New College of Florida’s official commencement ceremonies, once known for the graduates’ unconventional costumes and brilliant Sarasota bayfront sunsets, have now been hubs of controversy for three years running. The 2025 ceremony marks the first year that the graduates included students who enrolled at the college after its “right-wing takeover” began in 2023. At the time, New College Trustee Christopher Rufo was quoted as saying that some of these students were recruited in an attempt at “rebalancing the ratio of students” in order to rescue the school from “what many have called a social justice ghetto.”
The 2025 New College Commencement ceremony on May 23 was neither a particularly joyful affair nor a protest against the presumed ideological aims of the leadership. A faculty member who asked not to be named summed it up for Old School Catalyst in one word: “sparse.”
“It was terrible. I really regret coming,” said one graduating student who also requested that their name be withheld.
How is it that a graduation ceremony inspires reactions such as these? Since 2023, New College commencements have carried a certain tension due to changes in leadership, the mass exodus of faculty and attempts to recast the student body in a more traditionally conservative mold. Each commencement since then has included a notably controversial right-wing speaker, heckling from the audience and a heightened police presence.
In contrast, the alternative [NEW] Commencement ceremonies, held the evening before and orchestrated by graduating students and members of the Novo Collegian Alliance (NCA), offered a supplementary ceremony in an off-campus space, free from administrative oversight.
The 2024 official graduation attracted headlines when New College’s administration retaliated against its graduates for speaking out of turn. Brief chants of “free Palestine” came from an estimated 10 students while that year’s speaker—whose microphone malfunctioned, rendering him inaudible to in-person attendees—attempted to give his address. In response, members of the administration and campus police identified some of the chanting students and withheld their diplomas for several months, sending a clear message that dissenting voices would not be tolerated.
The 2025 ceremony differed from previous iterations in several ways. Nearly all of the graduates present donned traditional caps and gowns, a stark departure from the colorful outfits or hand-crafted costumes that were previously typical of a New College graduation.
The administration also selected two speakers for commencement, instead of the usual one. President Richard Corcoran acted as emcee, but shook hands with only about half of the graduates who passed him onstage.
An estimated 30 police officers patrolled the perimeter of the tent where the outdoor ceremony took place, including at least one officer stationed on the roof of College Hall. The college also hired a third-party vendor to sell various “graduation gifts” at the ceremony, including flowers for graduates and beige-and-navy, Banyan-branded New College merchandise.
154 students were listed in the 2025 Commencement program: 121 undergraduates, 11 graduate students and 22 graduating with Associate degrees. This number of graduates appears to be slightly up from the 133 total degrees that were reportedly awarded to students in 2023. However, this year’s commencement program also came with a disclaimer that stated that a students’ inclusion in the program “does not certify the completion of degree requirements.”
Four students graduated with a full or partial area of concentration (AOC) in Gender Studies—likely the last students to do so at New College.
Of the 121 undergraduate students listed in the program, an estimated 80 attended the ceremony.
Meanwhile, a VIP section with an estimated 100 seats was reserved for members of the Board of Trustees and their guests, including Chair Debra Jenks, Chancellor of the State University System of Florida Ray Rodriguez and artist and socialite Michelle-Marie Heinemann. On May 21, Heinemann donated a nine-foot-tall metal sculpture of a daisy to New College, named the “Flower Tree” or “Lady Banyan.” She also received a full dedicated page in the commencement program.
The elected student speaker, Safari Svensson (‘25) told his story about living in extreme poverty and housing insecurity before attending New College, and spoke to the resilience of his fellow students. Swensson also spoke at [NEW] Commencement the evening before. The administration’s chosen alumni speaker, Adam Kendall (’02)—who is also the current chair of the New College Foundation—spoke about his studies in Economics at New College and the life lessons that track imparted to him.
Faculty speaker and Professor of Philosophy April Flanke did not shy away from discussing the odd circumstances under which the class of 2025 at New College was graduating.
“So many of you came to New College with big plans and embarked on those studies and those friendships, only to have everything get, well, strange,” Flakne said. “A lot of your friends left, and a lot of your mentors left. But you, you’re here today. You’re here today because you stayed. And there may have been a lot of reasons why you stayed.
“You demanded your personalized liberal arts education, the one you were promised,” Flakne continued in a statement that was met with cheers from the audience. “That personalized liberal arts education is the beating heart of New College, and it’s what we’re going to stick to through thick and thin, just like you stuck to your career here.”
The officially designated star of the event—attorney, former Harvard Law School faculty member and administration-selected speaker Alan Dershowitz—had a different message to impart.
Dershowitz was a controversial invitee, as evidenced by the back-and-forth opinion pieces and letters to the editor featured in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, debating the appropriateness of his selection. Dershowitz became well-known in the 1980s and ’90s for taking on various wealthy, high-profile clients, and perhaps most notably for representing infamous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 and securing him a plea deal.
Dershowitz used his speech to emphasize the importance of institutional neutrality. Despite this, he also platformed beliefs that included the sentiment that immigrant students do not belong in U.S. colleges and universities and that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) pose a threat to academic excellence.
“I’m opposed to all ethnic, gender, religious and other departments,” Dershowitz told graduates. “The question is, will a university pass what I call the ‘shoe on the other foot’ test? Will it apply the same principles? For example, you say there should be a course on gender studies. That’s fine. But what if a professor wanted to teach a course that was against transgender rights, or against gay rights? Would a university do that? Of course not. Should they do that? Of course not. Universities have to be neutral, they have to be forums in which views of every kind are allowed to be expressed.”
Dershowitz praised the New College administration several times for having the “courage” to invite him to campus and for “saving higher education from continuing its descent into an ideological abyss of propaganda.” He also briefly rallied against institutions that do not provide traditional letter grades or “non-meritocratic grades,” despite New College being one such institution. These comments were met with audible laughter from portions of the audience.
Dershowitz emphasized repeatedly his dislike for his former employer, Harvard University, amid an ongoing feud with the Trump administration. This feud has most recently resulted in an order from Trump for all federal agencies to cut financial ties with the university.
“We have so many problems in this country, we have so many students who deserve a great education in this country,” he stated. “Thirty-five percent of the student body [at Harvard] are from outside the country. That’s just too much and too far.”
Dershowitz was paid $12,500 by the college for speaking at Commencement, and another $12,500 for speaking at an event in the Socratic Seminar Dialogue series that took place on campus the day before, totaling $25,000.
The audience had mixed reactions to Dershowitz’s speech—some openly laughed at times as he spoke and several graduating students were spotted on their phones while he was on stage. Some attendees expressed their disappointment or frustration during the reception.
“There was a lack of decorum to what he [Dershowitz] was saying, and a lack of understanding of the audience he was speaking to,” an attendee who asked to be identified only as Amelia told Old School Catalyst. “He was very hypocritical in a lot of his statements towards freedom of speech, specifically about understanding opposing sides… there was a bit of a Freudian slip.”
The “slip” in question came as Dershowitz discussed academic freedom and censorship for a portion of his speech: “The deeper problem is the idea of free speech for me, but not for thee… Academic freedom only for views that are acceptable, but not views that are unacceptable.”
A member of the audience called out in response, “That’s why you support gender studies, right? People have the freedom to study whatever they want?”
“You’re talking about genocide?” Dershowitz called back, mishearing the audience member.
Beyond this instance, Dershowitz did not explicitly talk about the recent war in Gaza or the spike of Islamophobia in the U.S. He did, however, disavow antisemitism and, in the same speech, claim that Jewish studies and Holocaust studies should not be taught at universities lest they “become incubators for bigotry and narrowness of thinking.”
Several graduating students spoke of how Dershowitz’s speech did not reflect their experiences as New College students, and that they felt he was included as a speaker for the administration’s own political agenda.
“It was very hypocritical to criticize schools that teach people what to think and then spew more political thoughts into our minds,” recent graduate Annika Fuller (’25) said. “He kept saying, ‘It’s a testament that I’m here even though people [and] the press say that I wasn’t supposed to be here, but you guys chose me to be here.’ Who chose you? No one chose you, who is ‘we’?”
“This is political propaganda, political theater that we’re listening to,” third-year Cat Turner emphatically stated. “Human rights aren’t a conversation to be had. You don’t teach classes about why Nazis could have been right, you teach classes about why Nazis are wrong… the truth is that these are human rights, and human rights are not up for discussion. It’s annoying that they hide this clear contempt for their fellow man behind ‘I think everybody should be able to express their opinion.’
“All of these commencement speakers for the past three years, none of their speeches have been about the graduates,” Turner continued. “It’s been about what they want to talk about. Nobody here wants to sit here and listen to a political stunt.”
The ceremony lasted a little over an hour, ending formally at 6:12 p.m. In previous years, these ceremonies were timed to end around sunset, providing graduates and their families a beautiful backdrop for graduation photos. Instead, the sun would not set for two more hours.
“Things are very hostile here,” said Celi, an attendee who asked that her full name be withheld. “It was kind of flabbergasting to hear blatant prejudice [from Dershowitz]. It just felt like a stream of consciousness, it didn’t seem like he was thinking through what he was saying. And it was sincere in a way that is very scary for me, as an immigrant and someone that has been following the New College story for a while. Every day is a little bit scarier.”
