DeSantis toady Corcoran lands big payday at New College

[Timeflyer]

https://lbus6do-cdn.newsmemory.com?selDate=20230217&goTo=C14&artid=0
(Link doesn't work--working on it)

From Nate Monroe commentary, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union

The politicized ruination of Florida public education and public colleges includes a huge financial payoff, $700,000 a year, for Richard Corcoran.

"Once a churlish budget hawk in the Florida Legislature — whose favorite targets included the state’s higher-education institutions for their alleged 'lavish' salaries — Corcoran has spent his years since brazenly trawling for a job leading a Florida university, a role he has never previously held. In fact, Corcoran, a charter school evangelist, has no education background whatsoever, save for his appointment as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education commissioner — a few sorry years during which he courted ideological zealots, got ensnared in a bid-rigging scandal, and threatened local public school officials across the state. But one go at the public trough wasn’t enough. In his post-legislative career, Corcoran morphed into a familiar Florida character: an avowed small-government conservative turned big-government bureaucrat with an unslakable desire to cash taxpayer paychecks.

His was the name that serially surfaced when presidential search committees, run by increasingly politicized college boards, got to work, and it was the name that caused much puckering of nether regions and knotting of stomachs in Florida’s higher-education ranks. Who would be left with Richard Corcoran when the music stopped?

After setting his sights on more ambitious job prospects but coming up short, the nomadic Corcoran finally found his dream job: on Monday, a recently remade New College of Florida board of trustees named Corcoran its interim president — the second such time in recent weeks the board, which is supposed to operate exclusively in the sunshine, appeared to coalesce quickly around a highly controversial decision despite an absence of any real debate.

New College is one of Florida’s smaller schools, filling a space for students in search of a more intimate experience while pursuing a liberal arts education. New College’s mission appealed to an opportunistic governor looking to make an example of a liberal arts squish, its size was suited to engineer a quick hostile takeover, and its modest footprint limited the risk of handing the keys over to a neophyte like Corcoran (his previous pursuit of the top job at Florida State University may have simply proven too high stakes for state leaders to swallow).

For his temporary leadership of New College, which has an enrollment of about 700 students, Corcoran will be paid big money: about $700,000, more than double the salary of his predecessor, whom the board ran off, plus an $84,000 yearly housing allowance, a $12,000 yearly car allowance, and the possibility of a 15 percent bonus if he meets performance benchmarks that have not yet been set. One does not need to understand the contract in context — that it’s high judged even by the standards of universities with multiple times the number of students — to see that it is a sickening amount of money, indefensible in the extreme, disgraceful to the maximum, so much so that even DeSantis’ horde of choleric online defenders were unusually quiet. What is there to say, after all? Far more than $1,000 in compensation per student.

It’s possible he could net about $1 million by the time the college hires a permanent president.

So far, DeSantis’ decimation of New College has been understood in ideological terms: that he installed a gang of conservative dilettantes on the board of trustees to strip down the small liberal arts school and turn it into a Florida satellite of Hillsdale College, a private Christian conservative school in Michigan that has become a beachhead in the war on public education."
...

[Easterncedar]

1. The corruption keeps coming

Poor New College. What it could have done with an extra few hundred thousand a year. Damn DeSantis to hell.

[d_r]

2. I can not understand

how people allow desantis to get away with the things they let him get away with.

I know that in the last few years a lot of right-wing retirees have moved to florida with their sweet blue-state pensions.
I know that the Cuban community in south florida is pretty right-wing.
I know there were already a lot of rednecks in mid to north florida. I get that north west florida is south alabama.
But this guy is an absolute nazi.

[Skittles]

3. his voters make me sick

because they either are unaware how fucking corrupt he is, which is inexcusable, or they know and APPROVE of his fascist ass - FUCK THE LOT OF THEM

[d_r]

4. Yes exactly nt