A firsthand account of how Richard Corcoran, former education commissioner of Florida, successfully took on powerful progressive interest groups, broke their monopoly, and paved the way for higher education reform across America. Covid alerted the nation to the reality that K-12 schools–private and public alike–were infested with ideologues bent on indoctrinating children. Then, three years after the beginning of the pandemic, the shocking response to Hamas’s genocidal assault on Israel made Americans aware that the same tumor had wholly sickened our country’s colleges and universities. Now, conservatives–and increasingly, moderates and old-school liberals–want to know exactly how the radical left captured higher education. Florida has been the vanguard in the war to restore sanity to higher education. And Richard Corcoran has been one of its commanding generals–and racking up wins. When Corcoran was Florida’s education commissioner, he was the point person for reopening schools and banning mask mandates. He triumphed. Then, he was given a herculean task: remaking a college overrun by radicalism and cancel culture. In 2023, he moved into the president’s office in Sarasota, took on a campus mob, and challenged a media firestorm. Just a year later, Corcoran achieved the seemingly impossible. He turned around New College of Florida. Now, free speech is protected. Violence and anti-Semitism are abolished. DEI bureaucracy is eliminated. And, already, enrollment records are being broken. Storming the Ivory Tower is the story of how Corcoran is winning the fight for freedom in hostile territory, and how others can join the battle.
