Office of the President

President Richard Corcoran

Richard Corcoran is the President of New College of Florida, where he has led one of the most significant institutional turnarounds in higher education. Since 2023, he has more than doubled enrollment to the highest level in the college’s history and delivered consecutive record incoming classes. He has secured record state investment and expanded private philanthropy. He launched intercollegiate athletics, renewed the campus and its historic buildings, and led the acquisition of the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus. The result is a growing honors college on Sarasota Bay with a clear academic identity and a long horizon.

Before New College, he served as Florida’s Commissioner of Education from 2018 to 2022. While there, he was the first education leader in the country to force the opening of schools during the covid closures. He also made the first five years of a child’s life a central priority, built on the conviction that early learning shapes every outcome that follows. Earlier, he served as Speaker of the Florida House from 2016 to 2018, where he passed the most robust ethics and transparency laws in state history.

A trial attorney by training, he built a successful law practice and later founded a law firm and a consulting firm. He brings a builder’s discipline to public institutions.

Richard grew up in Pasco County and graduated from Hudson High School. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Saint Leo University and his Juris Doctor from Regent University. While in college, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a Petty Officer Third Class.

His parents came of age during the Great Depression and served in World War II, and they instilled in him a lifelong sense of duty and public service. He and his wife, Anne, also an attorney, carry those values forward with their six children.

President Richard Corcoran and Governor Ron DeSantis.