Students return to New College this week and together bring the energy every campus knows.
I look forward to it every year.
This year I look forward to it more than most, because the college is at the beginning of the most significant expansion in its history.
On July 1, the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus transferred to New College of Florida.
This collaboration will shape this academic year and our future more than anything else I could tell you about.
It drastically increases our physical footprint and brings new academic programs, new laboratories, new residential capacity and new possibilities for research on Sarasota Bay.
It positions Florida's designated honors college to accomplish at a serious scale what it has done so
well at a small scale.
New College is one part of Florida’s elite State University System, and a small one by enrollment.
But our charge is unmistakable, and I have never been quiet about it: to make New College of Florida the No. 1 public liberal arts college in America.
Florida has set the national standard for higher education, and this college intends to be one of our state's crown jewels of that system. The transfer of the Sarasota-Manatee campus is the most consequential step toward that goal this institution has ever taken.
Our responsibility grows with this transfer, because a transition of this scale deserves a careful hand.
USF has been a serious and generous partner, and I am grateful for it.
As our plans take shape we will collaborate with students and this community, and we will listen to ensure a collective vision is implemented for our thriving region.
New College is a regional anchor
The Sarasota and Manatee region has never settled for the ordinary version of anything.
The museums, the performing arts organizations, the marine research institutions and the schools were built by people who intended them to outlast their own lifetimes, and they are why a community of this size earned its world-class reputation.
New College has been one of those anchors for more than 60 years.
College Hall was completed in 1926 and turns 100 this year, alongside several of the landmarks built in that same short stretch of the 1920s.
A century later it still sits at the center of a thriving college community, and that is the standard against which I measure our own planning.
An anchor institution earns the description by what it returns to the community.
It educates its students exceptionally well, and that is the first obligation. It also draws talent here, keeps graduates here, and gives employers a reason to build here rather than somewhere else.
A larger, stronger public college on Sarasota Bay means more of all of it: more opportunities for Florida students, more research in Sarasota, more graduates who stay.
The return has always been regional, which is exactly why we intend to grow carefully and collaboratively.
This summer our Fulcrum Career Center hosted the Teen Summit with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Manatee County, bringing more than 100 local young people onto campus – and the Pritzker Marine Science Center continues its work with community partners on the dolphins of Sarasota Bay, part of the longest-running study of a wild dolphin population anywhere in the world.
Neither could exist without partners beyond the college.
A standing invitation
So here is my personal standing invitation to you.
Come to the Markovitz Socratic Stage and engage with the speaker afterward.
Sit in on an Independent Study Project presentation in January, when our students spend a month on a single serious question and then share what they found.
Visit a lab and see undergraduates doing research most students do not touch until graduate school.
Come to a performance, to the Clambake, to a game.
I know you will leave impressed by these students.
I always do.
And I hope you will consider what you might build here: an internship and workforce pipeline with the Fulcrum Career Center, a seat on a New College community advisory board, your next business event on campus, an investment in the programs we are expanding.
A lot of the questions I spend my time on are the long ones:
What kind of institution will occupy these buildings in the decades to come, and how a college sitting on Sarasota Bay uses that position to lead nationally in the fields that matter most to Florida, from marine science to data science, technology, the classics and the liberal arts.
Institutions of consequence are built patiently, and what matters is knowing where we are going and bringing people with us as we get there.
I do not take the stewardship of New College lightly.
A college like this one is handed to you for a while and then handed on, and what we do with the year in front of us will be visible on this bay long after all of us are finished watching these sunsets.
Walk the campus this fall and see the foundation we are laying.
This next chapter belongs to the whole region, and we look forward to anchoring Sarasota's future with you.
Richard Corcoran is president of New College of Florida.
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: New College building a bright future for our school, region | Opinion
