New College of Florida, which has been the subject of a rightwing takeover that has reversed its previous reputation as a liberal arts school, has hired ideologically aligned rightwing faculty and staff for a range of positions, in a process that an internal open letter said “often replaced faculty expertise with administrative fiat”.
New College of Florida (NCF) was targeted by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who made transforming the liberal institution into a conservative one a centerpiece of his ill-fated presidential campaign that sought to take on liberal causes. Its board of trustees is now dominated by DeSantis allies, triggering campus turmoil and the exodus of some staff.
Some in the Republican party see the effort to transform New College as a model in a wider battle to take on American higher education, which the rightwing sees as dominated by left-leaning institutions and leaders. With Donald Trump returning to power after winning the presidential election last week, many rightwing activists could seek to replicate what has happened to New College across the US.
The Guardian has identified several faculty members who have a history of connections with rightwing media, far-right thinktanks and the so-called “New Right”. The hires are of a piece with the hard-right drift at the college since DeSantis appointed new members to the governing board of trustees including the culture warrior Christopher Rufo, which in turn appointed a new administration led by Richard Corcoran, a longtime Republican activist and former political candidate in Florida.
In an internally circulated open letter to Corcoran written by the chairs of a key committee, staff members have complained that hiring processes now involved the “arbitrary replacement of searches in specific fields with open-field searches, searches with no requirement for a PhD in the field, insertion of candidates with no rationale, and job offers made without a recommendation from the search committee”.
The Guardian emailed NCF for comment but received no response.
Rightwing hires
New College has appointed a raft of faculty and staff with a history in rightwing politics since Corcoran assumed control.
The most prominent appointments – previously reported on by local news media and the college’s Catalyst student newspaper – are the new presidential scholars in residence, which are visiting appointments made at Corcoran’s direct discretion.
One, Bruce Gilley, is a political scientist on sabbatical from Portland State University.
In 2017, he published a paper entitled “The Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly, which touched off a firestorm of controversy by arguing that western colonialism was largely beneficial for colonised nations, and that colonial rule often provided better governance than indigenous alternatives.
Following that publication, 15 members of the journal’s editorial board resigned, alleging that the article did not undergo proper peer review and calling for its retraction. Critics argued that the article ignored the vast body of scholarship documenting colonialism’s brutality, ongoing impacts and the racist ideologies that underpinned it.
Beyond that controversy, Gilley has embraced a rightwing non-profit seeking to push conservative ideology in higher education. He serves on the national board of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), and leads the subsidiary Oregon Association of Scholars.
NAS is a partner organization in Project 2025, the policy blueprint for a prospective Trump administration spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Its funders include the conservative mega-donors the Scaife and Bradley foundations, and Thomas Klingenstein, who also serves on the NAS board and as chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute.
Gilley also regularly ventilates controversial rightwing opinions on X, formerly Twitter.
In recent days, Gilley has claimed that “Dems want illegal immigration … to import votes”, echoing the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. He also described Chile’s former president Michelle Bachelet as a “diversity hire”.
Employment records obtained by the Guardian indicate that New College is paying Gilley $130,000 for his yearlong residency. According to Florida state salary records, that puts him among the highest-paid faculty members at NCF in 2024, with most other faculty earning less than $100,000.
Emails first obtained by American Oversight show that Gilley was first recommended to Corcoran not long after his appointment by “yacht lawyer” Robert Allen, an New College alumnus, former board of trustees member, and Republican operative who has claimed credit for encouraging DeSantis to move on the college’s board.
In January 2020, after being re-elected on an “anti-woke” platform, DeSantis appointed a clutch of rightwingers with no Florida connections to the governing board of trustees, including Rufo, the retired academic Mark Bauerlain, Hillsdale College’s Matthew Spaulding, and Ryan T Anderson, a former fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who was previously best known for anti-LGBTQ+ activism.
The Heritage Foundation has recently become better known as the principal architect of Project 2025. Last month, NCF trumpeted on its website that Heritage had issued a report rating New College as a “great option” for conservative students and parents.
In a 23 April 2023 email, just weeks after the previous college president, Patricia Okker, was fired and Corcoran appointed as interim head, Allen wrote to Corcoran: “Has anyone mentioned Bruce Gilley, MA Oxford, PhD Princeton, teaches at Portland State to you, as a potential prof?”
Corcoran replied: “Haven’t heard about Gilley.”
Other presidential scholars include Andrew Doyle, an “anti-woke” writer and broadcaster from the UK who associated with rightwing media outlets there including Spiked Online and GB News.
Another, Joseph Loconte, a conservative academic and former Heritage Foundation director. According to Florida salary records, Loconte is being paid $165,000 for his residency.
The Guardian emailed Gilley for comment on his Portland State University address. He responded: “Fuck you, you ideological midwit. And please quote me.”
Nathan Allen
Earlier in the same April 2023 email exchange, Allen linked Corcoran to a Medium post, adding: “We need to find the author … I will send you another one by him shortly.”
Corcoran replied: “We’ve been talking and he’s helping. Great guy. Just emailing with him this afternoon again.”
The man they were talking about, Nathan Allen, is New College’s VP of strategy and special projects. Allen has little online presence other than his ideologically charged Medium blog, where he lets loose his own broadsides at the left, American universities and other institutions, and other perceived enemies.
Some of those posts include full-throated, conspiracy-minded attacks on the academics Allen now helps to administer.
In a June 2020 post, Allen wrote: “These Marxists and their affiliated majors don’t exist because students actually major in them”, adding “They are the thought police – on campus and nationally. They burn the books, tear down the statues, purge the faculties of thought crimes, assign value, and control the narrative.”
Also in that post, Allen characterized the public intellectual and current independent presidential candidate, Cornel West, as having been “the CEO [of] Race Inc for three decades, adding of West: “He’s one of the leading neo-Marxists who calls for the destruction of America.”
The Guardian emailed Nathan Allen for comment on the posts in September, and asked if he had changed his views.
Allen did not respond directly, but an NCF spokesperson, Nathan March, replied in an email: “You can’t possibly explore Mr Allen’s writing and appropriately gain context about New College without having read When Lilacs Last in the Palm Court Bloom’d.”
That post is an elaborate criticism of NCF under previous administrations, which Allen claims stems from a failure of leadership, a lack of a distinct identity, and a reliance on shallow marketing strategies.
Faculty
The rightwing hiring spree has also extended to faculty.
New faculty that New College boasted about in a specially created booklet earlier this year include Spencer Klavan, a former fellow at the rightwing Claremont Institute and assistant editor of The American Mind, a regular author in rightwing publications including the Claremont Review of Books and Law and Liberty, and a podcaster.
Casey Wheatland, meanwhile, is a newly appointed political scientist whose PhD comes from the conservative private university, Hillsdale College.
Hillsdale, which declines federal government funding in order to avoid Title IX provisions against sex discrimination, has been cited as an inspiration for changes at New College, with a DeSantis ally expressing the hope that it might become a “Hillsdale of the south”.
Wheatland defended his dissertation in March 2022, according to Hillsdale’s website. He has published just three peer-reviewed papers, according to online research repositories, including one in the Catholic Social Science Review.
US News and World Report puts Hillsdale’s program in political science equal second-last on its ranked list of graduate schools in that discipline.
On X, Wheatland has promoted conspiracy-minded positions consistent with those of the extremist so-called “New Right”.
On 1 August, Wheatland linked to a paper that he claimed showed that “not only do non-citizens vote in US elections, they do so at high enough numbers to change public policy at the national level”. It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in the US and there is no credible evidence that they do so in significant numbers.
On 21 June, Wheatland wrote that an 1879 supreme court decision forbidding Mormon polygamy showed that traditional heterosexual marriage was “at the root of our social relations and obligations”.
On 4 June, Wheatland responded to an AP story on Wisconsin’s attorney general filing charges against lawyers who assisted Donald Trump in his attempts to overturn the election in that state by writing: “Gableman’s investigation found many illegalities.”
In August 2022, the speaker of Wisconsin’s state assembly, Robin Vos, fired Michael Gableman and ended his scandal-plagued investigation into the results, which a court who sanctioned the former judge decreed had found no evidence of election fraud.
In September, Wheatland wrote a thread defending the views of Daryl Cooper, the revisionist historian who caused a scandal when Tucker Carlson spoke to him as a guest on his show on X.
The Guardian emailed Wheatland for comment in September. In an email, he said: “I do not teach my students any particular political position. That is called indoctrination,” and “You seem to think that indoctrination and virtue signaling are the purposes of the university. I believe its purposes are rigorous inquiry and debate.”
Wheatland locked his X account in late September, not long after the Guardian contacted him.
Pushback
Inside New College, faculty have pushed back on hiring processes for new faculty, which they allege have been subject to undue interference from Corcoran and his administration.
The Guardian obtained a 31 May open letter from David Gillman and Nova Myhill, co-chairs of New College’s education committee, which relayed the faculty’s “deep concerns over changes at New College in the conduct of faculty searches”, which they say has “resulted in some hires that negatively affect the ability of programs, including interdisciplinary programs which depend on faculty hired into various disciplines, to fill the needs of students”.
Without naming any specific hires, the letter said: “We see a breakdown of established processes with no new processes to take their place.”
The letter further alleges: “This has resulted in insertion of new lines with no rationale, arbitrary replacement of searches in specific fields with open-field searches, searches with no requirement for a PhD in the field, insertion of candidates with no rationale, and job offers made without a recommendation from the search committee.”
Since Corcoran assumed control of New College, it has plummeted in national rankings of liberal arts schools; attracted controversy for dumping library books and materials from a gender and diversity center that the administration closed; and invited controversial speakers to campus.
Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported on a brewing clash over changes to the core curriculum, which critics say is being “driven by conservative ideologues”.
