Sooner or later, each of us has to answer a simple question: "How do we know whether we are doing well?"
The easiest answer is to look at what others say about us.
Praise suggests we are succeeding, and criticism suggests we are not.
It is a natural instinct, but an unreliable one.
A person whose sense of worth rests on the opinions of others will rise and fall with every headline and every passing remark, many of them from people who have never seen the work.
There is a better measure, and it is how we show up.
Do we do the work when no one is watching?
Do we do the work when everyone is watching?
Do we keep our commitments?
Do we grow better at what we do, year after year?
None of those questions depend on anyone’s approval.
Each of them depends on our
actions.
I have been thinking about this as New College begins a new academic year
People have had plenty to say about New College recently: some generous, some critical and much of it political.
We welcome the scrutiny.
We are disrupting the status quo, and change always invites loud opinions.
A public college belongs to the public, and the public is right to ask hard questions.
But we have never measured ourselves by commentary.
We measure ourselves by student success.
Others recognize our success
This fall, three independent national publications offered their own measures of New College, each using a different method.
Washington Monthly asks what a college contributes to the country, weighing social mobility, graduation outcomes and public service rather than wealth or prestige.
This year it named New College the No. 1 public liberal arts college in the United States and No. 6 among all liberal arts colleges.
The Princeton Review asks the students themselves. Our students rated their professors 95 for how interesting and 95 for how accessible they are, among the highest marks the survey awards.
New College ranked No. 2 in the nation for financial aid and No. 24 for value, and was named one of "50 Colleges That Create Futures."
Families are rightly demanding proof that a college degree is still worth the investment, and students are asking what a degree will mean in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence.
Those are fair questions, and every college should be prepared to answer them.
To be recognized nationally for the value of the education we provide, at the very moment that value is being questioned, matters.
It tells a family that an investment here returns something tangible.
U.S. News & World Report applies its own set of institutional measures with double digit growth in academic investment of resources per student, rising to No. 14 nationally among liberal arts colleges.
These are three publications using three methods and drawing on no common data.
When people asking different questions arrive at the same answer, it is worth noticing.
Let me be perfectly clear to our students and community: we do not chase rankings.
They are a reflection of the work, not the work itself.
A ranking can move for reasons that have little to do with what happens in a classroom.
If we chased them, we would be making the same mistake as the person who lives by the opinions of others.
The work is the point.
We define success by the student writing a rigorous senior thesis guided by a professor who knows her by name.
We see it in the young, undergraduate researcher actively studying dolphins on Sarasota Bay, the student taking ownership of their education through an academic contract and the athletes building a new program from the ground up.
In a world where artificial intelligence can supply almost any answer, the value of an education lies less in information than in learning how to think.
That means learning how to ask a better question, how to test an assumption and how to hold one’s own reasoning up to challenge.
That is what students are learning to do at New College.
That is how a college shows up, and the rankings reflect it.
Judge us by our work
Recently we opened a new season of the Markovitz Socratic Stage.
It rests on one of the oldest ideas in classical education: that an idea is worth holding only if it can withstand questioning.
Socrates taught in the open and expected to be challenged.
The classical tradition understood character as something practiced rather than proclaimed.
Institutional success is exactly the same.
We do not ask you to judge New College by what pundits say about us, or even by the national rankings we continue to earn.
We ask you to judge us by the work.
Come to the campus.
Sit in on a class, attend a debate and meet our students.
Showing up, doing the work and embracing the challenge – that is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the exact standard we equip our graduates to carry into the world.
Richard Corcoran is president of New College of Florida.
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: The critics keep talking. New College keeps succeeding. | Opinion
