SRQ Magazine | In Conversation on Higher Education

NOVEMBER 2023 EDITION

IN CONVERSATION: WITH LEADERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION INTERVIEW BY WES ROBERTS EDITED BY BARBIE HEIT

In Conversation

RICHARD CORCORAN, PRESIDENT OF NEW COLLEGE OF FLORIDA During four terms in the Florida Legislature, Corcoran was a staunch advocate for improving all levels of education. His eight years in elected office culminated with the speakership in the Florida House of Representatives in his final term. Subsequently, appointed as Florida’s Education Commissioner in 2018, he de ly navigated the reopening of Florida’s schools in the fall of 2020. In his first 100 days at New College, he implemented necessary improvements for rediscovering the promise that established New College in 1960. Corcoran has been a member of the Florida Bar for 24 years and served six years in the U.S. Naval Reserve while in college.

I’VE HEARD YOU SAY MORE THAN ONCE, “SHOW ME HOW YOU ARE TEACHING YOUR YOUTH, I WILL SHOW YOU YOUR NATION’S FUTURE.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? RICHARD CORCORAN: The point is that education done right is what would allow us to exist for another 230 plus years as a great constitutional republic, a great democratic experience and arguably, I say that unnecessarily cautiously, the greatest country in the history of mankind and it all starts with education. You can’t legislate ‘raise children this way’, you can’t legislate ‘do this in relationships’. That’s not the purview of the government. But what the government can do is facilitate an educational system from the youngest ages all the way up to the collegiate ages that allows anybody of any background, of any race, of

any economic situation to be able to be afforded a world-class education. This is what all our founding fathers [believed], as did all the philosophers that were read by our founding fathers, Hobbes, Burke, Augustine. The concept was that in order to have a self-governing society, you have to have self-governing citizens and what does it take to have self-governing citizens? It takes that world-class education.

WHAT IS YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION AS NEW COLLEGE PRESIDENT? My job in the last six months, hopefully, is considerably different than the next six months. In the last six months there’s been a tremendous new group of folks, new board of trustees, lots of controversy, turmoil unfortunately in the press. And we came into a school that was struggling. One of the former alumni I think said it

best that we all had to recognize and confront the brutal fact that New College was “circling the drain”. Stagnant enrollment, stagnant growth, drifting in ideological ways. I’ve been trying to get that on proper footing and it’s gone fantastic. We brought in new great leadership, which I think is the number one thing the school needed more than anything else. For example, we hired a new dean of students, I think he’s the seventh dean of students in seven years. [In the past six months,] we had record enrollment. The school existed for 63 years and never came close to breaking 300 in new enrollment.

We’re now at 323 in new enrollment.

Now we have a whole year ahead of us to start recruiting. I think you’re going to see a 400-500 member class. I think because of the growth, we’re going to

need another 30 or so faculty members. We’re going to lock down students by December, January, February, where last year we didn’t even start recruiting until March. It’s game changing for everything in terms of growing. But I think for the time now and moving forward, if you talk to most university presidents, they’ll tell you, that they spend probably 50% of their time fundraising. We’re turning our attention again to fundraising.

Hopefully on a day-to-day basis, we’re out there selling the great things that are happening in New College, the great vision for New College, the understanding of where we’re going with our new curriculum, with our new hires, with our new growth, with our new sports program, and that will result in hopefully tens of millions of dollars in new revenues.

ENGAGING READERS THROUGH STORYTELLING.

V3_SRQ244_InConversation_NewCollege_Nov23_1010.indd 45

10/11/23 2:56 PM

IN C O NVERSAT I ON YOU’VE ALSO SAID THAT IT’S “EASY TO RAISE MONEY IF YOU HAVE A VISION THAT EXCITES.” WHAT’S THE VISION THAT EXCITES YOUR FUNDERS RIGHT NOW? We have not sat down and spoken to one of the [private] prospective donors that we’re hoping to spend time with over the next six months, but the vision that excites is simple and I think you’re seeing it play itself out.

What we’re saying is “liberal arts is the best education you could possibly get,” and we walk you through why that is true. Then we’re saying that New College will potentially be the best college in the entire country for that liberal arts education. And third, we’re going to do it differently than anyone else. The liberal arts schools in this country are dying by the day. You have to sell the liberal arts. You have to convince people. You hear it all the time.

Again, going back to philosophy, what’s the purpose of education?

If you just talk to the rank and file moms, dads on the street, they’ll say, [it’s so students can] get out there and get a good job. No, it is so much greater, so much grander, so much more wonderful. I always quote Frederick Douglass, “education is the uplifting of the human soul to the glorious light of truth and to deny someone that kind of education is a crime against humanity” and that is it. You want to raise up great thinkers, you want to raise up brilliant minds.

People who can read and synthesize volumes of information, make great decisions, be great community leaders, great spouses, great family members, those are the things that an education gives you. It goes to your dignity as a human being.

And if you have those things and you have a well-rounded education in some specialty of biology, physics, whatever it might be, you’re going to go out there and you will always get a job. Steve Jobs would say that Apple was the greatest company in the history of mankind, more than Microsoft, Oracle, because “we’ve always tried to be at the

SRQ M AGAZ I N E L E ADE RS I N H IGH E R E DUCATION : : NOVE MBE R 2023

intersection of technology and liberal arts,” where all the rest were just technology firms.

That’s why more CEOs and Fortune 500 companies have liberal arts degrees than any other degrees. You’ve got to sell that and then you’ve got to sell how we’re going to revolutionize higher ed across this country [by showing that] we do it successfully here at a public small university. We’re going to produce an individual who is humble, who’s going to work hard, who thinks outside the box, who has a understanding of depth and breadth in a specialty area, and also has the technological components to understand how that moves.

AI, robots, whatever, they might replace an engineer, they might replace those STEM degrees, but they’ll never replace somebody who thinks outside the box and who has been prepared for the kind of a world that’s coming to us.

FOR YEARS BIG THINKERS TALK ABOUT HOW OUR SCHOOLS SHOULD SHOULD PRODUCE INNOVATIVE STUDENTS, BUT THE SYSTEM ALWAYS GRINDS BACK TO PRODUCING WORKERS. WHY DOES THE SYSTEM NEVER SEEM TO REACH THIS GOAL? This is going back to the formulation of public education in America and the roots with Dewey. They had two huge events that occurred at the turn of the 19th century.

One, we had a massive influx of Europeans who didn’t speak our language and they came through Ellis Island. The other is the Industrial Revolution. The Dewey school of thought was, “we’ve just got to take these people”–it’s almost demeaning and demoralizing in a way– “and make them widget makers. If we can teach them just enough skills to get on the assembly line and help us with this Industrial Revolution, everything will be great.” And that line of thought– it’s also what you saw in Eastern Europe in the last 100 years or so– still exists today. Even the great thinkers were saying, “no, we need

to get these kids out of school and they need to get a good job.” And it’s just completely missing the forest for the trees. History’s replete with these great stories [of success born of a liberal education]. The one I tell often is about a mathematician who started at University of Michigan.

She became one of the first females involved in the Apollo mission.

She worked with other scientists, mathematicians, engineers on Apollo 11. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are there trying to land on the moon and all of a sudden it has a breakdown and everything’s collapsing. They weren’t going to land. The mathematician comes and she solves it in two seconds.

She anticipated the problem could happen and then she solved it when it did happen. [This is what is possible] if you’re not just training people to be engineers, but giving them a broader education-this skill set of wrestling with the great questions of all time; what does a just society mean? What does it mean to be a citizen in a free market? If you don’t wrestle with those thoughts, you’re not prepared to make the intellectual leaps when innovative thinking is needed. Keep in mind, all the other scientists, mathematicians, engineers, all credit her with resolving this near catastrophy. And guess what? She was a double major–mathematics and philosophy. That’s it, the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE? A liberal arts college historically would’ve been pretty much all colleges. A liberal arts education is basically saying that you want people to understand their role in the world, their role in society, a government, a relationship, a family. And the way you do that is you teach great books, great courses. If you look at what ancient Greeks and Romans were talking about and you look at what we’re talking about, there’s something timeless about what every single society has wrestled with. In order to have a good understanding and be able to be a good citizen, a good

person in a functioning world, you ought to wrestle with those great questions. And when you do that I would say that it allows your mind to travel anywhere it wants and as broadly and as deeply as you possibly can because you’ve been exposed to these great thoughts and thinking. And so the concept of a liberal arts education is beautiful, but what people want is a dollar.

We give middle schoolers a personality test and then we say to the child, with your personality and your skillset, you should be a zoologist or you should be a marine biologist, but the average zoologist makes $60,000 and the average marine biologist makes $50,000.

It’s almost communistic, almost dictatorial, trying to shape kids to go into these fields simply because they may make more money. It’s just a horrible paradigm. You’re devaluing the real purpose of education, instead we are asking kids to become a widget maker for money. Look at the way we educate our kids, and how we are building a widget mindset, and have for 50, 60 years, and any of the philosophers I mentioned earlier might have predicted we would end up with the society we have now in the 2020s.

I KNOW YOU PERSONALLY HAVE A LARGE FAMILY. HOW HAS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE EVOLVED YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF EDUCATION? If you have a great liberal arts background and you ask that question to someone at any age, I think we’re all going to say something similar, that is, “we’re constantly learning.” We’re constantly thinking, “I could have done this differently or better or whatever.” You’re always analyzing: yourself, your world, your community, your job, your vocation, whatever it might be, thinking of things I could have done or should have done or I will do on a daily basis.

I was fortunate, it wasn’t like a strategic idea that when I went to undergrad, I got a liberal arts degree in international relations.

My wife went to undergrad and

46 | SRQ MAGAZINE_ NOV23 LIVE LOCAL

V4_SRQ244_InConversation_NewCollege_Nov23_1010.indd 46

10/17/23 2:23 PM

V3_SRQ244_InConversation_NewCollege_Nov23_1010.indd 47

10/11/23 2:57 PM

IN C O NVERSAT I ON she got what I would say is more of a technical degree in journalism and having raised our kids, we definitely became more and more stringent in the valuation and the importance of a liberal arts education to the point that my wife, she’s a lawyer by trade also, she started a classical liberal arts K-12 school and then we had our kids in that classical public liberal arts school.

Then in doing that, you study what courses, books, etc, would you want them to graduate with. For me, that K-12 school was a very embryonic New College. They had to do a senior thesis. All those great things that make you just a well-educated, well-rounded person.

NEW COLLEGE HAS A HISTORY AS AN INNOVATIVE SCHOOL, QUOTING FROM THE HISTORY ON YOUR WEBSITE, “DESIGNED TO FREE STUDENTS AND FACULTY FROM LOCKSTEP CURRICULUM AND TO GET AWAY FROM A FOCUS ON CREDIT HOURS AND AWAY FROM GPA.” THE FOUNDERS PROMOTED, “ACTIVE HANDS-ON LEARNING TO ACHIEVE COMPETENCE AND REAL MASTERY.” HOW HAVE THOSE PRIORITIES EVOLVED? In law we have substantive due process and procedural due process. I would say those quotes describe the procedural due process by way of analogy. The process our students experience, enabled by having a low faculty to student ratio, working closely with a faculty member, of entering into a contract, having the constant oversight of that faculty member pushing you and prodding you as opposed to just getting a paper back that says you got an 80 and you feel good because it’s in the 80 range.

No, at New College that faculty member would say, “no, you really missed X, Y and Z and let’s focus on that,” so you can pursue 100% work, 100% outcomes. It causes you to recognize failure, develop soft skills and negotiations at 18, 19, 20 years old. It forces you to be creative and think about what you

SRQ M AGAZ I N E L E ADE RS I N H IGH E R E DUCATION : : NOVE MBE R 2023

could do for a short tutorial or an ISP, Independent Study Program.

All of that procedure married with the great substance of a liberal arts education will produce great, great thinkers and great, great innovators and great leaders in our society.

Again to quote Steve Jobs, “we want to be that place that makes your heart sing” and also, he said that, “Apple came and put a dent in the universe.” And so you get those two things, that procedural way we do it, and the substantive great coursework, and you marry those together and you’re going to put a dent in the universe. Somehow, someway, you will.

NEW COLLEGE IS FAMOUS AS THE COLLEGE WITHOUT GRADES. HOW DO YOU ANSWER PEOPLE WHO ARE INSECURE WITH THE SENSIBILITY THAT STUDENTS CAN BE TAUGHT WITHOUT GRADES CLEARLY EVALUATING THE EDUCATION THEY’RE RECEIVING? A lot of thoughts there. One is measurement.

Without measurement, you have a lowering of standards, a lowering of outcomes, a lowering of everything.

And the people in that world of no measurement that get lost or hurt the most are the people most in need of measurement in order to continue to advance down their path. Measurement matters and you have to have measurement.

The second part of that is are grades a good measurement, or does our system provide a better measurement? I think you will find that our measurement system creates more rigor, greater outcomes, and it’s a tougher program than grades. The third thing I would say about that is grades have become just overwhelmingly subjective.

You hear from college and university students from around the country that they’re turning in a paper a certain way or writing something a certain way because it will affect their grade because it’s so subjective.

There’s a lot less subjectivity in the way we do it, but we do have measurements.

I HEAR YOU TALK ABOUT LEADERSHIP A LOT IN NEARLY EVERY INTERVIEW. IS LEADERSHIP A SKILL THAT CAN BE TAUGHT? IS IT PART OF THE CURRICULUM AT NEW COLLEGE? Leadership can absolutely be taught. I think for the most part it is taught. I don’t think you can be a good leader without surrounding yourself first and foremost with talented people. I do think that [the confidence a leader needs] is learned as you’re raised.

Either you’re a secure person (we’re all insecure to some degree) but either you’re on the scale of one to a 100, you’re a 80 to a 100 secure person, or you’re a zero to 20. The worst leaders I’ve ever worked with are the zero to 20s. They will not surround themselves with people more talented than themselves because they’re too insecure. If there’s one thing I think I do fairly well as a leader is I have no issues surrounding myself with minds and thinkers and people with skill sets far greater than mine and have them all in a room and have that discussion on how we move forward. I think it’s leadership 101. I’ve told the story 1000 times about US Army General Stanley McChrystal, he says that if he had ten colonels, and one colonel is over the best unit and the other colonel is over the worst unit. General McChrystal says, “if I switch them and put best colonel over the worst unit with the worst colonel over the best unit, in 30 days, everything will flip.” The best colonel will have made the worst unit into the best, and the best unit will have faltered and become the worst. Leadership is that important. At New College that is why the school was “circling the drain,” too often we struggled with poor leadership. Hopefully, now, we can continue to attract brilliant minds, brilliant thinkers and people who are passionate about New College and if we do that, we will become, hands down, the number one liberal arts college in the country.

HOW CAN YOU WORK TO MAKE NEW COLLEGE A VISIBLE PART OF OUR COMMUNITY? That’s basically going out and doing it. You’ve probably heard me talk about [President of Ringling College of Art and Design] Larry Thompson.

I think what Larry has done is leadership 101. He took a school that was also circling the drain, came in, made significant changes. Even this summer, he’s brought in a bunch more new senior people into Ringling.

He has record enrollment.

It’s a phenomenal display of leadership. We’re blessed to have him in the community as a leader. I’ve learned a ton from him in just probably four or five conversations. Like all great leaders, he’ll impart every piece of knowledge to you, not worried that you’re down the street and you may compete in some way.

He wants to look at synergies and grow and help you grow because that could help him grow on all levels. That’s a very secure man and it shows in his leadership style. So, I have to be more like Larry and the school has to be more like Ringling. Get out there in the community, get the community to come here to the campus. And now that the fall semester started, it’s all about recruitment. We only had March, April and May, which was very difficult. Now we have a year, and there’s not one stone that we will leave unturned to find the absolute best and brightest minds. That’s meeting with the superintendent, that’s meeting with community leaders, that’s meeting with IB programs, that’s traveling to conferences. All of that is being done every single day. When students understand what we offer, we know that exceptional students will find it very, very painful to choose a school other than New College. SRQ

48 | SRQ MAGAZINE_ NOV23 LIVE LOCAL

V4_SRQ244_InConversation_NewCollege_Nov23_1010.indd 48

10/16/23 2:44 PM