New College trustee avoids facts
New College of Florida Board Trustee Lance Karp made some easily corrected errors in his recent guest column published in the Herald-Tribune (“New College of Florida’s noisy critics are stuck in the past,” March 14).
Karp’s claim of a “culture of instability” at New College prior to the January 2023 takeover is contradicted by Florida’s own 2022 “Viewpoint Diversity” survey.
Before the takeover, New College students overwhelmingly agreed that they were encouraged to consider a wide variety of viewpoints; only 10 individual respondents disagreed.
Nearly none of the respondents knew their professors’ political viewpoints.
Under the current administration, New College of Florida has received a cautionary “yellow light” designation from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for policies that encourage violations of the First Amendment.
The culture of “free speech” that Karp touts has been marked by the purging of a student-owned gender and diversity library and the ousting of anyone who dares to challenge the administration.
In addition, faculty members interviewed by Sarasota Magazine in 2024 reported a new, unprecedented challenge: “student apathy” resulting from a campus that has become a site of “political warfare.”
Now current students are losing the ability to design their own educational experience.
The only Humanities core course now is a half-semester on “The Odyssey” that requires no writing and no textbook – not even “The Odyssey” itself.
And New College’s academic and residential qualities are reflected in the school’s national standing, which has fallen in U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings.
While the administration spends heavily on athletics and executive salaries, the revenue per student has dropped significantly; in fact, “Presidential scholarships” are paying for nearly every student to be there.
And while New College’s enrollment is rising, its retention of students is not – even students who are on free rides are transferring out.
This isn’t a “manufactured” narrative – this is a crisis situation.
Rev. Grant Balfour, West Palm Beach
Balfour is a graduate of New College of Florida.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: New College can’t avoid the facts. It’s a school in decline | Letters
Reporting by Sarasota Herald-Tribune / Sarasota Herald-Tribune
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