A recent piece in the City Journal by Colin Wright has caused confusion among many supporters of New College of Florida. The piece looked like a familiar bloviated attack from the left about the alleged failures of NCF.
But upon full review, it was a friendly fire attack from a writer tied to the Manhattan Institute, a mission-aligned, intellectual hub also advancing free speech and individual liberty. Though Wright failed to extend the college the courtesy of an inquiry, rather than return friendly fire, we will respectfully set the record straight and showcase our commitment to civil discourse.
It is worth remembering what New College looked like before its recent reform.
Enrollment was in serious decline. The campus was long neglected with unhealthy buildings. The institution was drifting without a coherent academic mission. Free speech and open debate were nowhere to be seen, and DEI was central to its mission.
Rather than allow the college to fail, state officials stepped in and mandated change to save one of the South’s few great liberal arts colleges.
We are certain that Wright would agree that the necessary revolution in higher education must be academic freedom, free speech, civil discourse, and teaching students how to think, not what to think. But it’s also about restoring something that had gone missing across much of American academia: the conviction that ideas should be tested, not protected.
That students should be trained to reason, think critically, and never be indoctrinated. That a diploma should represent genuine intellectual development, not credentialed conformity.
That mission requires allowing students to pursue their own interests and passions and write theses with which we might personally disagree. It requires faculty willing to engage and promote debate rather than suppress it. It requires an administration confident enough in its own values to let inquiry run its course and allow students to choose their own values in the great marketplace of ideas.
These are not concessions; they are what define a real university.
If one opposes indoctrination, one must oppose indoctrination from all sides. A student writing a thesis with an objectionable claim or central point is not evidence of institutional failure; it is evidence of an institution succeeding. Theses must be graded on the articulation and defense of the ideas they contain, not whether the reader approves or agrees with the topic or central theme.
What we have built at New College is a campus where free speech is at the forefront of all we do. We are America’s free-speech campus. We prove this every day: our Socratic Stage exists because we believe ideas should compete in public, under scrutiny and heard by people who disagree.
That is not a radical proposition. It is the oldest proposition in higher education, and most institutions have quietly abandoned it, yet we embrace it!
When another Manhattan Institute Fellow, Christopher Rufo, joined the New College Board, he famously said, “We’re not going to try to suppress your opinion. We’re not going to try to stifle debate. We’re not going to try to create one orthodoxy to replace another.” Rufo knew, and we embrace the fact that real academic freedom in higher education rejects performances of ideological purity.
There is a meaningful legal distinction between scholarship and activism. We respect the difference. Critics who cannot make this distinction are not defending academic standards; they are undermining them, let alone the freedoms afforded all Americans in the U.S. Constitution.
New College is not accountable to social media cycles or to organizations that confuse surveillance with reform. We are building something real, something rigorous, and something that will last.
Perhaps all sides of the body politic might realize that free inquiry is not a threat to what we are building here. It is exactly what we are building.
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David Rancourt is the Vice Provost of New College of Florida.
