The New College Gambit
Kathryn Joyce | 09 December 2024 | In These Times
On the evening of May 17, under a billowing white tent overlooking the sunset on Sarasota Bay, a titan of business, a self-made man, stood before a sea of ungrateful punks, trying to impart some wisdom.
Joe Ricketts, founder of the online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, was talking about his boyhood paper route, the lean years while he built his first company and the importance of hard work when the graduating class of the New College of Florida — the small, unorthodox honors college of the state’s public university system — drowned him out with raucous chants of “Free Palestine…”