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The Broward College Board of Trustees named Henry Mack, Florida’s former senior education chancellor and a close ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, as interim president of the college, a week after the abrupt departure of former president Gregory Haile.
Elsewhere in the state, New College of Florida elevated DeSantis ally Richard Corcoran from interim president to president after a six-month search that produced two other finalists.
“We want to extend our gratitude to the presidential search committee, who conducted a robust nationwide search to bring us candidates that would capably guide New College into the future,” said board chair Debra A. Jenks in a press statement. “With the selection of President Corcoran, New College is poised to continue on its path of becoming the best liberal arts institution in the nation.”
Mack, who most recently worked as an education lobbyist, fits the new profile of public college presidents in DeSantis’s Florida: a politically connected figure with a government background but little experience in higher education administration. While Mack was a finalist for the presidency of Florida Gulf Coast University in a failed search this summer, he has never led a college or university before. The two other finalists were both former longtime Broward employees, according to The Miami Herald.
Broward, located in Fort Lauderdale, is the second-largest institution in the State University System of Florida; despite its status as a college rather than a university, it has a student population of more than 56,000.
In a February interview with the London-based City Journal, Mack espoused a view of higher education aligned with the philosophy underpinning much of Florida’s Republican-led overhaul, from the state system’s acceptance of the controversial Classic Learning Test to curriculum changes at the New College of Florida.
“We are combating the infiltration of postmodernist philosophy as the guiding philosophy of public higher education here,” he said. “It has become an education system that often compels or cultivates the treacherous belief that students should be taught to either hate others based on race, or that the free society we are so fortunate to enjoy is inherently racist.”
Mack will take the helm at Broward following a month of turbulence kicked off by Haile’s resignation on Sept. 13. Haile has not publicly commented on the reasons for his departure, saying only that he would let his resignation “speak for itself.”
