Richard Corcoran, author of the book Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses (2024), spoke with Peter Schweizer on a recent episode of The Drill Down about what incoming Education Secretary Linda McMahon should tackle first.
“I think the first thing you have to do is you’re going to have to say, ‘What is the philosophy of the federal Department of Education going to be?’ And I think it needs to be something that we are going to ensure we’re going to protect and ensure that students are getting a world-class education and that is defined as such,” Corcoran told Schweizer.
Corcoran continued: “So everyone in the whole department needs to know we don’t care about the teachers union. We don’t care about the union bosses. We don’t care about the elites. What we are going to do is be about teaching truth, teaching kids how to think, not what to think, and on all levels.”
“Then you start going through every single department right now. And then you start eliminating those things. I think you have to get rid of bad philosophy first. So wherever there’s bad philosophy and ideology, you have to eradicate it … even the textbooks,” Corcoran added.
“You need to shut down these publishers. We did that in Florida. You need to rewrite the standards or have federal standards that you say, here are the acceptable ELA standards and math standards so that people are actually getting taught the things that matter and they’re being taught it in an objective, truthful manner.”
“You’ve got to get rid of the ideologies.”
Watch the clip above. About “Ivory Tower” below:
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.
