DeSantis is eliminating nursing and tourism programs that serve working people to expand a conservative ideology project that costs nearly $495,000 per degree.¹ On July 1, New College of Florida — the 900-student liberal arts institution the governor seized in 2023 and remade in the image of his “anti-woke” agenda — will acquire the 32-acre, 2,000-student Sarasota-Manatee campus of the University of South Florida. A six-story residential hall, a $44 million student center, and the programs that served Sarasota County’s working people — nursing, hospitality, tourism — will transfer to an institution that the state’s own efficiency study showed costs $494,715 to produce a single degree.
The transfer was not voted on by the state senate. It was inserted into the final budget by a conference committee after the legislative session had effectively closed — a procedural end-run around the institution whose opposition it was designed to defeat. Near-universal opposition — from USF faculty, students, education leaders, and the Sarasota business community — did not stop it. The governor’s hand-picked board at New College, led by Richard Corcoran, a former Florida House speaker with no higher education experience drawing a $1.2 million salary, will now control a campus built and paid for by USF.² The nursing programs will survive for four years under a teach-out arrangement. After that, the campus will belong to New College.
Now: I would like you to look at those nursing programs, and those hospitality programs, and the students who enrolled in them, and the hospitals and hotels that employed their graduates, and ask who those people are. They are the people Matthew 25:35–36 names. “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” That passage is not a metaphor. It is the criterion of judgment Jesus lays out in the Gospel of Matthew, and it is as specific as it sounds: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. Greek: epeinoēsa kai edōkate moi phagein — I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. The verb is aorist, which means it happened, in the past, in the body, not in the spirit. The nursing students at USF Sarasota-Manatee were training to do the work that passage describes. Their governor eliminated those programs to build something else.
I sat in Sunday School for thirty years and heard Matthew 25 preached as a passage about individual charity — about individual Christians choosing to feed the hungry and visit the sick. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The passage is about what happens to nations. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). The “least of these” are not an abstraction. In DeSantis’s Florida, they are the high school graduates in Manatee County who chose USF Sarasota-Manatee because it was close to home and affordable, and the older residents who returned to college through its programs, and the nursing graduates who staff the hospitals along the Gulf Coast. The state of Florida has decided those people are less important than a political project.
The justification the administration deployed for this transfer, and for the broader New College project of which it is a part, is a specific claim about the Western canon and the Christian intellectual tradition. The word the project uses is “classical liberal arts,” not “Bible,” but the governor has framed New College’s mission as a restoration of the education received by the nation’s founders — an education that was, in the project’s own historical imagination, inseparable from the Christian intellectual tradition. The claim warrants engagement on those terms. The claim is that New College, under Corcoran and the DeSantis-appointed board, is building a “nationally distinctive public liberal arts institution focused on academic excellence, civic discourse, innovation and student opportunity” — that the board is, in its own words, “apolitical,” and that the project is a restoration of the college’s founding mission rather than a political capture of it.
The Bible’s plain language, read at the passage where the captured operation’s claimed normative authority is highest, requires the opposite of what the operation has done.
Amos 5:21–24 is the passage. I have read it in the New Revised Standard Version and in the King James, and the Greek of the Septuagint and the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text are both beyond my working competence, but the English is not ambiguous. The prophet addresses the assembled religious festivals of the northern kingdom — the solemn assemblies, the burnt offerings, the grain offerings, the songs, the harps — and he says that the Lord hates them, despises them, will not accept them, will not listen to the music, because the people who bring them have trampled the needy, have pushed aside the poor (Amos 5:11–12), and, as Amos 2:6 charges, have bought the vulnerable with silver and the destitute for a pair of sandals. “Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
The prophet does not say, “Reform your religious festivals so they are more doctrinally correct.” He does not say, “Replace your current worship leaders with ones who have the right theological commitments.” He does not say, “Your problem is that your solemn assemblies have been captured by the wrong ideology, and if you install the right board of trustees, the Lord will accept your offerings again.” He says that the worship itself, the assembled religious apparatus itself, the festivals and the offerings and the songs — the whole institutional structure of serious public devotion — is detestable to the Lord, not because the doctrine is wrong, but because the people who run it have trampled the poor. The institutional structure is not being judged by its theological correctness; it is being judged by what it does to the vulnerable. The logic is not a single-chapter outlier; Isaiah 1:11–17 and Micah 6:6–8 deliver the same demand: the rituals of the powerful are rejected when the vulnerable are crushed.
This is not a general principle. This is not a vague scriptural admonition to be nice to the poor. This is a specific text, in a specific prophetic book, at a specific chapter and verse, and the text is that the institutional apparatus of serious public devotion — the solemn assemblies, the governing boards, the appointed leaders, the budgets, the campus transfers — is judged by one criterion and one criterion only: what it does to the poor, the vulnerable, the people who cannot defend themselves against it. Amos 5 is not a passage about the need for more doctrinally-pure worship. It is a passage about the fact that worship conducted by people who are actively harming the poor is not worship at all. It is rejected. It is detestable. It is a stench. The Lord will not listen to the music.
The captured operation’s claim is that the New College project is a restoration of “academic excellence, civic discourse, innovation and student opportunity” — that the institution is “apolitical,” that it is building a “classical liberal arts” model, that it is grounded in the Western canon and the Christian intellectual tradition. The actual operation — named, documented, carried out in the specific procedural end-run that seized a campus over the objection of its faculty, its students, its local business community, and the university that built it — has done the following things to the poor and the vulnerable:
It has ended nursing programs at a campus that serves the hospitals of Sarasota and Manatee counties — counties where the population skews older, where the Medicaid expansion the state has refused for a decade has left tens of thousands of working-poor adults without coverage, and where the hospitals that employ the graduates of USF’s health programs are the same hospitals that treat the patients who drive ninety minutes because the local hospital closed.
It has ended hospitality and tourism programs at the campus that serves the hotels and restaurants of the Gulf Coast — the same hotels and restaurants that employ the graduates of the local high schools and the older residents going back to college, the same students for whom the removal of the campus, in the words of the student lieutenant governor, “really removes an opportunity to get a degree affordably.”
It has, per the efficiency study published in November, spent almost half a million dollars to produce a single degree — a cost-to-degree figure nearly three times that of the next-highest of Florida’s thirteen state universities and colleges.³ The system average is roughly $46,000 per degree. New College costs ten times that. The product is an institution that announced it would commission a statue of Charlie Kirk while purging its library of diversity materials.⁴ Richard Corcoran, the former House speaker with no higher education experience, draws a salary package four times his predecessor’s. This is not an efficiency story. This is a story about whose needs the state serves.
It has taken a campus that served the poor and the geographically-precarious and the working-class students who needed a degree close to where they lived, and it has handed that campus to an institution that will not serve them — an institution whose president’s salary is four times the market rate, an institution whose cost-per-degree is the highest in the state system by a factor of three, an institution that the governor’s own efficiency exercise cannot justify on any metric of efficient public expenditure.
Fentrice Driskell, the Florida House Democratic caucus leader, called the transfer what it is — “a grift” — and noted that the measure was resurrected in a conference committee and inserted into the final state budget after opponents believed it had died.⁵ The institution that calls itself apolitical has taken a campus that served the students who could not afford to drive to the main USF campus in Tampa, and it has given that campus to an institution whose board was appointed by a governor who has spent his entire second term testing the limits of executive power in ways that, per the same caucus leader, “I don’t think anybody would have ever foreseen, and he’s been such a bully about all of these things.”
The board that invokes the Western canon has named itself a restoration of the classical liberal-arts tradition, grounded in the Western canon and the Christian intellectual heritage. The captured operation has claimed the mantle of the Bible and the Christian tradition. And the actual operation — named, documented, carried out against the opposition of the faculty, the students, and the local community — has taken a campus from the students who needed it and given it to an institution whose cost-per-degree is the highest in the state, whose president’s salary is four times the market rate, and whose board was appointed by a governor who has spent the past four years building this very apparatus from the raw material of state higher-education assets.
Proverbs 14:31 answers plainly: “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” And Jeremiah 22:13–17 addresses the ruler who “builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor.” The prophet’s question is not whether the palace is well-built. It is: “Does it not mean anything to you who follow the path of justice? Your father — did he not do what was right and just? He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well” (Jeremiah 22:15–16). The Hebrew mishpat u-tsedaqah — justice and righteousness — is not decorative language. It is the standard by which the prophet judges the king’s building project. DeSantis’s building project eliminates the programs that trained people to care for the sick and serve the stranger, and replaces them with an institution that costs nearly $495,000 a degree and produces a Charlie Kirk statue. The prophet’s question stands.
I am aware that the governor will be out of office in January, and that some observers believe the acquisition might be reversed. I hope they are right. The campus transfer, per the president of the university that is losing the campus, will take four years to fully unwind, during which time the students currently enrolled will have the opportunity to finish their degrees. But the damage is not only to a campus. It is to the principle that public institutions serve the public. When a governor can eliminate nursing programs and hospitality training — programs that served “the least of these” in the most literal sense — and replace them with a vanity project that costs nearly $495,000 per degree, the question is not only about one campus in Sarasota. It is about what the state is for.
The verdict of the text is that the transfer itself, the operation itself, the board itself, the budget end-run itself — the whole apparatus of “academic excellence, civic discourse, innovation and student opportunity” that was used to justify taking a campus from the students who needed it — is, on the Bible’s own plain-language reading, a stench in the nostrils of the Lord. Micah 6:8 closes the matter: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” The Hebrew mishpat, hesed, tsana — justice, mercy, humility. The state of Florida has spent $494,715 per degree to build something that serves none of them. The captured operation named the Bible as its warrant. The Bible named the operation back. The operation’s defenders should read the passage before they sing the hymns.
Notes
¹ Florida Board of Governors, State University System Efficiency Study, November 2025. Per-degree cost figure reflects total institutional expenditure divided by degrees conferred. New College’s cost was $494,715; the next highest, Florida Polytechnic, was $155,000. The system average was approximately $46,000 per degree. Source: Florida Phoenix, November 7, 2025.
² Richard Corcoran’s $1.2 million salary package was reported when his appointment was finalized in 2024. His predecessor, Patricia Okker, was fired by the DeSantis-appointed board on January 31, 2023, during the initial takeover.
³ State University System Efficiency Study, November 2025. New College cost: $494,715; Florida Polytechnic: $155,000; system average: approximately $46,000.
⁴ The Charlie Kirk statue commission was announced in September 2025. The library book disposal and DEI purge were documented in 2024; Christopher Rufo’s “throwing out the trash” comment was widely reported. Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
⁵ Driskell’s “reeks of grift” characterization and the conference committee maneuver were reported by multiple Florida outlets. The transfer was not taken up by the state senate after passing the house, leading opponents to believe the measure had died, before it was resurrected in the budget conference process.