When Zeltzin Mozo arrived at Northeastern University in the fall of 2023, it took her some time to adjust. After spending the previous two years at Mills College, a small institution for women, she had forgotten what it was like to have men talk over her in class.
Mozo had been enrolled at Mills when trouble struck. First, leaders of the 170-year-old college announced in 2021 that it would close after years of financial problems. Then the plans changed: The campus, in Oakland, Calif., would actually be absorbed by Northeastern University, a large research university in Boston.
For Mozo, the merger ensured that her academic journey wouldn’t be disrupted by a campus closure. Next year, she will graduate with a bachelor’s degree, the first in her family to do so.
Now she is mourning the quirky, weird, social-justice-focused college experience that she lost. That’s why she decided to finish her studies in Boston instead of staying in the Bay Area . “I don’t think I could take the emotional toll of having the campus I really once loved being turned into something that it isn’t,” she said.
The gradual transformation of Mills into Mills College at Northeastern University — these days, most at Northeastern call it the Oakland campus — is becoming an increasingly common arrangement in higher ed.
Mergers offer a lifeline to struggling colleges hoping to maintain their name and legacy. They also can come with growing pains as campus cultures clash.
Within a few years, those growing pains typically ease. The last two cohorts of students who matriculated at Mills, including Mozo, will graduate. The Oakland campus is welcoming hundreds of Northeastern students each semester, mostly for one- or two-term stays. New programs are debuting, and campus upgrades are rolling in.
A lawsuit filed by Mills students alleged that they’d been misled by Northeastern about being able to continue in their programs of study, but that chapter has closed, too: Last fall, the case was settled.
This month marks two years since the Mills College merger became official, and many former Mills students and employees are grateful they had somewhere to go. But they’re also processing that a lifeboat for the college could erode much of its independent identity. As contraction in the higher-education sector continues, more colleges will be forced to reckon with what the loss of their identity might mean.
“The fear is that … we’ll be completely pushed out and the history won’t matter to anyone who’s there because all the students will have graduated and maybe the faculty will have moved on,” said Susan Ito, an assistant adjunct professor at Mills at Northeastern who started teaching at Mills College in 2015.
This coming academic year, Ito said, “feels like a really important transitional point. What’s going to happen when our original students have gone?”
Northeastern didn’t respond to The Chronicle’s repeated requests over several months this year for interviews on how the university approached the Mills merger and how the Oakland campus is faring today. In an emailed statement, Renata Nyul, a spokesperson, emphasized that if Mills had closed instead of becoming part of Northeastern, it “would have adversely impacted hundreds of existing Mills students.”
‘Signature Strengths’
Since 18-year-old men arrived as students at the Oakland campus, Teddy Johnstone has stopped going to the gym as much.
“Now, it’s just cis dudes. That’s it,” said Johnstone, a former Mills student who’s graduating in December. “Pretty much from when the gym opens to when it closes, there’s always just dozens of dudes there, and that can be intimidating.”
Johnstone said some Northeastern students don’t seem to appreciate the historical and cultural significance of the campus they’re on.
“They have seemingly dedicated themselves to understanding and learning as little as possible about Mills and about the people who were originally in this space,” Johnstone said. “They still get to have their fun college experience and go to Boston next year. It is so inconsequential for them to not engage in caring about this space.”
What Aoun saw as “signature strengths” seemed like gaping contrasts to frustrated Mills students and alumni.
When the college’s acquisition was announced, a message from Northeastern’s president, Joseph E. Aoun, trumpeted the “perfect congruence” between the history and focus of both institutions.
“Not only are our missions aligned, but by combining our signature strengths we can create new and distinctive opportunities that extend and enhance our collective priorities,” Aoun wrote in June 2021.
What Aoun saw as “signature strengths” seemed like gaping contrasts to frustrated Mills students and alumni.
Northeastern’s academic core focuses on business and technology; Mills’s offerings were concentrated in the arts and humanities. At Northeastern, 12.5 percent of undergraduate students received Pell Grants in 2022; at Mills, which primarily served first-generation students of color, nearly half received Pell Grants in 2021, the year before the merger.
Combining the institutions began in January 2022 with a one-semester pilot program and just over a dozen Northeastern students. “Leading Social Change” was advertised as an opportunity for participants to learn about social justice and immerse themselves in a campus and student body with a rich history of activism. The Northeastern students received little orientation on what to expect, they told The Chronicle.
They saw people walking around campus with T-shirts that read “F U, N.U.” They were handed pamphlets with caricatures of Aoun labeled as a “McMillionaire.”
When Olivia Oestreicher, then a Northeastern freshman, posted on LinkedIn about participating in the program and attending Mills, she received comments from Mills alumni telling her not to come.
“As an 18-year-old, I was the face of the Northeastern merger — completely against my will, completely unknowingly. We just had no idea what we were stepping into,” Oestreicher, now a rising senior, said in an interview earlier this year. The two groups of students, she said, “just don’t see the world the same way.” She doesn’t blame the Mills community for the hostility she experienced; she blames Northeastern for subjecting students to the merger’s growing pains.
The fall of 2022 brought the first full cohort of Northeastern students to Oakland — as part of the university’s “specialized entry” programs for freshmen who aren’t immediately admitted to the main campus in Boston and instead spend their first semester or two at other Northeastern campuses.
Then, last year, the university began admitting new students specifically to the Oakland campus. Under that arrangement, students were to take classes in Oakland for at least their first year. The degree options for those students were quite different from what Mills had typically offered: “areas of study at the intersection of Technology, Healthcare, Science, Business.” (Northeastern’s website says students enrolling in the fall of 2024 will have the option of completing their entire undergraduate degree in Oakland.)
Professors who chose to stay and continue teaching under the college’s new owner said they felt the changing environment, too.
Cliff Lee, a professor of art and design who has taught at Mills since 2019, recalled a verbal altercation last year in which a former Mills student asked several male Northeastern students to clean up the trash they had left on a table at the campus café.
“Our students, typically, are highly respectful of the workers and the space. … They’re friends with the workers and the custodial staff,” Lee said. “They see things like that and they’re just like, ‘You are disrespecting the workers that are here that are helping us.’”
The former Mills students were also protective of Oakland itself. Johnstone, who grew up just outside of the city, was perplexed at the sight of members of the institution’s housing team distributing maps of the area and recommending that students avoid neighborhoods they had deemed “unsafe” — including East Oakland, the neighborhood that directly borders the campus.
‘Who Wants Us?’
For universities like Northeastern, mergers have become a means of expanding enrollment and attractiveness to students in an increasingly tight market. In May, Northeastern announced it would acquire Marymount Manhattan College, an arts-focused institution in New York City, marking the latest addition to its network of more than a dozen satellite campuses.
In the coming years, more small colleges are likely to seek out such deals as finances look grim.
At the same time, scrutiny of that “inorganic growth” is increasing, said Aaron Lacey, chair of the higher-education practice at the law firm Thompson Coburn. The U.S. Department of Education added requirements over the past year that will ramp up oversight and lengthen the process significantly, Lacey said. Institutions will likely be forced to slow agreements.
“In many cases where you have distressed institutions, transactions are potentially the only lifeline … to avoid closure,” Lacey said. “At the same time that all this is occurring, ironically, the regulatory environment for completing transactions has become meaningfully more complex.”
As Northeastern officials see it, acquiring Mills was beneficial for former Mills affiliates and the region. In addition to keeping students on campus, faculty and staff members “are now Northeastern employees with enhanced compensation and benefits,” Nyul, the spokesperson, told The Chronicle. “The city of Oakland will also benefit from maintaining a vibrant academic institution with deep ties to the community.”
Former Mills students and employees acknowledge that Northeastern’s acquisition has come with much-needed renovations, campus beautification, and tech upgrades for Mills over the past two years.
If our name goes away completely, that’s really hard on alumni and boards to deal with. Sometimes they don’t have a choice. And strangely enough, sometimes they would even choose to close instead of merge and lose identity.
Some of those improvements also altered the character of the campus, said Iris Kingery, a former Mills student who graduated in the spring of 2023. “Wealthy, corporate, streamlined design” and art appeared, Kingery said. The new automated mail-center lockers eliminated the need to interact with the staff. She used to spend nights mixing music in the Prieto Computer Lab; then it became the Prieto Tech Bar, and the mixing and mastering equipment was removed.
“Piece by piece, it was stripped of all those things that made it Mills and made it weird and unique and radical and queer,” Kingery said.
Pushback about potential loss of institutional identity continues to be one of the biggest obstacles to college mergers today, according to Paul N. Friga, a clinical professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Friga has written for The Chronicle about strategies for higher ed’s future.
“If our name goes away completely, that’s really hard on alumni and boards to deal with,” Friga said. “Sometimes they don’t have a choice. And strangely enough, sometimes they would even choose to close instead of merge and lose identity.”
When a college conducts an 11th-hour transaction in a last-ditch effort to avoid closing, as was the case with Mills, “you’re not really keeping your mission alive,” Friga said.
“You want to avoid the last-minute, ‘we’re almost closed, who wants us?’ conversations and try to get ahead of it,” Friga said. “If Mills had begun conversations about merging several years prior,” he added, “it could have been an even better, more fruitful partnership.”
Wendy Ng, who serves on the board of the Alumnae Association of Mills College, said the talk among alumni is that “Northeastern wants Mills College to go away — you know, they just want to be Northeastern, not Mills.” Ng is dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences at California State University-East Bay.
Northeastern officials have said that the legacy of Mills College is being preserved through the Mills Institute, which “offers programming that advances educational access, equity, social justice, and women’s leadership,” according to its website.
The institute is led by Christie Chung, a former associate provost for student success and undergraduate education at Mills College. Chung did not respond to multiple requests from The Chronicle to speak about the institute.
As of now, Mills’s Alumnae Association doesn’t have a close relationship with the Mills Institute, Ng said. But she said it’s important for alumni to work with the university and the institute if they want the college to be remembered.
Academic Legacy
Much of institutional identity comes from the academics. While mergers offer continuity for many students and employees, some programs don’t survive.
At Mills, Northeastern eliminated several majors it did not already have accreditation for on the Boston campus, including ethnic studies, child development and education, dance, and art history. As a result, many faculty members had to pivot to teach required gen-ed classes to freshmen.
Ito, the longtime assistant professor, began teaching “Introduction to Literature, Language and Culture.” For the first time in her career, she said, she felt students were not excited to be there.
“I had always taught elective classes and now, all of a sudden, I was teaching a required class,” Ito said. “It was just by chance that I might have an English major or somebody who liked to write and read. Chances were that I would have computer-science students or business majors.”
Ito said the change has been a “transition with a capital T.” She was used to building yearslong relationships with her students, teaching them as fledglings, and crying at their graduations. “Now,” she said, “I have students for a semester and then they leave. … I do as much as I can in the 16 weeks, but it’s not the same.”
Ng would like to see Northeastern empower faculty members at the Oakland campus to preserve what made Mills special through the curriculum.
A signature academic program mirroring Mills’s justice- and equity-focused majors could offer “a Mills College experience to the Northeastern students who didn’t get into the Boston campus,” Ng said. That kind of program could offer more structure for cohorts of students who might be cycling in and out of Oakland within a semester or two.
“And even if they go away and go back to one of the other Northeastern campuses,” Ng added, “that experience is with them and then they become Mills alumni.”
Ito is thankful that Northeastern’s ownership helped preserve the campus of the institution she loved. She also mourns “losing the kind of education that we valued and that we were able to give to the world and give to our students.”
“I just feel like change is inevitable,” Ito said. “I really recognize Northeastern as wanting to be this front-runner of entrepreneurship and really looking to the future. But I feel like not looking to the past and the humanities is just an incalculable, incalculable loss.”
Next year, Mozo will get her degree in history, culture, and law, instead of ethnic studies, which no longer exists.
“I think Mills — because it was so small — it was able to offer a more tailored education to people,” Mozo said. “I wasn’t able to do the thing that I had set out to do. I think that’s what is lost.”
Scott Carlson, a Chronicle senior writer, contributed reporting to this article.
