Questions Swirl as Earlham College’s President Will Leave After Just a Year

Earlham College

After only a year on the job, the president of Earlham College is stepping down amid continuing budget and enrollment pressures.

Alan C. Price’s departure, which will take effect July 31, came as a shock to many who had hoped his leadership could help stabilize the shaky finances of the liberal-arts college founded by Quakers.

Price, an Earlham alum and the first person of color to lead the institution in Richmond, Ind., became president of the college and its School of Religion on July 1, 2017. He will help with the transition to new leadership. Avis Stewart, senior adviser to the president, will serve as interim president.

Price declined to discuss the reasons for his departure. In a written statement, he said, “After careful deliberation, I have decided that this is the best way forward at this time.” He thanked “the entire community for supporting me and generating an atmosphere of positive collaboration over this last year.”

Deborah Hull, chair of Earlham’s Board of Trustees, also declined comment beyond a written statement that praised Price for recruiting a strong leadership team and engaging people in “a re-envisioning process” for helping Earlham meet its continuing challenges.

Those challenges were laid out in stark detail in a message Hull sent last month to the “Earlham College Community.” It called for the college to cut $8 million, or 16 percent, from its $50-million budget.

The college, she said, has been running substantial operating deficits since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. While working to eliminate inefficiencies, Earlham has spent where it felt necessary to try to attract the students a tuition-dependent institution needs to survive.

It’s renovated and built new buildings and stepped up marketing outreach to prospective students. Like other small colleges looking to stand out, it adopted a signature program it calls EPIC, which includes paid internships, research opportunities, and interdisciplinary study.

At the same time, Earlham has confronted the same difficulties other small liberal-arts institutions face as heightened competition for a shrinking demographic pool forces colleges to dig deeper into their coffers to offer ever more generous grants. The result, Hull wrote, has been “an unsustainable drawdown of unrestricted endowment funds, jeopardizing the long-term future of the College.”

Nationally, the average tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time students climbed to an estimated 49.9 percent in 2017-18, according to a report by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. As a result, even as colleges have increased tuition, the net revenue per student has declined.

“Our priorities are to make sure that we take on the headwinds that are out there for higher education, which are no different for us than for anyone else,” Earlham’s incoming interim president, Stewart, said in an interview on Friday. “We need to do it in a way that will keep us here in perpetuity.”

Given the divisiveness gripping the nation, this is a time when the world needs a college that, in its Quaker tradition, values “truth, respect, integrity, and peace,” Stewart said. Earlham’s reputation as a student-centered college that emphasizes strong teaching was cemented in 1996 when it was named in a popular book as one of 40 Colleges That Change Lives.

A faculty member who asked not to be identified said Price had struck him as an inspirational leader who could help the college navigate the current “rough patch.” After graduating from Earlham in 1988, Price earned a law degree from Harvard University and was appointed by President Barack Obama as associate director of management for the Peace Corps. He was also acting chief of staff for the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and served on Earlham’s Board of Trustees.

“I’m really concerned that in a climate of budget cuts that [Price’s departure] will make it harder to recruit faculty and students,” said the faculty member. Reflecting widespread speculation that Price was pressured to leave, he added, “I’m really surprised the board of trustees decided now was the time to jettison the head of the college.”

Like other faculty members interviewed, he asked not to be identified because he worried that doing so could make him vulnerable to potential layoffs. The trustees’ statement said that “some reductions in faculty programs are likely to be required” but that the mission of the college and its commitment to shared governance won’t change.

Price was a strong proponent of a plan that included increasing enrollment from its current 1,060 to 1,400 students by 2023. The challenges of meeting that goal became clear when the upcoming fall’s entering class didn’t grow as hoped and required an even larger tuition discount.

Another faculty member, who also asked not to be named, said the trustees and the president seemed to have differing views on how the college could emerge from its budget problems. “They were hoping for a miracle, and from what I can tell, his philosophy on where the college should be going wasn’t aligning with theirs,” he said.

A college spokesman declined to share the president’s resignation letter, which is not available through open-records requests because Earlham is a private college. In a private Facebook message that someone reposted on the alumni page, Price said he “would love to have served for many years but it was not to be.” He said he and his wife are in good health and plan to move to Cambridge, Mass., in August while they consider what comes next.

Earlham was facing pressure to enroll more students who could pay close to the full sticker price, while Price was known to feel strongly about the importance of continuing to further diversify the student body by attracting more first-generation and minority students, the faculty member said. Whether such tensions, which are playing out at colleges nationwide, contributed to his impending departure isn’t clear.

Earlham alumni took to social media to register their frustration over the lack of explanation for Price’s departure.

Lisa K. Crist, who graduated in 1991 and whose time at Earlham overlapped with Price’s, said she and her classmates were “stunned and saddened” by the announcement. “I do understand enrollment and budget issues, but it seems like Alan wasn’t given a chance,” she said in an interview on Sunday.

Melissa Gonzalez wrote in an email that she remembered Price, who was a year behind her, as “always super calm and poised. He never seemed stressed out, had a smile for everyone, was always extremely positive and just exuded leadership qualities.” When he was named president, “the general feeling was of pride and excitement and a bright future for EC.”

The Board of Trustees’ incoming chair, David Stump, sent an email to faculty members on Monday saying that Price had resigned after a conversation with board members that had to be kept confidential “to best serve and protect the interests of both Alan and the College.”

In a message on the college’s alumni Facebook page on Monday, Stewart, who graduated from Earlham in 1974 and is a popular, long-term leader at Earlham, sought to reassure anxious alums.

Among the factors working in the college’s favor, he wrote, was its strong endowment, which a spokesman said was $425 million in June 2017. The goal, Stewart wrote, must be to “find a way for Earlham to remain steadfast in its conviction to the liberal arts and sciences, financially sustainable, and grounded in Quaker principles of respect, integrity, simplicity, community and peace.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.