Corcoran's New College crack-up: 7 reasons the BoG should deny his $15M - mostly in his own words

Includes: whining about Tally "harassment"; half-baked retention gimmicks; pretending to model woke liberal arts icons; pressuring Senate president's relative; and general incompetent incoherence.

The audio recording above comes from the New College faculty meeting on Sept. 11. I was also sent a partial transcript, key points of which I’ve posted below. Corcoran’s bits are hilariously shady and rambling.

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The dark comedy that is Richard Corcoran’s Sopranos-style bust-out and “leadership” of New College is turning darker and stupider by the moment — for students and for Corcoran himself.

Indeed, I may have too hastily declared Corcoran a better grifter than UF’s Ben Sasse. I don’t think anyone will pay Corcoran $1M per year to pretend to teach after this all comes crashing down.

Let’s run through the Top 7 signs of the approaching Cor-pocalypse.

1. Corcoran’s fake “business plan” for fake New College is already failing miserably

Check out this detailed accounting from the “Novo Collegian Alliance,” which is urging Florida’s Board of Governors to cut off the Corcoran grift state tax money gravy train. Key paragraph follows. Note the part in bold, with supporting detail in the article:

You’ve been asked by the Florida legislature to review Richard Corcoran’s business plan for New College of Florida to ensure the plan has “detailed descriptions of specific strategies” and will lead to “maintaining the high academic standards associated with the institution’s role as Florida’s designated Honors College” (2024 appropriations bill). This is required before the BOG can “submit budget amendments requesting release” of “$15,000,000 in nonrecurring funds” for New College (2024 appropriations bill).

The business plan presented to you by Richard Corcoran for the September 18th BOG meeting shows Corcoran already failing to meet the plan’s targets, and the proposed plan is lacking “detailed descriptions of specific strategies”. This proposed business plan must be evaluated in light of the poor performance from Richard Corcoran over the last 18 months as he oversaw the lowest average SATs in the history of New College, a historical drop in student retention, and a long run of last-minute and poorly executed initiatives.

The proposed plan is unsatisfactory in its current state, and the BOG should not approve the plan but instead require a more detailed and realistic plan from Richard Corcoran.

Corcoran already lost his best right wing grifter sugar daddy when Joe Ricketts bailed with his money after Corcoran and crew proved they couldn’t actually launch his “great books” online program. See article below.

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Has Joe Ricketts abandoned Richard Corcoran's New College grift?

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Corcoran’s giant salary doesn’t pay itself. It needs cash from somewhere. Cutting him off from both Ricketts and the taxpayers could prove fatal to this entire grift.

2. Snowflake Corcoran declares state oversight and BoG review of his spending of your money to be “harassment”

Here’s what Corcoran said at the Sept. 11 New College faculty meeting about the BoG having the temerity to review his profligate spending with taxpayer money:

If you look at the strategic plan, there's much more details, but we've hired a bunch more people now on the recruiting side for those academic kids, we're sending them to the four corners, mostly of the state, but certainly all around we have it down. We clearly just hand them a book that says, See, I need you to go to Gulliver. There's 28 kids that scored a 31 or higher. You need to get one of those kids. We're getting it that scientific with the with the folks we've been working with. So we're very optimistic, but if the fall of 25 we have 200 of those kids, it's game over. Shut the door. End of story. New College is going to be a just an amazing success story here too for it, and we'll never get harassed again from Tallahassee. The second thing, and I say that's probably you shouldn't laugh, I think that's probably a very pejorative statement, given it's in the political world, those dynamics change fast.

The second thing is growing money, and I'll start with Tallahassee, because they are harassing us. But we have, we have $15 million yet to get next week. On Wednesday, we go, we make a presentation, we go through that strategic plan, our enrollment growth. Myself, numerous staff members have been driving to Tallahassee, all across the state, meeting with the Board of Governors. We've met with the Senate staff, we've met the Senate President, we've met with the house speaker, we've met the house staff, we've met with the Board of Governors numerous times. We've sent up 18,000 drafts. I think we're really in a good spot, and that will free up that $15 million which allows us to do a lot more of the things that the proviso language allowed. So that, I think that's really good.

One assumes “Gulliver” is this.

In any event, if I had to go beg a board charged with overseeing the taxpayer money that pays my absurd salary, I doubt I would complain about its “harassment.” But Corcoran is not like you and me.

3. Corcoran claims to want to grow students by modeling woke liberal arts icons Williams and Amherst

This is really really funny, from the faculty meeting. Note the parts in bold:

If you guys can really make it a part of your thought processes, not just just being great teachers and great academics, but also helping us with this is, you know, sports has been a great enrollment thrower, and it's just kind of an automatic thing. You know, if you take if you just do the math, you have so many sports, you have so many kids graduate. If you have a four year program, you're always going to have give or take 200 plus kids coming in, and it's always going to be at that 30 and 35% it's the same at any great liberal arts school, Williams, Amherst, all of them. It's just an automatic mapping. And then you as more the more elite you become, your yield gets better, and your scores get up.

And that set the segment of the of the pie, the other pie is what we really need to work on. If we can get 250 rock star kids, if we can get 200 rock star kids this next year, and all of the money. If you see someone in the street and they tell you there are 1410 and they have a 4.0 and they're thinking about New College, you just flat out tell them, they get a full ride. Everything's every that's completely free, we need those kids

I just spent the weekend with three dear Amherst friends/athletes — baseball, hockey, and field hockey. One of their daughters is currently at Williams.

Literally everything about those two iconic liberal arts bastions — from sports to academic freedom to encouraging rather than punishing student activism and community — is diametrically opposite from the grifting New College shit show Corcoran is temporarily cashing in on.

So take my alma mater’s name out your mouth, Dick.

Smart, athletic kids come to Amherst and Williams to stay.

Those colleges do not recruit and admit 80 kids for their baseball teams, like New College did, knowing that most will churn out within a year.

4. Corcoran turns to gimmicks/not gimmicks as the incoherent answer to disastrous retention failures

Speaking of athletic churn and retention, note parts in bold here, also from the faculty meeting. Also note the general, incoherent, slipshod communication to faculty:

And I'll start giving you some stuff as I collect this data. But just as a point of interest, you know, one of the things that we're not good at is our retention rate, and so we're always looking at things. How do we get retention rates? So last year, we tried very gimmicky, but we said, Okay, we'll give every incoming student a computer. You know, you know, maybe that, but if you leave, you have to give it back. So we look at all these different things from other colleges and universities do that one did not work at all. So now we're doing a new gimmick, one which you guys, I think we'll like. It's not a gimmick.

This one's real is we're going to give you guys. We'll get it out to you. We're going to give you guys, probably I've got to figure out how to do it with the new vendors. But $500 it's your money, and you can spend it at four wins. You can spend it at the cafeteria, and the whole point is, go meet 321, of your students pay for them. They don't. You don't have to pay for them, just the cafeteria, because they get their own meals paid for. But you could pay for your meal, and you can pay for them at Four Winds [campus cafe] and just to continue to establish that relationship. So when they're having those you'll hear it faster and quick, more quickly that they're having a difficult time. And maybe we can save those kids for having them leaving and hurting the retention rate. Having said that, our retention rate is up 11% and you can see like trend lines of things that are positive.

You know, the top give or take, six reasons why we lost kids prior to this last class. Number 130, 8% was personal health issues. And we don't get into more details, obviously, critical reasons. What those are that's dropped down to less than 10% I think it's at 8% which is great. Then there was toxic culture. I couldn't find friends. I got canceled. [LOL, “I got canceled.” — from Billy] Those were all in the top. All of those have dropped to the bottom. But the new tops I've talked to some of the faculty about are, you didn't have an AOC that I liked. I didn't there wasn't enough offerings of the course that I wanted to take. It's much more academic, which we can fix. And so I think that's encouraging on trying to keep that retention rate up.

5. Corcoran is counting on incoming Senate President Ben Albritton’s relative to deliver his cash

Also from the faculty meeting:

I think it's going to be our best of the three years with the legislature this coming session, the new incoming speaker, the new incoming Senate President, actually the new incoming Senate President, Briana here. No, Brianna is actually related to him, so you better help us get some that, literally, he's from which one, and so is Brianna. So I found out that they're your cousins or something. Are you like first? Anyway, he's actually in town on Thursday night, so I'll get with him, and I'll tell him, but Brianna, you say hello.

It’s unclear who “Briana here” is. I see a couple candidates on Linked In; but I don’t want to wrongly ID someone. Perhaps Ben Albritton can identify her.

At the very least, Albritton should be put on notice that Corcoran is publicly leaning on his relative, who seems to be a New College employee. What do you think about that, Mr. Senate President? Would you consider that “harassment”?

6. Corcoran’s absentee New College grifter trustee frenemy Chris Rufo put “bounty” on Haitian migrants over the stupid cat lie

Remember that Rufo was the conduit for the Ricketts money. So I’m not really sure where his bromance with Corcoran stands. But this is quite indicative of where fake New College stands under Corcoran’s leadership right now.

7. A new campus ban on gatherings, parties, and hangouts of more than 5 students? Also you can’t provide tampons?

See this crazy article — meaning the content/unwritten policy is crazy — from NCF Freedom, another group looking to preserve what’s left of New College. Key passage:

The viral images of books piled up in dumpsters are symbolic of a larger sweep of changes at the school, including concerning adjustments to the registration process, the undermining of the mini-class and contract system, and constantly changing housing accommodations. Less visible –  but equally as insidious – is the slow reduction of community gathering spaces for students, the most recent casualty of which is the Gender and Diversity Center, which was once a beloved space on campus for students to gather for workshops, movie showings, clubs, or informal gatherings.   

The slow dismantling of community gathering spaces is no accident. Students at New College are becoming more and more isolated by various actions of the administration, including moving students to housing accommodations in hotels and portables, turning the ACE Lounge into the college bookstore, “cleansing” the GDC, and new rules that prevent “unauthorized” gatherings of 5 or more students. According to some current students and faculty, this policy has already begun to be enforced by the administration, and students are being disciplined accordingly.

What is so insidious about these changes is that they are happening with no official announcements or trackable policies (the “no gathering” rule, for example, is nowhere to be found in the currently available version of the student code of conduct), meaning the community at large must piece together what is happening by hearing it second-hand from students and faculty. In this way, the rule is comparable to “double secret probation,” in that it’s an expectation from the administration that the students aren’t aware of.

This will certainly help lure the Amherst and Williams “rock star” kids Corcoran claims to be recruiting. Indeed, Amherst and Williams — to put it mildly — do not do this.

One specific example, according to New College sources, was ordering a group of kids chatting under the campus’s iconic banyon tree to disperse because there were too many of them.

Another example I’ve heard of just gratuitously nasty treatment of the campus community is barring tampons from a community food pantry — on the grounds that women should be able to predict their own menstrual needs with precision.

The college is welcome to correct or dispel these reports if they are inaccurate. I am printing them now because the college never answers my questions when I ask them.

Just what I told you would happen; so withhold the $15M

I told you all this would happen. And it was the easiest prediction I’ve ever made. See article below:

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The Florida Board of Governors should, absolutely, refuse to pay this grifter $15M more of our tax money. Ben Albritton, who represents some of Polk County, should refuse.

But the BoG is just as grifty and pathetic as Corcoran and the New College trustees. So who knows if they’ll actually do their jobs on Wednesday and hold him accountable for all of this? I doubt it. I mean, look at what they let Ben Sasse do under their noses.

But Sasse’s time came elsewhere; and I suspect Corcoran’s is coming. He is not a well-liked guy by anyone, really.

And I know that Florida will never get out of its downward spiral until “leaders” collectively grow spines and purge the fake conservative grifters that dominate our public life and tax money spending.

Start with Dick.