In the coming months, the new governing board of Sweet Briar College can expect a crash course in postrevolutionary affairs.
On Thursday, July 2, a peaceful transfer of power is expected at the financially struggling women’s college north of Lynchburg, Va. A phalanx of activists, who managed to help keep the college open with a shrewd mix of litigation and social-media organizing, will be installed as members of Sweet Briar’s newly constituted Board of Directors.
In a wholesale leadership transition, the board will be purged of its previous members, who had decided in March to close Sweet Briar. James F. Jones Jr., the college’s president, will also step aside, making way for the appointment of Phillip C. Stone, a former president of Bridgewater College, in Virginia.
Several of the new board members were affiliated with Saving Sweet Briar Inc., a nonprofit group that helped to stave off the college’s closure with legal challenges and a broad-based fund-raising effort. The college’s new directors must now trade the passionate work of protest for the more sober task of governing, and it is a transition they say they welcome.
“There were very smart, purposeful people involved in this from the beginning, thinking about how to run the college,” said Teresa Pike Tomlinson, a Sweet Briar alumna who has been named to the board. “This is not a dog who has caught a car. These are people who know how to drive cars.”
Ms. Tomlinson, who is mayor of Columbus, Ga., joins an eclectic mix of new directors, who include a battle-tested college president, a Washington lobbyist, a financial consultant, the executive vice president of a conservationist organization, and a couple of professors, among others.
Under a legal agreement approved this week, the plaintiffs in three lawsuits challenging Sweet Briar’s closure were authorized to nominate the new board members. The settlement allowed for a few of the existing directors to stay on, but they have since resigned their posts.
It was the previous board’s opinion that Sweet Briar was on an unsustainable financial trajectory, and directors described the decision to close the college as heart-wrenching.
But critics of that decision, who will populate the reconstituted board, say their predecessors underestimated the college’s resilience.
“This was a failure of faith,” Ms. Tomlinson said. “They got locked into a decision-making process where they could not see any possibilities going forward.”
Under the settlement agreement, Saving Sweet Briar is charged with moving $12 million of pledged donations into college coffers over the next couple of months. The college will then be authorized by Virginia’s attorney general to draw $16 million from Sweet Briar’s $84-million endowment.
Formerly outside observers, Sweet Briar’s new directors will soon have access to all of the college’s internal financial information. It will be a truth test of their prevailing assumption, which has been that their predecessors relied on false projections about the college’s potential and too easily surrendered as a result. But Ms. Tomlinson, a lawyer who specializes in corporate-corruption cases, said, “We need people to go in and do the deep dive and make sure there aren’t any more surprises.”
Immediate Challenges
News that Sweet Briar will open this fall has been met with jubilation, but the college’s monthslong existential crisis sent the institution into disarray. Many professors and staff members, who were told they would lose their jobs, have found employment elsewhere. Students, who are more than ever the lifeblood of this tuition-dependent institution, have made other plans. Indeed, many of the very people upon whom the college would rely to rebuild have dispersed.
These are the sorts of challenges that Gen. Charles C. Krulak, an incoming board member, seems to relish.
General Krulak, a retired commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became president of Birmingham-Southern College in 2011. When he arrived, the college’s bonds had been downgraded to junk status and its future seemed uncertain. But General Krulak, who will step down on June 30, is widely credited with turning things around.
When he read about Sweet Briar’s struggles, General Krulak volunteered his consulting services to the Saving Sweet Briar group. The college’s challenges, he told the group, were similar to those he had encountered at Birmingham-Southern, which also drew heavily on its endowment to offset enrollment declines. The difference, he said, was that Sweet Briar’s debts were not as severe as Birmingham-Southern’s and its assets were greater.
“What really got me was the idea that a school that has the history of Sweet Briar … would go down without even a fight at all,” he said. “In looking at their situation I believed that they had the ability, if given the time, to turn it around.”
As upbeat as the new board seems to be, there is no denying the challenges for Sweet Briar. The college is scrambling to persuade students to come back and bracing for a dive in enrollment.
“The real concern is the incoming class,” General Krulak said. “If that’s real, real small, which it’s probably going to be, then you’re going to have that going through the stomach of the snake for the next four years.”
A more immediate concern, however, is the state of flux and uncertainty in which Sweet Briar now finds itself. The skeleton crew of remaining employees, who had been charged with winding down the college, now awaits orders from an administration that has yet to seize control. In the meantime, people say they feel in limbo.
“It’s totally bizarre,” said Georgene M. Vairo, a future board member and a law professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. Absent a new president and board to provide direction, “nobody in the old administration thinks they are able to order a sandwich, but that’s going to change.”
From the beginning, those working with Saving Sweet Briar have tried to focus on what might happen “when we get the keys back,” Ms. Vairo said. But getting the college up and running will take some improvisation, she said.
“This is a lot of flying by the seat of our pants,” Ms. Vairo said. “But it’s worked so far.”
Correction (6/25/2015, 8:53 p.m.): This article originally misstated the timing of the transfer of power at Sweet Briar. The college’s new leadership takes office on Thursday, July 2, not Thursday, June 25. The article has been updated accordingly.
Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.
