A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme

The president of Marlboro College says the small liberal-arts institution in rural Vermont is entering an alliance with Boston’s Emerson College. It’s been described elsewhere as a merger, and as a gift from Marlboro to Emerson. But for many alumni and students who are sad to see Marlboro subsumed, “closure” is the most accurate word: Come next fall, the institution they love will no longer exist.

The latest in a line of New England colleges to confront its own survival — and the realities of demographic declines, rising costs, and plummeting enrollment — Marlboro announced this month that it would pass its $30-million endowment and $10 million in real estate to Emerson, which will take on the smaller institution’s tenured and tenure-track faculty members, as well as any of Marlboro’s 150 students who opt to move to Boston. Emerson will rename its interdisciplinary-studies institute for Marlboro.

For Marlboro students and alumni, the news has brought a range of emotions to the fore. While some mourn their college’s impending closure, others have taken to alumni Facebook groups with a resolute focus on saving it — proposing a range of unconventional means.

‘A Place That Appealed to Mavericks’

Marlboro has, from its founding in 1946, enjoyed a reputation as a quintessentially bucolic campus where students create their own programs of study and write a master’s-style thesis before graduating. Marlboro enrolls about seven students per tenured or tenure-track faculty member, ranking it second, to Yale, in The Chronicle’s 2019 Almanac among four-year private nonprofit institutions with the lowest number of students per tenured or tenure-track professor. The college’s governance is shared, and students, faculty, and community members gather for a weekly town meeting to vote on issues.

“It was always a place that appealed to mavericks and kind of iconoclastic kids,” said Paul J. LeBlanc, who served as Marlboro’s president from 1996 to 2003 and is now president of Southern New Hampshire University. “It was never going to be mainstream, neither in the academic programs it offered nor in the people it generally attracted.” (The Marlboro Music Festival, a summer classical-music retreat, is held on the college’s campus but is not affiliated with Marlboro College.)

Kevin F.F. Quigley, Marlboro’s president, said discussions of the college’s future had been in progress for two years, more formally so in the past year, when the college hired EY Parthenon, a business-strategy consultancy.

“I’ve been very candid over the last two years or so about the college’s circumstances and that our trajectory around enrollment and finances was not sustainable,” Quigley said. Marlboro, as he saw it, had three options: close, forge a partnership, or try to remedy the situation independently.

In pursuit of the latter option, the college began a “Reimagining Marlboro” campaign last year, investing in marketing, student support, more admissions staff members, and a new curriculum. “All of those efforts, while successful in their own regard, didn’t address our existential circumstances,” Quigley said. “We needed more students who could pay more.”

Of an initial pool of 300 potential partner institutions, 10 signed nondisclosure agreements to review Marlboro’s financial data. A task force narrowed the options from four to two before landing on the University of Bridgeport, the only partnership that would have allowed Marlboro to maintain its rural campus.

Marlboro signed a letter of intent with Bridgeport, a STEM- and vocationally oriented institution that enrolls 5,000 students, in late July. Negotiations, however, broke off in September.

During that process, Quigley also carried on conversations with M. Lee Pelton, president of Emerson College. Pelton said Quigley asked him if Emerson would be interested in a merger. He didn’t see the fit until Quigley proposed scrapping the idea of maintaining a presence on the Vermont campus. “At that point, the discussions and, eventually, negotiations moved kind of fast and furious with Emerson,” Quigley said.

Those negotiations, Quigley said, have been intentionally kept under wraps.

“Since the collapse of the talks with Bridgeport in the middle of September, my community has really been on pins and needles, waiting for the shoe to drop,” Quigley said. “We changed how we talked about it on campus and who was involved in the process, so we had a tighter circle of people involved. There were really no updates to the community.”

Boards of Trustees at Emerson and Marlboro will need to sign off on the final arrangements, which would see Marlboro close at the end of this academic year. Students who choose to transfer to Emerson can do so for the fall of 2020 and will be offered the same tuition rate they paid at Marlboro, unless they switch majors.

If the arrangement is approved, the 24 tenured and tenure-track faculty members Marlboro employs will be offered positions at Emerson, while all other Marlboro staff members will lose their jobs.

The partnership has been shrouded in confusion — Emerson’s student newspaper, The Berkeley Beacon, published an explanation of common misconceptions about the deal — down to the words used to describe it.

Pelton said he has called the arrangement an “alliance” and not a “merger” or “gift” to Emerson. In a video announcing the news, he compared the $40 million that Emerson will receive from Marlboro — the $30-million endowment and $10 million in real estate — to a $40-million individual gift earmarked for an existing program.

“That was an analogy. I’ve never said it was a gift because it’s not a gift. It’s a transfer of assets,” Pelton said.

Quigley agrees. “I know it’s perceived as a giveaway or a give-up, and I say emphatically, it’s neither,” he said. “It’s not a giveaway. We get something very significant in return, and far from giving up. This is the only path toward continuance for Marlboro.”

‘A Day of Celebration’

David Williamson saw another path toward continuance. A 1998 graduate of Marlboro, he didn’t want to see his alma mater die, so he offered to buy it.

After the Emerson alliance was announced, Williamson began crafting a plan with a friend and fellow alumnus who offered financial support to reboot Marlboro. They envisioned the institution as being run by alumni, many of whom have advanced degrees and work in academe. Williamson figured it would cost $5 million to buy Marlboro, based on a similar agreement signed by the now-closed Southern Vermont College with a nearby boarding school.

He crunched the numbers in his head: If his friend didn’t come through with the money, Williamson reckoned he could liquidate his stock portfolio, sell his house, get a loan, and move into the president’s house on Marlboro’s campus.

At 11:20 on Saturday night, three days after the partnership was announced, Williamson hit “send” on an email offer to Quigley to buy the college’s campus and intellectual property.

Then he stood up from his dining-room table and poured himself a glass of whiskey.

Williamson had a long car ride the next day. He said he spent all of it — 10 hours — fielding calls from fellow alumni who’d learned of his offer on a Facebook group. They assured him they were prepared to quit their jobs and accept lower salaries to rebuild their alma mater. “If they take this deal,” Williamson thought, “we can actually do it.”

But his offer was rejected that evening — Quigley cited a binding exclusivity agreement with Emerson — and the reality began to sink in.

T. Hunter Wilson, who taught poetry and writing at Marlboro for 47 years, has been “ricocheting between sorrow and fury — fury because I don’t think this really had to happen. I think things have been let go rather far before we find out how dire the circumstance is.”

“Marlboro has been sort of on the cusp of catastrophe almost from the moment it opened its doors,” Wilson said. “There were a few times when we learned later that the president wasn’t sure our paychecks would clear.” Once, he said, the faculty took a permanent 5-percent pay cut so the college could afford to keep a faculty position.

This time, Wilson said, is different. “All of this has taken place through secret negotiations. Nobody knew what was happening,” he said. “I think that it’s quite possible to talk in general terms about what needs to be done without exposing the particulars of your negotiating partners. That allows for a great deal more input than the community has had here. I think there’s considerable dissatisfaction with not only the result, but the process.”

Others are taking the news in stride. Hunter Corbett, a junior at Marlboro, has decided she’ll move to Boston. “I’m pretty optimistic about the merger. We recognize that it’s the best of a bad situation,” Corbett said. She said the announcement didn’t come as a surprise, but learning the Marlboro campus would be shuttered was emotional.

“You could hear the anger. You could hear the whispers just all across the campus,” Corbett said. At the meeting when the decision was announced, she sat next to a maintenance-department worker as he was told he would soon be out of a job.

Yet Corbett sees the announcement as fostering a sense of unity.

“That day wasn’t a day of grief to me. It was a day of celebration for our community. It was the most lively we’d ever seen campus,” Corbett said. Students baked bread together, drew with chalk on the campus sidewalks, and made s’mores in a fireplace as they talked about the transition.

Corbett is determined to uphold that sentiment. Aside from advocating for severance packages for Marlboro staff members who will be left unemployed when the campus closes, she’s helping plan a trip for Marlboro students to Boston, where they’ll tour the Emerson campus, see a student-produced play, and meet Marlboro alumni living in the area. Plus, she added, they’ll scope out spots to eat, study, and hang out in Boston.

‘It’s Pretty Crazy Out There on These Facebook Pages’

Yet Corbett also senses a dissonance in that community, particularly when it comes to Marlboro alumni. “Everyone on campus that I’ve heard has said that they understand the reason behind the merger,” she said. “The alumni are a different story.”

Three primary Facebook groups are dedicated to discussing Marlboro’s fate — the university-sanctioned Marlboro College Alumni Association; the longstanding Marlboro College Alumni; and Save Marlboro College! Each is populated by Marlboro boosters with lots of emotions — and lots of opinions — related to the impending closure of their college.

Should Marlboro reconstitute itself as an alumni-run institution, as Williamson proposed? Should alumni stage organized protests or a legal challenge to the merger? Call for Quigley and other administrators to resign? Orchestrate a donation campaign to keep the doors open, or crowdfund expenses for current students who decide to relocate to Boston? All of those ideas have been floated, and have met with varying degrees of approval.

In a survey conducted by the Marlboro College Alumni Association, a third of respondents wanted to preserve Marlboro as an academic institution, on its current campus, while 45 percent favored “working to retain the campus for cultural purposes.”

Some current students and alumni worry that too much public outcry will jeopardize the deal with Emerson and, in the process, students’ diplomas and faculty members’ jobs. Others fear not speaking up condemns the college to an unnecessarily harsh fate of closure.

“I think there’s a lot of angst and anxiety from people wanting to do something, and just throwing things out there and all kinds of different ideas coming up,” Vincent Lyon-Callo, the father of a Marlboro freshman and a participant in the Facebook discussions, said.

Cate Marvin, a 1993 Marlboro alumna who is now a professor of creative writing at the College of Staten Island, is part of the leadership of the newly constituted Marlboro College Alumni Association and helps run that organization’s Facebook group.

“We want a say in what happens,” Marvin said, “but we also want to create a space in which people can process what’s happened.”

An Alumni Collective

In 2014, Marvin joined three former classmates to create an award in the name of a fellow student who passed away in that year. Their effort inspired the creation of a Facebook group for alumni to keep in touch, but the news of the proposed merger with the University of Bridgeport — which was soon dashed — spurred further action, said Daniel Doolittle, who worked with Marvin on the memorial award.

“That series of events made us realize that the alumni had been a voice that wasn’t very active and wasn’t solicited by the administration,” Doolittle, a 1995 Marlboro graduate who now works as a geologist, said. “The school has always been functioning under some pressure or economic duress based on falling enrollments and increasing costs. So it’s something that we could understand, but it still caught us all very much by surprise.”

Soon after the Bridgeport-merger talks ended, Doolittle, Marvin, and others pitched a revamped alumni association to Quigley and college officials, who were enthusiastic. A committee of alumni trustees was convened to consider the idea, and Doolittle and another alum presented at a trustee meeting at the beginning of November. He left with the understanding that the newly formed alumni association would have several months to organize itself to provide feedback on potential future mergers.

The first Marlboro College Alumni Association email update went out to members on November 4. The next day, Doolittle, Marvin, and other members of the new interim alumni council had a phone conference with trustees. The following morning, they were told, a new merger would be announced. The seeming about-face left them feeling “a little whipsawed,” Doolittle said.

Doolittle and Marvin said they had been told the Emerson deal had come up only in the past few weeks. Quigley, Marvin said, had “negotiated this thing pretty much on his own. There’s a lot of people operating in the dark, trying to understand what’s going on, because of the lack of communication.”

Those facts are complicated, Marvin said, and so are her feelings.

“There’s this sort of friction between wanting to hold on to something that one cherishes and also understanding that there are greater needs within the community, and that we as alumni might not even recognize what those are,” Marvin said. “We’re looking toward the past. We’re sort of understanding Marlboro through a lens that is probably tempered somewhat with nostalgia.”

Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.