New College

Contributed by Stephen Wickman, St. Thomas Episcopal

I went to Eckerd College (the name changed from Florida Presbyterian College my freshman year)
which considered itself a peer and competitor to New College, the small liberal arts college
completely remodeled by Florida’s conservative governor. nytimes.com/2025/12/28/us/new-college-ron-desantis-florida-conservative

Eckerd had a “core” curriculum – one required class every semester, January independent study
excepted (FPC invented the 4-1-4 calendar), which like New College’s program was completely up
to the student. My freshman year, for example, a dorm mate built a harpsichord while I read Horace,
Juvenal, and every book written by Kurt Vonnegut and wrote a paper on the latter while nursing a
broken ankle (from basketball). The first year “core” syllabus included Homer’s The Odyssey, which
every student at New College is now required to “read” during one excruciating seven-week course.
I like Eckerd’s or FPC’s approach better because our semester-long class included quaint items like
The Bible, and authors like Alfred the Great, Rabelais, Milton Friedman, Arthur Koestler, etc.

As I read the Times article, I remembered the debate that raged on campus during my freshman
year: students opposed plans to eliminate the Classics department because few if any of our 1,000
students wanted to study it. Even our tiny Asian Studies program and Chinese language class, very
rare in 1972, was larger. I can’t remember what they decided to do, but the school, like New
College, fell on hard times after the name change (students went insane and strutted around
campus wearing “Eckerd Drugs College” tee shirts made overnight by the arts students) and the
fraudulent mismanagement of their small endowment fund. Like New College, Eckerd had to be
taken over by the state and is now much larger school that still features on lists of colleges that
“change people’s lives.”

I’m not sure how to react to the quotation from a New College student recruited to their new beach
volleyball team, “wooed with scholarships, to play on sand that is fluffed twice a week, with a view
of students kayaking on the bay.” She said she “was raised in a ‘very old school family,’ and
educated in Christian private schools but sees no ideological divisions on campus: ‘I think
everybody minds their own business, does their own thing.’”

Now that seems like a positive development, but sometimes my faith tells me we need to stop
minding our own business and get involved. Happy New Year.

This blog post is the expressed opinion of its writer and does not necessarily reflect the
views of Tysons Interfaith or its members