New College of Florida
public liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida
The New College of Florida is a public liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida, United States.
Founded in 1960, it opened in 1964 and was a private college. It ran into financial difficulty in the 1970s and was merged into the University of South Florida. In 2001, it became an autonomous college within the state university system of Florida, and was designated by statute as "the residential liberal arts honors college" for the state. Division of land holdings and sharing of some facilities followed for creation of a satellite campus for the University of South Florida that would become its Sarasota-Manatee campus on much of the Seagate subdivision and some of The Uplands subdivision.
In 2023, the state government of Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis summarily replaced the New College board of trustees in an attempt to transform the honors college into a conservative institution modeled on Hillsdale College, a private, Evangelical Christian school. Nearly 40% of the faculty resigned.
The college has the smallest student enrollment in the State University System of Florida; as of 2026, it has 710 students and 94 faculty members for student-faculty ratio of roughly 8:1.
The college is a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges.
History
New College was founded in 1960 as a private college for academically talented students.
The public source identifies “New College of Florida” as public liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around College, Florida and public.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1982482. VIAF identifies the subject as 128117574. The Library of Congress control number is no00100034. Authority coordinates are 27.384, -82.560. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1964, 2001 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “New College of Florida” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.