Richard Corcoran, the president of New College of Florida, was awarded a $200,000 bonus by the school's trustees for the third consecutive year.
The bonus comes despite scrutiny about the college's spending, which nearly doubled from about $53 million in 2021 to about $93 million in 2025.
Corcoran came onboard after Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to remake the college into a conservative institution in 2023 and appointed a slate of new trustees.
After a meeting that lasted less than 40 minutes on Thursday, the New College Board of Trustees agreed on the bonus for the former state House speaker.
"At the committee level, we did walk through those on a line by line basis, and talk them through and evaluate them. I won't reiterate them," board Vice Chair Ron Christaldi said of the performance metrics for Corcoran.
"The committee found that each of the eight criteria were well met by the president's performance," he said.
The bonus is a supplement to Corcoran's annual base salary of nearly $700,000, plus housing allocation and other perks.
Corcoran's salary is on par with many other presidents in the state university system, though he leads a far smaller school.
A recent Florida DOGE report also found New College was the least efficient in the system, with the highest cost to produce a degree and highest operating costs per student, in part because the college has a large number of administrators compared with students.
DeSantis has dismissed those findings.
"People say, 'Oh, they're spending so much money per student and all this.' I said, 'Well, no, that's because we're putting in capital improvements. These are not going to be expenses that are fixed going forward,'" DeSantis said in mid-January.
DeSantis proposed in this year's budget to hand New College the 32-acre University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus, along with dorms that New College currently rents for its students and $53 million in debt that USF incurred building those rooms in 2024.
"Obviously, one of the big items that's talked about is the USF merger. We'll see where that ends up, but that would be game changer for the university, and we're very hopeful for that," Corcoran said Thursday.
"Just keeping our fingers crossed for another great session, and I think that'll really help us to continue. We won't have to slow down our growth at all."
Critics have said the USF acquisition would add too much debt to New College, and eventually force both campuses to close.
Corcoran said Thursday that retention of students is up, and that a baseball field could be built soon on the east campus.
He did not mention that the Federal Aviation Administration has said construction cannot start until a new lease is negotiated and brought up to date between the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport and New College. Part of the outfield would spill over onto land that belongs to the airport.
The field would be used by the school's baseball team, which is a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.
"The baseball field is cleared. Hopefully that'll be done by sometime early, early summer, and they'll be able to play on that next year," Corcoran said.
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