Sanders Campaign Shines Spotlight on a Troubled College Presidency

When she took the helm of Burlington College, in 2004, Jane O’Meara Sanders inherited one of higher education’s tiniest and most eclectic enclaves, which in those days was housed in a renovated grocery store. The college, in Vermont, had fewer than 200 students and was known for a funky curricular mix that included filmmaking and transpersonal psychology.

But in Ms. Sanders’s grand vision, Burlington was expected to double its enrollment, luring students with a gorgeously expanded campus that overlooked Lake Champlain.

That’s not at all what happened.

Instead, Ms. Sanders and Burlington’s board had a falling out, parting ways in 2011. Her expansion plans imploded, and the college descended into a morass of infighting, protest, turnover, and near financial collapse.

With her days as a college administrator behind her, Ms. Sanders is now known for the supporting role she plays in the Democratic presidential campaign of her husband, Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont. But Ms. Sanders’s heightened national profile has brought renewed attention to her days at Burlington, thrusting the college’s fiscal misfortunes, leadership drama, and lackluster student outcomes into a harsh spotlight.

There is considerable disagreement in Burlington about the degree to which Ms. Sanders bears personal responsibility for the mess that followed her resignation, and the most cutting of her critics has a political ax to grind. But Ms. Sanders’s seven-year tenure at Burlington provides a compelling illustration of the difficult choices that confront small, tuition-driven colleges, many of which are struggling to survive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Early in Ms. Sanders’s presidency, the challenges facing Burlington were apparent to anyone who bothered to look out of the old grocery store’s windows. Christine A. Plunkett, who served under Ms. Sanders as the college’s vice president for administration and finance, recalls how prospective students would flee in the opposite direction once they got a glimpse of the campus.

“They would pull their cars into the parking lot for an interview and turn around and drive off,” Ms. Plunkett says.

Burlington had a thin market share to begin with, and it seemed sure to further deteriorate. There was a time, Ms. Plunkett says, when Burlington’s rough-around-the-edges facilities only accentuated its charm as the town’s “hippie school.” But a new generation of students wasn’t buying it.

“Things were starting to change nationally, and we had to be ready for that, and we had a short runway,” Ms. Plunkett says.

And then, one morning in 2010, everything changed. An article in the Burlington Free Press broke the news that the city’s Roman Catholic diocese planned to sell off 32 acres of pristine property, complete with an old orphanage building and a waterfront view.

“Within 24 hours,” Ms. Plunkett says, “Jane and I walked the avenue three blocks up, knocked on the door, and said, ‘We want to buy this.’”

In May 2010, when Burlington announced its plans for the $10-million purchase, Ms. Sanders described the deal as “transformative for the college.”

“The opportunities,” she said, “are limitless.”

Sixteen months later, Ms. Sanders was forced out of the presidency.

Following yet another tumultuous presidency, Burlington’s board, in 2014, decided that the cash-strapped college would have to sell off most of the land it had acquired from the diocese.

The college’s financial problems drew the attention of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Burlington’s accreditor, which placed the college on two-year probation, in 2014.

Ms. Sanders declined an interview request, but said in an email that she had left Burlington in good financial health.

“The purchase of the new campus was both a necessity — as we could not grow at all in the former space — and an opportunity, not the source of the current problems,” Ms. Sanders wrote. “The board that approved the purchase of the property and I shared a vision for the future and a clear plan as to how to get there. Due to unexpected turnover on the board, there was a change in leadership and direction.”

The former president went on to say that the college, having cycled through several leaders since her departure, had not carried out her “clearly articulated development plan.” The recent appointment of an interim president, Burlington’s fourth leader in as many years, might change things, Ms. Sanders suggested.

“My hope is that the college will now realize some of what was envisioned,” she said.

The college’s fiscal problems accelerated after Ms. Sanders’s resignation, and those challenges proved an albatross for her successor, Ms. Plunkett, whose presidency came to a bizarre end. In an exchange that was captured on video, student protesters surrounded Ms. Plunkett’s vehicle in a parking lot and demanded that she step down.

Exasperated, Ms. Plunkett said, “OK. I resign. Happy?”

The video seemed a potent distillation of a college under extreme pressure and very much at war with itself.

Fund Raising Questioned

The reasons for Ms. Sanders’s resignation remain opaque.

Adam B. Dantzscher, who was Burlington’s board chairman at the time, says he is “contractually” forbidden to discuss the details. He acknowledges, however, that the board had received a complaint about the president that required action under its bylaws.

Regardless of the reasons, Ms. Sanders’s unceremonious departure turned board members against one another and repelled some of the very donors who were expected to help finance the college’s land acquisition, Mr. Dantzscher says.

“Sides were drawn. Bad blood. Emotions flying,” he recalls. “It was a very difficult period at the college.”

The president had allies both on the board and across the campus, which made her resignation particularly contentious. Carmen M. George, whom Ms. Sanders hired as the college’s development coordinator, says the president “invigorated the school” with a clear vision and a sophisticated approach to promoting the college.

Before Ms. Sanders’s tenure, Ms. George says, the college had no cohesive branding strategy and third-rate marketing materials.

“The website was a train wreck,” she says. “I remember looking at the catalog and just being befuddled at how they could have sent that out.”

But several former college officials, including Ms. George, were less impressed with the president’s fund-raising skills. Ms. Sanders, who had previously served as interim president of Goddard College, also in Vermont, was hired with the expectation that her husband’s political connections and ties to donors would be a windfall for Burlington.

“We always thought she’d meet important people, and they’d become donors, but that didn’t seem to happen,” says Robin N. Lloyd, a former Burlington trustee. “People felt the opposite was happening, that they were possibly donors for Bernie, and therefore she didn’t want to try to woo them for Burlington College.”

To secure the money required for the purchase of the diocese property, Burlington had to convince lenders that the college had plenty of donors waiting in the wings. In legal papers filed by the college, Burlington asserted that $2.6 million in pledges had been “confirmed” for the next several years.

But much of the money never arrived.

It is entirely possible that those gifts, cultivated by Ms. Sanders, simply fell through once she resigned. But a Republican official in Vermont has suggested that Ms. Sanders fraudulently misled lenders about gifts pledged to the college and left the diocese holding the bag when the money didn’t materialize.

“There has been no accountability,” says Brady C. Toensing, vice chairman of the state’s Republican Party.

Last month Mr. Toensing wrote a letter to the United States attorney for the district of Vermont and the acting inspector general of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, asking for “an investigation into what appears to be federal loan fraud” by the college under Ms. Sanders’s leadership. He argued that the diocese, which had provided a loan to Burlington, had lost a minimum of $996,000 on the deal and hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional interest. Those figures are derived from the diocese’s own financial statements.

In a statement provided to The Chronicle, the diocese said it was “satisfied with the outcome” of the deal.

Poor Student Outcomes

Senator Sanders has made higher education a major plank of his presidential campaign, proposing that public colleges should be free. The candidate’s focus on the issue, however, has brought greater attention to tuition costs at Burlington and the college’s record of educating students.

It’s a tough record to defend.

Less than a quarter of Burlington’s students, who pay an average annual cost of nearly $26,000, graduate in six years, federal data show. Indeed, three-quarters of them never come back after their first year of college.

Carol Moore, Burlington’s interim president, acknowledges that the college needs to do a better job. But she describes Burlington’s poor student outcomes, and other problems, as products of the leadership instability that began with Ms. Sanders’s resignation.

“We’re not happy with our graduation rate, and I think that will change in the next couple of years,” Ms. Moore says. “Clearly the college has gone through quite a bit of tumult, and that plays out in retention and graduation.”

Financial concerns have dominated Ms. Moore’s first year on the job. Selling most of the diocese property, she says, reduced Burlington’s debt from $11 million to about $2 million.

To entice students, Burlington plans to reduce tuition by $4,000, bringing the cost down to about $21,500. In three to five years, Ms. Moore says, the college expects to bring enrollment up to 300 students.

And so, like Ms. Sanders before her, Ms. Moore is promising to double the size of Burlington’s minuscule student body.

The interim president is candid about the hard road ahead. She says she understands the skeptics, but she has answers for every tough question. Every question, that is, except one: Is all of this Jane Sanders’s fault?

“No comment.”

Correction (2/15/2016, 9:10 a.m.): This article originally mischaracterized the recipients of Brady Toensing’s letter. He sent it to the U.S. attorney for the district of Vermont, not the Vermont district attorney, and to the acting inspector general of the FDIC, not the state’s acting inspector general. Both are federal, not state, officers with jurisdiction over bank fraud. The article has been updated to reflect that correction.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.