How to Bring a College Back to Life

On July 2, 2015, Phillip C. Stone loaded his minivan for the 90-minute drive from his home in Harrisonburg, Va., to Sweet Briar College. He took inventory.

He had a garment bag and a suitcase full of white shirts.

He had the trust of a Board of Directors he had not met, but which had elected him president of Sweet Briar earlier that evening, over the phone.

He had an office waiting for him on campus, but he did not know how to find it.

A staff member who had agreed to stay on as his assistant, but he did not know her.

A motel room on the edge of campus where he would be living for a few weeks. (The president’s house, an Italian-style villa, was still occupied by his predecessor.)

What else?

He had a mandate: Save Sweet Briar from the damage wrought by its previous leaders’ decision to close the 114-year-old women’s college.

Sweet Briar Picks Up the Pieces

The Virginia college was on the brink of closure two years ago. Read our previous coverage here.

• After All but Closing, Sweet Briar Will Shift Curriculum and Pricing
• Video: How Sweet Briar Plans to Keep Surviving
• Sweet Briar’s ‘No Nonsense’ New President Faces a Tall Task
• Joy Over Sweet Briar’s Reopening Is Tempered by Questions About the Road Ahead
• To Resurrect a College, Supporters Need More Than Nostalgia
• How Sweet Briar’s Board Decided to Close the College
• Scenes From the Death of a College

Mr. Stone, a semiretired lawyer and former president of Bridgewater College, also in Virginia, had read about the closure announcement in March. About a week later he’d gotten a call from a lawyer friend who knew people on the Sweet Briar faculty. The friend had asked Mr. Stone if the college could be saved. “Of course,” he’d replied.

He hadn’t expected the Sweet Briar alumnae to raise millions and win a legal campaign to keep the college open. But they had, and now they wanted Mr. Stone to put their money where his mouth was.

Sweet Briar was alive, but barely. It had been hemorrhaging faculty, staff, and students since the March announcement. Questions about accreditation, staffing, and finances hung in the air of its empty hallways and abandoned administrative offices.

There was still light in the sky when he left Harrisonburg. Mr. Stone took calls from reporters as the minivan crawled south through the Shenandoah Valley toward Sweet Briar. All the smaller questions pointed to a bigger one.

How do you bring a college back to life, four months after it was left for dead?

He had eight weeks to figure that out.

Two years ago, the news of Sweet Briar’s imminent death caught the world of higher education by surprise. The Board of Directors had reason to believe the college was done for. The new board, in light of an aggressive fund-raising push and new access to endowment money, has reason to think it can survive.

The Sweet Briar story is not over, but the president who led it back from the brink is planning to step down in May. He will leave the college, emaciated but upright, to Meredith Woo, a former dean at the University of Virginia.

The circumstances of his departure will be more conventional than those of his arrival. In summer 2015, Mr. Stone found himself in a scenario that few college presidents have faced.

Mr. Stone and a small group of lieutenants took over a campus with a depleted faculty, a bare-bones staff, a set of contracts and regulations in flux, and a student population that was scattered to the winds and would need to be retrieved piece by piece. Classes were scheduled to begin on August 27.

When he arrived, the new president was already behind schedule. The legal settlement that allowed him to take charge had not come until after the end of the school year. Now, on Independence Day weekend, the campus felt as quiet and empty as the country around it.

“I started feeling a little frantic,” he says, recalling the weeks before the settlement. “Who would I talk to? How do you get with them, how do you get them back?”

A college is more than the sum of its classrooms. It is also a confederation of auxiliary services: the dining service, the campus-security force, the bookstore, the dorms, and the phone and computer systems. In Sweet Briar’s case, those services also include a motel and conference center where Mr. Stone spent his first few weeks on the job, living out of a suitcase.

He faced practical matters like rehiring the staff, hiring a new dining service, and canceling a contract that had placed the campus-security force under the management of an out-of-state company. But Mr. Stone also needed to bolster the college’s invisible support beams: its accreditation status, its membership in its athletic conference, and its standing with banks and insurers.

Relationships were crucial. Sweet Briar needed the benefit of the doubt, and Mr. Stone was well-positioned to get it. The college’s finances may have been murky, but the new president was a known quantity in Virginia higher-education circles.

He’d led Bridgewater College, his alma mater, for 16 years. He’d served on several NCAA committees and had even chaired the accrediting agency that oversees Sweet Briar.

To hear Mr. Stone tell it, his exchanges with top officials at the agency and Sweet Briar’s athletic conference early that summer bordered on vaudevillian.

“I called them and said, ‘Put us back!’” says Mr. Stone of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference, which had excluded Sweet Briar from its planning for the fall season.

“How many teams ya got?” came the reply.

“I don’t know.”

“How many players ya got?”

“I don’t know.”

“You got any coaches?”

“No, they’ve been fired.”

“What about your athletic director?”

“She’s gone to another school.”

It was too late to rework Sweet Briar into the fall schedule, but the college was allowed to remain in the conference. “From our end, it was somewhat a leap of faith,” says Brad Bankston, the commissioner. But Mr. Bankston had known the president for 20 years and trusted him.

Mr. Stone remembers similar banter with Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, the accrediting agency.

“Don’t you think about puttin’ me on probation,” he remembers telling Ms. Wheelan. “I’ve got a lot of money.”

“How much do you have?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t counted it yet.”

“How long do you need to count it?”

“At least a couple weeks.”

“I’ll give you till September.”

Ms. Wheelan, whose good faith would be crucial to the survival of the college, said in an interview with The Chronicle that summer that Mr. Stone was “the closest thing to walking on water that I know of.”

But their friendship, according to Ms. Wheelan, was beside the point. “I would have done that for any president,” she says. She says she was confident Sweet Briar could be saved for the same reasons Mr. Stone had been. The college had not yet run afoul of the agency’s standards, and it had money to spare. The attorney general had given the new board permission to use $16 million from the restricted portion of its $84-million endowment, and the alumnae delivered an additional $5 million right before Mr. Stone took office, with another $7 million due by September.

As a result, resurrecting Sweet Briar in eight weeks did not pose a financial challenge so much as a managerial one. The task at hand was really hundreds of smaller tasks, undertaken by hundreds of disoriented employees who, unlike Ms. Wheelan, did not know the new president from Adam.

Mr. Stone was in the twilight of his career. In his retirement, he did part-time work at a law firm he started with his children, but he had made a pledge to stop working weekends. He had a house in Germany to visit, research on Abraham Lincoln to do, and a wife whose health problems occasionally required hospital care. But he also had a “provincial loyalty” to endangered Virginia institutions, and didn’t fear the stress of working under pressure. “I think I get an adrenaline pump from doing this,” he says.

Ms. Wheelan remembers having only one pressing question for the septuagenarian retiree who had accepted the job.

“I asked him if he had lost his mind,” she says.

“No, not yet,” Mr. Stone had replied. “But after I get in there, I might.”

He arrived on a campus that was still recovering from months of suspicion and infighting.

The previous winter, James F. Jones Jr., the president, quietly began planning to shutter the college. In February, Mr. Jones’s vice president for finance, Scott Shank, made the case for closure to the trustees, who then voted unanimously to end Sweet Briar. Several days later, Mr. Jones shocked the college’s nearly 600 on-campus students and 330 employees by informing them — and soon the world, including the college’s 14,000 alumnae — that they would need to find a new home.

Dawn Gatewood was then working in the alumnae and development office. It had been her job to talk to alumnae who were demanding to know what was going on. She dutifully recited her talking points on why closing the college was the responsible choice. She told them about national trends: how students were tacking away from women’s colleges and the liberal arts, and how Sweet Briar had seen evidence of this in its own foundering attempts to attract more young women to its remote campus.

Ms. Gatewood believed the administration’s rationale, but the closing announcement had shaken her like everyone else, and the indignation of the alumnae got to her. “I did, one time, on the phone, say to someone, ‘We’re losing our jobs, or losing houses, and I know you’re upset that your college is closing, but for goodness sake,’” she says. “They didn’t understand really what it was like for us at the beginning.”

After a few weeks on the front lines, she was called to serve as Mr. Jones’s assistant, replacing a staff member who had left for Liberty University. In June, when the alumnae finally took control of the college and recruited Mr. Stone to replace Mr. Jones, she agreed to stay on to help the new president.

Other employees had headed for the exits. By the time Mr. Stone arrived to campus in his minivan, the student-life and physical-plant offices were hollowed out. So was Ms. Gatewood’s old haunt, the alumnae and development office, where the staff would later find files abandoned on shelves and in desk drawers.

After Mr. Stone had officially taken office, he posted a message on the Sweet Briar website addressed to all faculty and staff, telling them, Your job is still yours if you want it.

But was it true? Some employees weren’t sure. They’d received termination notices in the mail earlier that week. Many felt misled by the previous administration, and the new one seemed to exist only in theory.

Mr. Stone tried to acknowledge the elephant in the room by shooing it out the door on his way in. He had met with Mr. Jones’s senior staff the previous week; later, he asked those who weren’t already planning to leave to resign. “We just didn’t warm up to each other,” he says.

The new president instructed everyone else to bury any lingering resentments. “Some of you feel injured and mistreated,” he wrote in his first official message. “Sometimes the words may have been sharp.” But that chapter was over, he said. “No matter what our differences, we will be kind to each other.”

Ms. Gatewood had been among the first people on campus to meet Mr. Stone in the flesh. He had made a courtesy call to Mr. Jones the previous week. “I want you to stay,” she remembers the new president saying. It was an early version of the refrain Ms. Gatewood would hear Mr. Stone repeat many times that summer.

We need you. Please come back.

She remembers Mr. Stone’s first day as both busy and improvisational, a combination that would eventually become a settled climate at Sweet Briar. Ms. Gatewood spent much of the day cycling people she didn’t know through Mr. Stone’s office.

“I didn’t know him, and he didn’t know me,” she says, “and it was pretty funny to spend an entire day of, ‘You have this one coming in,’ and he’s looking at me, hoping I can tell him something about them, and I don’t know them. It was really just making it up as you go.”

The president’s office was perhaps the only office on campus where someone would reliably answer the phone. Ms. Gatewood found herself on the receiving end of a deluge of calls. People wanted to know if the dining hall was open. (It wasn’t.) They wanted to know how to get keys to a building, or where to find an item of furniture. Small questions, all pointing to the larger one.

“We are working on details now, and we hope to have an answer shortly,” she would tell them. Then she would enter their names, numbers, and questions into a spreadsheet.

Some alumnae were not satisfied to leave phone messages; they turned up in the office, eager to meet Mr. Stone. It occurred to her that these may have been some of the same women who had given her an earful on the phone that spring, their anger now transformed into solicitous enthusiasm.

It might have been awkward for Ms. Gatewood, but her own anger, too, had been transformed as she’d watched the alumnae refocus their passion into litigation that preserved the college. They were on the same team now, eager to help their new captain.

“They all just wanted to be reassured,” says Ms. Gatewood. ‘I don’t want to interrupt him, but I just wanted to say hello’; ‘I don’t want to interrupt him, I know he’s busy, I just brought him some cookies.’”

“That went on for weeks,” she says. “Flowers were being delivered all day long.”

The closure announcement had blasted several holes in Sweet Briar’s academic program. The economics, environmental-science, government, philosophy, and classics departments were vacant.

This was a problem. Sweet Briar students had made plans to finish their degrees elsewhere. In order to bring them back, the college had to guarantee that it would continue to offer the courses those students needed to graduate.

Mr. Stone was especially worried about the engineering program, one of the key features distinguishing Sweet Briar from most other women’s colleges. Hank Yochum, the chair of the department, had already accepted a job elsewhere. In the days before he took office, Mr. Stone and other board members successfully begged Mr. Yochum to come back.

But he needed backup. He asked Mr. Stone to hire Kaelyn Leake, a former student who had just finished her doctorate in California, to join him in the engineering department. But time was short. Ms. Leake had another job offer, and the college would not have the time or staff to process a contract before she needed to make a decision.

On the day before he took over, Mr. Stone called Mr. Yochum and told him to write a copy of his own contract, replacing his name and salary with hers.

“Can we do that?” the president remembers Mr. Yochum asking.

“Yeah, I’ll be president tomorrow,” Mr. Stone replied. “Be sure to date it tomorrow.’”

It worked, but the new president needed backup, too. In late July, he summoned Pamela DeWeese, a longtime Spanish professor, to his office. Ms. DeWeese wanted to recommend a colleague as academic dean. Mr. Stone surprised the professor by offering the job to her.

The president’s direction was simple: “Make people glad they came back here.”

Ms. DeWeese had a knowledge of the Sweet Briar faculty that Mr. Stone lacked. She and other professors met regularly in the library, where they talked about job searches and future plans. “We knew who was coming back and who wasn’t coming back,” says Ms. DeWeese, “and we knew where we had holes.”

It wasn’t hard to fill them, she says, even though the college was not prepared to offer salary increases or retirement benefits. Some long-serving professors had not been keen to pull up stakes or retire early, and were grateful for the opportunity to return. Alumnae stepped in to cover courses in economics, government, and environmental science. A pair of professors came out of retirement to teach math and education courses.

In all, 68 people signed on to teach full time in the fall, counting librarians and athletic coaches, and another 34 joined as part-time faculty members. “By the end of the first week of August, we had all that paperwork done,” says the dean, “and we knew somebody was going to be there to cover whatever we needed.”

Restoring the student population, the college’s lifeblood, would prove harder.

Steven W. Nape met Mr. Stone in a Bedford, Va., courthouse on June 22, 2015, a week and a half before the president embarked in his minivan.

Mr. Nape, an enrollment consultant, was at the courthouse for a hearing related to one of the three legal cases brought against Sweet Briar to keep its leaders from closing the college. He’d planned to reiterate his belief that Sweet Briar could be saved if it made a better effort to recruit students, but his scheduled appearance was pre-empted by an announcement that Sweet Briar’s former leaders had agreed to transfer control of the college to the alumnae and Mr. Stone.

In a waiting room reserved for court witnesses, the new president asked Mr. Nape to help the college gets its students back.

The work began immediately. The attorney general announced the settlement, and soon Mr. Nape was inundated with emails from students and their parents.

He was limited in what he could tell them. He couldn’t promise they would be automatically readmitted, or that they’d get the same financial-aid packages, or that their favorite professor would be back. Mr. Nape couldn’t speak for the college, because he didn’t officially work there. Moreover, he didn’t know the answers yet. Nobody did.

He drove to Sweet Briar on July 2, the same day the new president arrived. The next morning Mr. Nape reported to work at the admissions office, and was surprised to find the building full of people.

A group of professors and alumnae had come to work the phones. “They had independently started reaching out to their students,” says Mr. Nape, “and they were forming lists of students who said they would come back if the college was open.”

The lists were handwritten at first, and eventually found their way into spreadsheets. Although Mr. Nape had no formal authority to lead the ad hoc team — all he had was a verbal agreement with the new president, he says — the enrollment specialist coordinated a group effort to persuade the students who had transferred elsewhere to cancel their plans and recommit to Sweet Briar.

Working in their favor: The admissions office’s permanent staff had stuck around. They knew where to find the names and numbers of students who had been accepted to the college during the spring admissions cycle. They knew how to reactivate applications and enter committed students into the college’s computer system so their financial aid could be processed.

Because winding down the college would have required the staff to continue reporting data and preserving student records after Sweet Briar’s scheduled closure date, the previous administration had allowed the financial-aid and registrar’s offices to remain intact.

In order to even get to the financial-aid and registration stages, the admissions staff and their deputies had to persuade incoming first-year students, most of whom had made commitments elsewhere, to take a chance on Sweet Briar.

“The main hurdle we had with those students was overcoming their anxiety over whether the college would stay open for four years,” says Mr. Nape. “Some of them said, ‘Can you put something in writing guaranteeing that you will be open?’”

He could not. All the new enrollment officer could offer, especially early on, was the reassurance that the college’s new leaders and its remaining faculty members had “every intention” of remaining in place beyond the next year. The number of inquiries the office had received made Mr. Nape confident, at least, that prospective students would not be arriving that fall to a ghost town.

Still, nothing was certain. “We were talking to students and we, in good faith, could not say, ‘Hey, you’re going to have 150 classmates,’” he says. “Because we just didn’t know that.”

As the summer drew on, the admissions office gradually assembled a first-year class. Ninety-nine women applied. The college accepted nearly all of them, and 24 said they’d come.

Education Department data suggest that the college did not compromise on admissions standards, although Sweet Briar’s internal records show it did promise more financial aid per student than it had in recent years. Reversing the enrollment trends that had endangered Sweet Briar would have to wait. So would any effort to recalibrate the college’s student-to-faculty ratio, which stood at a relatively indulgent 8 to 1 before the closure announcement and 5 to 1 after.

The students were, in some ways, the hardest to persuade. Many had already had moved through their grief over the loss of Sweet Briar and had allowed themselves to feel optimistic about a future at Roanoke or Lynchburg College, or at Hollins University.

We need you. Please come back.

Was it ethical to ask them to reconsider? On his first day in the admissions office, Mr. Nape called Joyce Smith, chief executive of the National Association of College Admissions Counselors, to ask if recruiting students back to Sweet Briar would violate the association’s admonitions against poaching.

Ms. Joyce called him back a few days later and left a voicemail message: “There’s no provision that we would enforce about recruiting students who had already committed to another school.” Doing so normally would violate the association’s principles, she explained, but “these are unique circumstances.”

Sweet Briar’s doors were open. The new administration would now have to walk students over the threshold, one by one. Mr. Nape handled a lot of the more technical questions about financial aid. Sometimes families wanted to talk to the president himself, and he obliged. Mr. Nape quickly learned to pass skeptical parents to Marcia Thom-Kaley, a longtime music professor who just had been named a trustee, and had a knack for moving them with impassioned monologues about the resilience of Sweet Briar and the women who make it.

Mr. Nape could feel the campus buzzing with expectation. “There were some people,” he says, “who by the third week of July were telling me we were going to have a waiting list.”

The admissions team knew better. There were occasionally phone calls that ended with someone shouting that they had gotten someone back, followed by a cathartic cheer from the other volunteers. But students were rarely won over in a single conversation; often it took 10 or more such dialogues over weeks, and even months.

The work alternated between tedious and emotionally grueling. “One of the disappointing things about those first few weeks was that nobody answers their phone anymore,” says Ms. Thom-Kaley. “Out of 50 phone calls I might have made in a morning, I got somebody’s answering service 45 out of 50.”

When the volunteers did get someone on the line, the dull process of dialing into the ether was replaced by the emotional crucible of counseling a young woman to come back to the college that had broken her heart. “We were very sensitive about the fact that these kids had been hurt,” says Ms. Thom-Kaley.

Jacqueline Burke, a Sweet Briar student who completed her final credits at Lynchburg College that summer before joining the admissions office in August as a counselor, spent a few days calling friends and former classmates before asking for a different assignment.

“They had made up their minds, they were comfortable in their decision,” says Ms. Burke, “so it felt just very strange trying to change their minds on something they had already committed to.”

Some students would commit to coming back, only to back out a week later. Others would rule out a return, then reconsider after hearing about friends who were going back. The number of expected enrollments didn’t rise like mercury in a thermometer; it rose and dipped along a fragile upward trajectory, like a small plane weighed down by baggage. “Some of the first students to talk to us,” says Mr. Nape, “were among the last to commit.”

More often than not, success meant ending a phone call on a hopeful note, with the expectation that there would soon be another good call, and perhaps another one after that.

It was the kind of success that would have to sustain Sweet Briar for the time being. At the time the previous board announced that the college was unsalvageable, the number of students enrolled on campus was 561. The number who would arrive in the fall would be less than half of that figure. The college’s new leaders would have to rely on ending the weirdest admissions cycle in its history on a hopeful note, with the expectation of better years to follow.

“Sometimes a victory was a student saying, ‘I can’t come back this fall, but I’ll consider it for next fall,’” says Mr. Nape. “Just remaining in the game was a victory.”

Classes started on time, at the end of August, some of them with noticeably fewer students. The dining hall opened under new management, which said it would try to incorporate recipes from a cookbook alumnae had sent over. The field hockey and soccer teams convened to practice for what would turn out to be a combined 0-17 season. It would be a rebuilding year.

On September 25, the president stood on a small stage on a windy, overcast day and prepared to give his remarks for Founders’ Day, an annual campus holiday. He took inventory.

He had a presidential medallion around his neck.

He had a captive audience of some 240 young women in Sweet Briar regalia.

He had a goal of expanding that number to 800, which he believed was necessary to make the college financially stable.

He had more work to do.

Things would not get easier. The alumnae had raised $26 million in pledged donations at that point, but Mr. Stone was still playing from behind. He later estimated that the closure threat, though never carried out, cost the college between $30 million and $40 million in lost revenue, severance payments, and legal fees. The alumnae had given a lot, and the president would spend the next two years asking for more. The college, in turn, would ask a lot of him: unending work weeks, constant road trips. At a fund raiser in Palm Beach, Fla., he would learn that his wife of more than 50 years had been rushed to the hospital unconscious. He would fly to Charlotte and then drive through the night, arriving at her bedside in Harrisonburg around dawn. She would recover.

The sky was threatening rain, but Mr. Stone had made the call to hold the Founders’ Day ceremony outside anyway. The umbrellas remained stowed as the president stepped to the lectern. He took time to appreciate the college’s rescue effort and everyone who made it possible. “That will go down in the annals of higher education as one of the most remarkable achievements of all time,” said Mr. Stone.

“It’s not enough,” he continued.

The college would need to prove that its salvation was worthy of the effort — that any small college is worth saving for any reason other than to sustain the livelihoods of its employees and validate the affection of its alums. Provincial loyalty made Mr. Stone want to help save the college, but the small details of Sweet Briar’s comeback had to point to a bigger story about the resilience of institutions that shared its traits and anxieties.

Why do some colleges live and others die? The same reason some people bury their loved ones while others witness lifesaving interventions. In Sweet Briar’s case, the illness was treatable, the family could afford to pay, the patient was willing to fight, a lot of people turned out to donate blood, and the surgeon had a steady hand.

Sweet Briar’s identity as a rural women’s college in Virginia had taken it to the brink of obsolescence.

Now it had a new identity: survivor.

“We must demonstrate,” said the president, “that private, liberal-arts, residential colleges are going to survive as part of the fabric of higher education in America.”

Dan Bauman contributed to this report.

Steve Kolowich writes about writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.

Dan Bauman is a reporter who investigates and writes about all things data in higher education. Tweet him at @danbauman77 or email him at dan.bauman@chronicle.com.