As alumnae of Sweet Briar College rallied on Wednesday around desperate efforts to save it from sudden closure, its students and faculty and staff members found themselves having to come up with new plans for their lives.
When the small women’s college closes for financial reasons, at the end of the current academic year, not only will its roughly 300 employees lose their jobs. Those who occupied 40 homes on its 3,000-acre rural Virginia campus face the prospect of having nowhere to live and, in some cases, potentially taking a hit on investments in their properties.
Although Sweet Briar has made plans to let its seniors graduate, and a growing number of colleges have offered to take in the remainder of the more than 520 undergraduates on its campus this semester, many enrolled there have never seriously considered going anywhere else.
As much as the market for women’s colleges has shrunk in recent decades, those drawn to them often have an intense attachment to such institutions. That was made immediately clear by the angry reaction from alumnae to Sweet Briar’s surprise announcement on Tuesday and by its administration’s decision to reach out mostly to other Virginia women’s colleges in making arrangements for the transfer of its students.
The students will need to transfer. The faculty will need to find new jobs—in some cases, new houses. And the 50 horses owned by Sweet Briar, long known for its nationally competitive equestrian teams, will no longer have a place at the college, which plans to sell them off, either to other colleges or to private owners. But on Wednesday, few people were certain of their next steps.
“People are deeply, deeply shell-shocked,” said John Gregory Brown, a tenured professor of English who has been heavily involved in faculty governance during his 21 years at Sweet Briar and who owns a home on the campus.
“The faculty and staff,” Mr. Brown said, “are feeling traumatized by this—not just by the loss of the institution, but by the way it has been handled. They seem to have no answers about anything, and that is what feels so deeply troubling.”
Awaiting Answers
Sweet Briar’s struggles with declining enrollments and revenue had been well known among its employees and elsewhere. But Saranna Thornton, a professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College and chairwoman of the Virginia conference of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession, said it had been widely assumed that Sweet Briar “still had a few years of breathing room to work out a solution.”
On Wednesday, Sweet Briar alumnae and students mounted a social-media campaign and started a website to raise the $250-million estimated as the cost of saving the college.
Meanwhile, one of the few things the college’s administration seemed certain of was its demise. James F. Jones, Sweet Briar’s president, told parents on Wednesday he could not conceive of any institutional adaptation or business plan that could pull the college out of the financial tailspin caused by its declining enrollments.
Jennifer McManamay, a Sweet Briar spokeswoman, said, “There is no savior on the horizon. This is the reality we have to deal with.”
Although Sweet Briar’s leadership has said the college hopes to give its employees some form of severance payment, it has yet to say what that will be. “We are not going to know that for a while,” Ms. McManamay said. The college has $84-million in its endowment, but $56-million is in donor-restricted accounts, and its top priorities in spending the rest, she said, are ensuring the transfer of students, finding a new custodian for its archival student records, and paying off its creditors.
The financial impact of the college’s closure is expected to be felt well beyond its work force, which consists of 80 full-time faculty members, 30 part-time instructors, and 179 full-time and 15 part-time staff members. It has been a major employer and source of business revenue, public service, and cultural opportunity in Virginia’s rural Amherst County, just north of Lynchburg.
“It is a tremendous loss for us financially, but also in terms of what Sweet Briar College brought to our community,” said Victoria A. Hanson, an economic-development specialist with the Economic Development Authority of Amherst County.
Bad Timing
Ms. Thornton of the AAUP’s Virginia conference said Sweet Briar had done “the faculty and the staff and the students a gross disservice” in announcing its closure plans in March, several months after colleges began their annual hiring cycle to fill permanent faculty positions, and past most selective colleges’ deadlines for transfer applications.
For faculty members, she said, “essentially what is left at this point is short term—sabbatical replacement, visiting professor—and there are not even many of those jobs,” even in fields with relatively high demand.
All of Sweet Briar’s faculty members, whether or not they have tenure, “are starting from scratch in the job market,” she said. In terms of full-time, permanent positions, she said, their best prospects are probably at other small colleges that, like Sweet Briar, emphasize teaching and do not put as much pressure on faculty members to publish as universities do. At larger universities, she said, their prospects are most likely limited to positions as contingent professors.
“To go on the job market at 55 is a deeply troubling, unsettling circumstance,” said Mr. Brown, the longtime English professor at Sweet Briar. “The academic-job market is not really set up for people who have already been tenured.”
Students face similar uncertainty about their future.
Tammy Burnley, a resident of Shipman, Va., said her daughter, Kimberly, a freshman at Sweet Briar, never considered attending college anywhere else. “It is a beautiful campus. You feel at home there,” she said. Trying to devise a back-up plan “is really quite confusing for us.”
Sweet Briar plans to host on-campus college fairs to help students choose where to transfer, and is offering assistance to students admitted for the fall of 2015 in finding a new place to enroll. It has reached agreements to let its undergraduates transfer easily to four institutions: Hollins University and Mary Baldwin Colleges, both women’s colleges in Virginia; Randolph College, which was known as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College until it began admitting men, in 2007; and Kettering University, a Flint, Mich., institution selected as an option for Sweet Briar’s engineering majors.
Sweet Briar is working with Hollins University to adopt its study-abroad programs in France and Spain, and has already arranged for Hollins to maintain the student records of Sweet Briar’s graduates.
Agnes Scott College, in Atlanta, has announced plans to offer merit scholarships to Sweet Briar students who wish to transfer, and other institutions are expected to make offers to assist Sweet Briar’s students. Lynchburg College has also agreed to accept displaced Sweet Briar students.
“There are many colleges that will find those students desirable,” said Robert B. Lambeth Jr., president of the Council of Independent Colleges of Virginia.
None of the four colleges with which Sweet Briar has reached transfer agreements would venture estimates of how many Sweet Briar students they expect to enroll.
Nancy Oliver Gray, president of Hollins College, said she had asked the faculty to make exceptions to certain rules to allow transfer students from Sweet Briar to graduate in a timely manner. For example, she said, she plans to waive, for current Sweet Briar juniors, a requirement that students reside on the campus for two years.
“It is our goal to do everything possible to help these students,” she said. “We really are looking at this as lending a hand to a sister institution, to let their students graduate.”
Brenda Edson, a spokeswoman for Randolph College, said her institution’s desire to help Sweet Briar students was driven partly by a recognition that it could have ended up in similar financial trouble if it had not gone coed in 2007. “Underlying everybody’s thoughts,” she said, “is, This could have been us.”
Robert K. McMahan Jr., president of Kettering University, said he sees many of Sweet Briar’s science and engineering students as well fit for his institution. Helping Sweet Briar students graduate, he said, will help ensure more women are represented in engineering.
Crista Cabe, a spokeswoman for Mary Baldwin College, said her institution might need to offer additional courses and establish new residential housing to accommodate transfer students from Sweet Briar, but “if we get good, strong students, we are going to be very happy to have them.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
