Why Support the NCA?
Guest post by NCA Board Member Steve Jacobson
Dear Novocollegians,
With the academic year under way at New College, the Novo Collegian Alliance (NCA,) is looking at the projects we’re working on for the coming year and beyond. Some of these projects will cost real money, which will be supporting students, alums, and other members of the community. Here are some of the major projects for which we need your support:
Alt-Graduation, giving the graduates a ceremony for them, in the New College tradition, rather than the public display of political malfeasance that the administration will put on. Students will choose their speaker at Alt-Grad, like Novos have done for decades. Richard Corcoran and friends will choose the speaker for the official graduation. We’ve seen how they did the past two years, and we did a whole lot better. With your help, we can give the grads a great graduation once again.
Student Grants, is a program started by the NCAA, before the Foundation absorbed the NCAA. For the coming grants cycle, the Foundation is woefully short on funds, so the grants will provide roughly a quarter of what should be available. It’s not clear that a second grant cycle will be possible in the Spring, as the Foundation has almost nothing to provide. What NCA proposes is to provide funds directly to the students whose proposals are funded. If you donate to the NCA Student Grants Fund, your money will not go through the Foundation or the college. It will go directly to the students, giving the Foundation no options for misappropration of your money. You will not be funding Corcoran’s salary, nor the athletic department, nor the Freedom Institute, nor the Socratic Stage events. You will be funding student research projects and presentations of their research at professional conferences, just as we always did it, before THEY came to our campus. In the world we’d like to see, we would have $50,000 per grant cycle. The Foundation has about $11,000, which needs to last all year. NCA has committed another $6000 for this cycle, but, clearly, with your help, we can do much better than that, and we can have money for the Spring Grant cycle as well as the Fall. Student research has been one of the hallmarks of success for New College, with our students presenting at professional conferences at rates far in excess of almost any other college.
Some of you have seen, maybe even purchased, a hardcover catalog of art, produced by graduating Fine Arts AOCs. These catalogs were created by the students themselves, working with a couple alums who provided production help. The Foundation was supposed to be reimbursing the costs, using a restricted fund which existed for the sole purpose of supporting this project, and which was funded entirely by alums and other donors. No Foundation money was used to support the catalogs. For the coming year, NCA proposes to support the Fine Arts catalog, and we hope that you will want to support it as well. They’ll need something in the neighborhood of $10,000 to do this properly, so we urge you to go to contribute.
Finally, as some of you are aware, NCA has helped students with critical needs, including help with legal issues when the administration came to get them for daring to oppose the will of the new administration. This is an ongoing mission, which you can support by clicking on the donate button!
We look forward to your continuing support for NCA, as we do our best to maintain the spirit of New College, and to support some of the programs which made it the unique, life-changing, educational institution so many of us loved and brutally critiqued. We all knew of its flaws, weaknesses, and failures, but we also knew that these flaws were fixable, and many of us had good ideas on how to implement those fixes. When the new administration came in, they set out to correct an entirely different set of conditions, most of which were features, not bugs, and they did nothing to correct the actual problems. NCA will continue to work on fixing the real problems, and, with some help from alums, other supporters, and, perhaps, Cthulhu, we hope that someday soon, the State of Florida will come to its senses and stop trying to destroy everything we held dear, so that we can go about the business of making New College a better version of the school we attended, where motivated students can pursue their educational interests with as few limits as possible.
Please help us in this mission!
