses on the changes wrought Corcoran and his allies, such as changing curricula, adding sports and improving campus facilities. He and his team clearly have the institution’s and its students’ interests at heart. But the level of public expenditure for such a small college seems extraordinary and some of it seems to have been spent unnecessarily. For example, some neglected student dorms were renovated at large expense only to be declared still unfit for humans to live in, meaning hotel beds had to be requisitioned.

It is striking that the reconquest of the institution was done via the actions of the state governor, the spending of considerable public money and the enforcement of strict rules. In other words, the tactics were interventionist rather than libertarian, even if the agenda was right-wing rather than left-wing. This helps explain why Corcoran is, unlike some other Republicans, opposed to abolishing the Department of Education, urging the American right to copy the left by using federal bodies to effect real change.

The other thing that really sticks out is how big a battle was fought over a college that educates something like 0.003% of America’s college students (or 0.15% of Florida’s). In terms of size relative to the rest of the higher education sector, the New College of Florida is the US equivalent of something like the Dyson Institute here in the UK. So it is worth asking whether the campus battles are a trailblazer akin to Ronald Reagan taking on the University of California or whether they are more like the skirmishes seen here in the UK over institutions like Regent’s University London, the New College of the Humanities (now Northeastern University London) and Buckingham (where, to declare an interest, I sit on the Council). Corcoran himself seems unsure which they will turn out to be.

I. Did. Not. Give. A. F***.

At one point, Corcoran tells a story about his negotiations to eject a car museum which was on the New College campus and occupying much-needed space at a rent level that was far below the market value. This leads to some negative media coverage about which Corcoran writes, ‘As to the press: I. Did. Not. Give. A. F***.’ But there is an element of protesting too much here as there is page after page of settling scores and putting the record straight after numerous attacks on New College from many sides (including some parts of the media, staff and students and the Governor of another state [California]).

While it makes sense to discuss the media attacks on the New College of Florida’s leaders in a book on the institution, the author can’t resist the temptation to broaden his text out to include earlier battles he fought with the media about COVID during his previous job as Education Commissioner of Florida, before delving even further back to recount his time as the 100th Speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives. It is all diverting and somewhat interesting as a study of state-level politics, but it is not really on what the book professes to be about.

I don’t blame the author for responding to the attacks; educational institutions that profess to be objective can sometimes struggle to accommodate members that hold anything other than the standard left-wing views that predominate in education. But as a reader on this other side of the Atlantic, I’d have preferred more higher education strategy and less tittle-tattle. When you’re trying to work out what lessons the battles over New College might hold for higher education outside the US, the settling of old scores with various local, national and specialist media outlets is less interesting.

Nonetheless, the book ends with a nine-point ‘roadmap’ for transformation, from ‘Leadership is everything’, through ‘Litigate, litigate, litigate’ to ‘Presidents should have CEO capabilities’. Given it is so hard to find out what a Farage Government might mean for higher education over here, then this book may provide a bigger hint than Reform’s last manifesto.

Parting thought

When I’ve previously posted my assessment of books that are relevant to higher education and written from a right-of-centre perspective, I’ve received pushback. My far-from-adulatory review of one of Matt Goodwin’s books, for example, won an excoriating comment from a former vice-chancellor: ‘HEPI was set up as a serious evidence based think tank. It was not set up to dabble in phoney party political “culture wars”.’

It is hard to disagree with the general sentiment on HEPI’s purpose, but I do disagree with the notion that we should ignore books written from the right. It is important to understand the right’s approach to higher education (on both sides of the Atlantic). If you draw a thick boundary around those books that are deemed acceptable to read and review and if that line excludes books like Corcoran’s, there are two problems.

1. First, you play into the hands of – and give succour to – those who regard higher education as both insufficiently ideologically diverse and unwilling to engage with the full range of mainstream ideas.
2. Secondly, you fail to draw a distinction between a right-wing stance, like Corocran’s, which (whether you agree with it or not) is aimed at raising educational standards, and other right-wing educational escapades that are much less clearly about improving education.

Having also just finished reading Trump U: The Inside Story of Trump University by Stephen Gilpin, which lays bare the horror that was ‘Trump University’ and its get-rich-quick-at-the-expense-of-the-poor schemes which have nothing to do with academia, I am reinforced in my view that we should engage with all mainstream educational ideas irrespective of whether they emerge from potentially divisive Republicans such as Corcoran or somewhere else.