Alumnae like to describe Sweet Briar College as a magical place. Many people say they fell in love with the women’s college the moment they saw the campus, a sprawling tract of land crowned by a cluster of Georgian Revival buildings. You see the buildings, and you know you want to belong there forever. They know this is a cliché, but they insist it’s true.
That sense of magic evaporated in early March, after the board of directors decided that Sweet Briar’s failure to increase its revenue in recent decades had driven it to the brink of financial collapse. The board had voted unanimously on February 28 to close the 700-student college at the end of the current academic year. The news left many devotees of small liberal-arts colleges to wonder if seeing a future for that model is a form of magical thinking.
Some of them were here on the imperiled college’s campus on a Monday in mid-March. It was the first day back from spring break, and administrators were holding the first of four college fairs for Sweet Briar’s soon-to-be-orphaned undergraduates. Representatives from about a dozen other small colleges sat in Upchurch Field House, answering questions about credit transfers and financial aid.
Dave Voskuil, vice president for enrollment management at Emory & Henry College, a Methodist institution located about three hours to the south, spent the morning taking students’ financial-aid information and running estimates on his computer to see if his college could match the scholarships Sweet Briar had given them. He was somewhat astounded to see how much aid the college had been doling out.
“Sweet Briar’s scholarship program, the financial-aid program is, uh, hard to — hard to figure out where they’re coming from, to be honest with you,” he said. One student had shown him a letter with nine different institutional scholarships listed.
Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz
Upchurch Field House played host to four days of college fairs for Sweet Briar’s soon-to-be-orphaned students.
As fate would have it, the fair coincided with Junior Week, when, as a rite of passage, Sweet Briar seniors instruct juniors to dress up in elaborate costumes. So as the students discussed the logistics of building a life beyond Sweet Briar, many were dressed as Disney princesses, anthropomorphic tea cups, and singing-animal sidekicks.
“People are kind of expected to go all-out,” said Charlotte von Claparède-Crola, a junior.
Ms. von Claparède-Crola had obliged. Wearing glasses, a bow tie, gray hairspray, fake wrinkles, and high-waisted pants with suspenders, and pushing a walker with balloons tied to it, she was a dead ringer for Carl Fredericksen — the character in the movie Up who, under pressure to abandon his rustic home as modern forces bear down around him, ties balloons to the chimney and floats away.
Like pretty much everyone here, Ms. von Claparède-Crola was stunned to learn that her own home was in jeopardy. Early in March, when she got an email from Sweet Briar’s president announcing a meeting that day in the auditorium, she considered skipping it. Shortly after the note arrived, one of her professors hugged her and asked how she was doing.
“I just gave her a weird look,” she recalled, “and the person she was with said: ‘They don’t know yet.’”
Soon after that, standing on the same stage where Ms. von Claparède-Crola and her classmates performed Molière’s The Learned Ladies two days earlier, James F. Jones, Jr., president of Sweet Briar, broke the bad news to the students. “I think we all just kind of stopped breathing,” said Ms. von Claparède-Crola. “And then the tears started, and they never stopped.”
In the weeks since then, Ms. von Claparède-Crola has moved through grief to planning for the future. At the fair, she peppered the officials from Hollins University, another small, women’s institution in nearby Roanoke, with questions — “secretly comparing it to Sweet Briar,” she confessed to me. They told her she could finish both her music and business majors there, as well as her certificate in arts management. She thinks she’s going to go.
Not everybody has reached that point yet, said Ms. von Claparède-Crola. “There are those who are just so completely in denial, who are saying, You can’t take my college away from me, you can’t take my home away from me, I’ve devoted everything, this is my life, I can’t leave Sweet Briar,” she said. “Secretly, down deep in our hearts, we’re all thinking that.”
Alas, no amount of balloons could lift the campus to safety. But Ms. von Claparède-Crola was not holding out for a miracle. She had allowed herself to start thinking about life after Sweet Briar. “We don’t want to lose our home,” she said. “But that’s just not what reality is.”
The day before the fair, as students and faculty members returned to campus, hundreds of women lined up along the campus driveway, dressed in the college’s green and pink and holding signs. They greeted each car with a wave of high-pitched whoops that sounded half like cheers, half like battle cries.
“I think we all just kind of stopped breathing. And then the tears started, and they never stopped.”
The alumnae had invited the news media and passed around literature, developed by a public-relations firm, on a strategy for communicating their message. They incorporated a nonprofit — Saving Sweet Briar — and vowed to reverse the board’s decision. They had elected their own board, hired lawyers, and built a website. The graduates of Sweet Briar were going all out: They would not let the college close without a fight.
Debbie Martin stood on the side of the driveway with her daughter Dawn, who graduated in 2001. The senior Ms. Martin held a bright pink sign: DISMISS the Pres. + the BoD; SUPPORT Students, Faculty, + Staff. Dawn held a green sign: We’ve only just begun ... SAVE SWEET BRIAR.
“There’s something underlying that we don’t know about,” said Debbie Martin of the board’s decision to close. “We need to know everything.” Dawn Martin chimed in: The board’s financial-emergency excuse didn’t make sense. The endowment, totaling $84 million, seemed healthy, especially considering how small the student body was. The president was surely lying. The truth would out.
Jean Bryan, Class of 1982, had appointed herself as something like a mascot for the rally. Wearing a bright pink cowboy hat and green-and-pink shawl, Ms. Bryan buzzed up and down the main campus drive in her cream-colored Plymouth convertible, offering rides down the winding road to the front gate to demonstrators who wanted to solicit honks of support from passing cars.
Ms. Bryan said she was offended that the board went ahead and voted to close the college without first using the threat of closure to spur a major fund-raising push. But she allowed that the finality of the board’s decision might have been a stronger catalyst for action than any fund-raising plea.
“You kind of want to find a scapegoat,” said Ms. Bryan. “There’s not one person you can point your fingers to, but gosh, you just don’t close an institution.”
Later that afternoon, the demonstrators climbed Monument Hill, where the college’s founders are buried, and laid flowers on their graves. Sally Mott Freeman, a member of the nonprofit board, climbed the edge of the founder’s monument and cried out that Saving Sweet Briar had just hit $3 million in donations.
The goal is $20 million. That’s how much Saving Sweet Briar’s alumnae leaders think it will take to keep the college open past the scheduled closure date, in late August, said Ms. Freeman in an interview. The long-term plan to save Sweet Briar is a different and more complicated question. But the No. 1 priority is keeping the lights on.
Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz
The grave of Indiana Fletcher Williams, who left her estate to establish Sweet Briar in memory of her daughter, Daisy, who died in 1884, at age 16, from an inherited illness.
She said the group has a legal strategy to fight the closure, but she wouldn’t say what it is — only that it might be similar to a strategy that alums of Wilson College, in Chambersburg, Pa., used to keep its board from closing that institution in 1979. (At Wilson, a women’s college that turned co-educational in 2013, a coalition of alumnae, faculty, students, and parents sued the board and won. Wilson is still open; in fact, its website now announces that “Sweet Briar Students are Welcome Here.”)
“Lord, I know more than I’m letting on,” confessed Ms. Freeman, still wrestling with the discretion required of board members. She promised to tell me more when it became strategically advantageous to do so.
That money won’t stop the bleeding, according to President Jones. By the administration’s count, it would have taken a lot more than $3 million, or even $20 million, to save Sweet Briar. More like $200 million to $250 million, he said.
The alumnae could never have saved it, he insists, even if he had kept them in the loop. A recent fund-raising feasibility survey showed that the college’s donor base did not have the money to give as much as the college needed to survive, he said.
Mr. Jones, whose wife and sister-in-law graduated from Sweet Briar, came to the institution from Trinity College, in Connecticut, which he led for 10 years. He had been president of Sweet Briar for only six months when the board voted to close the college, a fact his critics now regard with suspicion. (Some have insisted he was brought in specifically to preside over the closure, a theory he strongly denies.)
I met the president in his office the morning after the alumnae rally. Mr. Jones is a tall man who speaks in a gentle Georgia twang through perpetually half-pursed lips. His affect is informal yet erudite; he uses the word “concomitant” just as naturally as he remarks that this or that is “the damnedest thing in the world.” On his business card, the word “Interim,” in front of “President,” is blacked out with a marker.
I told him about the rumors making the rounds down on the campus drive. “I’m very Cartesian,” he told me, “so I don’t understand when people act in a completely irrational way and say things that are simply not true.”
Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz
Sweet Briar’s existential crisis, according to the president, is based on simple math. The students choosing to attend the college are no longer from “the wealthy families of the South, who sent their daughters here with their horses,” said Mr. Jones.
“This is not nuclear physics or differential equations; this is arithmetic from third-grade add-up-the-column,” he said. “Forty-three percent of these wonderful young women are on Pell Grants. You know what that means about the economic stratum that their families are in. Thirty-seven percent are first-generation, 33 percent minority.”
The president continued: “Are we doing something that’s incredibly noble? Yeah. It’s like the second GI Bill, except it’s not being funded by the federal government, and the schools in our sector are having to expend massive amounts of financial aid so that these young women can get a college education.”
As a result, Sweet Briar has had to discount its tuition — $34,935 this year, including fees — by more than 60 percent. With so little money coming in, the college has been withdrawing cash from its unrestricted endowment in order to pay its bills. (A large portion of the endowment is restricted, according to Sweet Briar officials, meaning that it cannot be used to pay operating costs.) Now, administrators say, there is no longer enough money to steer the ship in a new direction while also keeping it afloat. Better to invest what’s left in life rafts for students and the faculty.
“There’s not one person you can point your fingers to, but gosh, you just don’t close an institution.”
Mr. Jones said he was aware that some alumnae doubt this narrative. He knows they are mounting a legal challenge. But he says the administration has nothing to hide. “None of us have any idea upon what grounds a judge would allow an injunctive order to be passed down,” he said.
The president said he had been moved by the eagerness of other small, liberal-arts colleges to step in and help the students find new homes. “You ought to walk around and look at this,” he said, gesturing toward the field house, where the college fair was just beginning. “It’s the damnedest thing in the world.”
Students are not the only ones who will need to find new homes when Sweet Briar closes.
The two-story, red-brick house on the north side of Elijah Road was the centerpiece of Christopher Witcombe’s retirement plan. The art-history professor and his wife bought the house in the fall of 2013, after renting a different house on campus for more than 30 years.
The new place was expensive but worth it. The back patio offers a stunning vista of Virginia countryside, as well as partial views of several Sweet Briar landmarks — the field-hockey pitch, two lakes, and the boathouse.
Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz
Christopher Witcombe, an art-history professor at Sweet Briar, may have to sell his home back to the institution.
On the early-March day when students got the news, Mr. Witcombe and the rest of the Sweet Briar faculty also gathered in the chapel for a meeting with the president. They knew the college had hired consultants to study Sweet Briar in the context of the current higher-education marketplace and to help chart a path forward.
“Everybody went to this meeting expecting to hear the results of that,” the professor said. Instead, Mr. Jones informed them that the college would close. As Mr. Witcombe understood it, professors and staff who owned homes on campus property would have to sell their houses back to Sweet Briar.
The college is obliged to pay “fair market value” to people who move out of homes built on its land, said Mr. Witcombe. However, because of the current financial state of the college, he was not taking anything for granted. A similar ambiguity was hanging over the question of severance. “As far as I’m aware, nothing has been made clear to us at all,” he said. “We’re still very much in a state of limbo.”
This is especially true of his younger colleagues. At Sweet Briar, as at many small, liberal-arts colleges, faculty members focus most of their energy on teaching rather than on research and publishing. This could hurt them as they face the cold reality of the academic job market, said Mr. Witcombe.
Sweet Briar’s decision to close has raised an awkward question. Are small, remote colleges — especially the ones with relatively small endowments — living in a dream world? Many people here described Sweet Briar as a magical place, but magic isn’t real. Financial obligations are.
Then again, many alumnae claim the college can still exist in the real world, under the proper management.
Mr. Witcombe seemed caught in the middle. He said he was still willing to give Mr. Jones and his fellow administrators the benefit of the doubt. Yet he could not help but feel betrayed.
The professor suggested that Sweet Briar’s impending closure was not a matter of a benevolent fairy tale coming to an end, but of a sinister one coming true: “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The faculty at Sweet Briar, as elsewhere, had been hearing about money troubles for decades, he said. Eventually all that doomsaying became just background noise.
Even now, perhaps more than ever, it was hard to hear. Near the end of our interview, the tears that had welled up in Mr. Witcombe’s eyes disappeared. His tone grew firm.
“This does not need to happen,” he said. “We could survive this.”
Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz