Gov. Ron DeSantis is doubling down on his plans to transfer USF's Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College.
DeSantis said at an event in Seminole Wednesday the chairs of the board of trustees at both schools are onboard with the transfer.
In December, USF board chair Will Weatherford gave no indication that USF would fight it, saying “it's not something we dictate or control, and we won't be necessarily opining on every day as it as it ebbs and flows over the coming weeks and months.”
"I think USF, the sky's the limit," DeSantis said Wednesday. "I think they really, really got great momentum.
"But like that momentum is really in the Tampa Bay, right? It's Tampa. And that's what I think that they want to focus on. So I think you're going to see that there's going to be pretty strong agreement on that."
The governor's proposed state budget would force USF to hand over its buildings to New College by the summer of 2026. About 2,000 students and 300 faculty and staff are based at USF Sarasota-Manatee.
The deal would give New College 32 acres of land, new dormitories, classrooms, office space, and a STEM lab USFSM just broke ground on in November.
New College is a public liberal arts university headed by President Richard Corcoran. It's been a major part of DeSantis' effort to overhaul higher ed and eliminate "woke" teaching on Florida campuses.
DeSantis said the transfer jibes with his ongoing plans to transform the school into a more conservative-leaning place of higher education.
"When you get down into the Sarasota area, there's just an undercurrent of people that just didn't want New College to change," he said. "And so anything that we do to try to make it continue to make it better, they're just going to say it's bad because, you know, New College."
"And it was a really for the taxpayers to be funding something that was basically like a Marxist commune," the governor continued. "They didn't have grades, they had very low enrollment, and all this stuff. I'm a fiduciary. It's like, we've got to figure out, how are these institutions serving the people of Florida? And I couldn't justify it. And so it's very valuable real estate. Some people wanted to close it down and and I was like, Okay, well, let's make it something meaningful. So we changed the leadership, new board. We reoriented the mission to classical liberal arts."
READ MORE: New College far outspends other Florida universities, a DOGE report shows
However, Florida's Department of Government Efficiency presented a report in November that found it costs $494,715 to produce a degree at New College, by far the highest among the state's 12 public universities. Florida Polytechnic University came in second at $154,213 per degree, while a degree at USF cost $72,252.
In addition, New College had the highest operating expenses per student at $83,207.
DeSantis said Thursday USF would not lose out on any more state funding if the deal goes through. In exchange, New College would take on about $53 million of debt from USF.
"USF is not going to lose money. They're still going to get money like they're getting now. They can just apply that money in Tampa, rather than apply it there," he said.
