“Is it weird to say that I want to sue my college?” Tracy Stuart, a 1993 graduate of Sweet Briar College, remembers asking her lawyer.
She led an insurgency to keep Sweet Briar College open.
It was early March. The news had broken two days earlier: The Virginia women’s college, citing irreversible downward financial trends, would soon close after 114 years. The news blindsided Ms. Stuart, who found out on Facebook, sitting at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
She was shocked. Why were the alumnae hearing about the college’s existential crisis only now, after the decision to close was already made?
“Something inside me couldn’t let it go,” she says.
That is how Ms. Stuart, 44, a self-employed real-estate agent who had not given money or visited the campus in years, found herself the improbable head of a campaign to wrest the fate of her alma mater from those who wanted to pull the plug.
The announcement of Sweet Briar’s impending closure sent ripples through higher education. Many of the forces working against the college’s survival were not unique: old debts, deferred-maintenance costs, rising financial-aid needs, declining tuition revenues, the waning appeal of the rural campus. If those things could kill Sweet Briar, which college was next?
But instead of a cautionary tale, today Sweet Briar became something of rallying cry for the power of motivated alumni and the resilience of small colleges. Graduates refused to let the college go quietly — and while many people played a role in its resurrection, Ms. Stuart stands out for her efforts behind the scenes to organize the campaign.
Not long after the announcement, Ms. Stuart began hunting for a law firm willing to take the case. She eventually found Ashley L. Taylor and William H. Hurd, partners at the Richmond, Va., office of Troutman Sanders, an international law firm. On the phone, Mr. Taylor was enthusiastic about the case. He bet her a dinner that they would win. By the end of the week Ms. Stuart had hired Troutman Sanders, along with a public-relations company.
With the help of the lawyers, she then formed a nonprofit group called Saving Sweet Briar. She picked seven board members, including herself, and the group started coordinating with a Sweet Briar graduate in Idaho who already had created a fund-raising website for the cause. Eventually, Saving Sweet Briar raised more than $12 million.
“Their ability to do that — to raise the money, to be organized, to be serious and credible and bring in new leadership — convinced me that they should be given the opportunity to try to make a go in the long term,” said Mark R. Herring, the Virginia attorney general, in a September interview.
In late spring, the attorney general stepped in and brokered a deal, settling a lawsuit filed by Saving Sweet Briar, to keep the college open for at least another year under new leadership.
In blocking the closure, Ms. Stuart and her fellow alumnae turned what had been a story about the obsolescence of small, private colleges into a demonstration of what such institutions say they offer: confidence, savvy, and, perhaps above all, a network of well-connected people who can be called upon in a pinch.
Through another lens, of course, the Sweet Briar alumnae might appear sentimental and loyal to a fault. The board that tried to shutter the college was also composed almost entirely of alumnae. They said they wanted death with dignity.
In many ways, the fight to save Sweet Briar has only just begun. This fall only 241 students were on campus — fewer than half of last year’s enrollment, and fewer than a third of the number that Phillip C. Stone, the new president, thinks the college needs to survive over the long term.
In the fall, Ms. Stuart, who before the campaign had not visited the campus in nearly 20 years, returned to Sweet Briar. She lived in Virginia for a few months while she volunteered as an athletic recruiter and assistant coach for the field-hockey team.
“Before, it was like, OK, this is what’s happening here, but you’re an alum so you stay over there,” she says. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”
Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.
