Florida’s New College of Florida is set to acquire the Sarasota-Manatee campus of the University of South Florida, expanding the governor-backed institution’s physical footprint and student capacity as part of Ron DeSantis’s conservative higher-education agenda. New College is controlled by a board of trustees hand-picked by DeSantis and will grow after the transaction closes next month. Critics including a leading Florida Democrat described the deal as a grift, pointing to the political strategy behind the takeover and the mismatch between New College’s 900-student baseline and the 2,000-student campus being added. The acquisition includes a new six-story residential hall and a $44 million student center, suggesting a substantial shift in capacity and recruitment scale. For Florida colleges, the transaction further underscores how governance and board control—rather than academic programming alone—are shaping institutional trajectories amid heightened ideological scrutiny.