New College of Fla. Alumni Board Not Giving Up, Chair Says

The chair of the New College of Florida foundation’s formerly official alumni group said the foundation board voted Wednesday to dissolve the alumni organization’s board and remove the chair from the foundation board.

“Neither of those actions was legal,” Chris Van Dyk, chair of the New College Alumnae/i Association, told Inside Higher Ed Thursday. He said the group is considering suing and will continue meeting.

“The mascot for the old New College was the null set,” he said. “And I’ve been making the point that neither philosophically nor mathematically can you eliminate the null set.”

Van Dyk said the foundation board doesn’t “want to listen to anybody that isn’t them: the current board, the entirety of which is ‘mission aligned’ with [New College] President [Richard] Corcoran.”

Jono Miller, a former head of the alumni group who previously worked at New College, said the foundation board is replacing the alumni board, whose members are elected by other alumni, with an “Alumni Engagement Committee” containing people serving on the foundation board.

“I just think they felt that they didn’t have the level of compliance that they wanted,” said Miller, who now leads a group called NCF Freedom, founded in response to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s conservative overhaul of the college.

Jamie Miller, New College’s vice president for communications, told Inside Higher Ed, “This is a governance issue that will put our Alumni Engagement Committee that was formed yesterday in alignment with the vast majority of State University System [of Florida] foundations.”

Spectrum News, which reported earlier on the foundation board’s move, quoted foundation board member Adam Kendall as saying, “I don’t feel that we can have an alumni association that is fighting everything we’re trying to accomplish at the college level, and it’s denying our future alumni a positive experience for when they graduate.”