I n a dusty corridor in Virginia Intermont College’s Main Hall, Alice L. Brown has stopped in front of the Poetry Club’s bulletin board, where poems by seven students appear beside their photos and profiles. “All these little schools give students so many opportunities,” Ms. Brown says after a few moments. “There are a lot of kids whose lives aren’t going to be as rich as they could be without the liberal arts.”
Through the next door is an empty hallway strewn with dry leaves, and past that the main dining room, where stacks of plates await bargain hunters.
Virginia Intermont closed in May 2014, after a long struggle with declining enrollment and deteriorating finances. Bill Best, who as facilities manager is one of a handful of remaining employees, says things got so bad at one point that “we were submitting purchase orders to the president for $10,” and he was paying for toilet valves and caulk out of his own pocket.
“It’s a mess out there for these little schools,” says Ms. Brown, a former president of the Appalachian College Association who spent much of her career raising millions for small mountain institutions that she says were doing “wonderful things.”
But she suggested meeting here at Virginia Intermont to make a point that a number of people undoubtedly would prefer not to hear from someone with a résumé like hers: “A lot of struggling colleges should give up the fight to stay alive.”
Many small liberal-arts institutions, she says, are “hanging on by a thread” and have been reluctant to risk making changes even as enrollment and revenue decline. For some, she says, it’s already too late.
“Somebody will say, If you don’t do X, Y, and Z, in five years you’re going to be closing. The problem is, they needed to do that 25 years ago.”
She’s the first to argue that many students — particularly students from isolated regions in Appalachia — do better if they attend colleges that aren’t too far from home and that can give them a lot of personal attention. But, she says, “we don’t need three colleges with 600 students apiece within a 30-mile radius, where the only difference is their denomination.”
Virginia Intermont, she notes, is two miles across town from King University, another small institution, and within an hour of three other liberal-arts colleges — Emory & Henry, Milligan, and Tusculum. East Tennessee State University is 45 minutes away.
“I watched this college die a long and slow and agonizing death for years,” Ms. Brown says of Virginia Intermont, which closed after an extended struggle to keep its accreditation and a last-minute attempt to merge with a small Florida college. Arthur J. Rebrovick Jr., whom Virginia Intermont’s trustees hired to close down the college and sell the campus, says Virginia Intermont owes creditors and former employees between $10 million and $20 million, and has “lawsuits stacked up to here.” The campus has two possible buyers, and he’s keeping his fingers crossed.
As you might guess, Ms. Brown’s warnings are not the kind that many small-college presidents are eager to be talking about with donors or reporters. But William G. Bowen, a former Princeton University president who worked with her while he led the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, says he is “a huge fan of Alice” and that she is “doing very valuable work” by taking on an unpopular but important subject. “She is by no means always in favor of closing colleges in trouble — she’s very balanced in all this.”
Not Loved by Sweet Briar
What may most anger some small-college supporters, though, is that after Sweet Briar College’s board voted a year ago to close — a decision that alumnae eventually overturned — Ms. Brown was among those who suggested publicly that the board had made a responsible choice.
“No college closing is celebrated with joy by those who love it, regardless of the circumstances under which it closes,” she has written since, in a book-length study of the roots of the Sweet Briar drama that is being considered by the Johns Hopkins University Press. “But it does seem more honorable to close with resources still in hand so that obligations to employees and students can be met, creditors can be paid, and at least part of the mission of the college might be preserved.”
The Spencer Foundation, which supports education research, commissioned the study before the board’s decision was reversed — but not before it had provoked plenty of charges, countercharges, and bitterness.
“One could (and many did) argue that Sweet Briar was in good financial shape for a small, rural college,” she writes in the study. However, she says, “there was no answer to the question, ‘What would it take to make Sweet Briar so attractive that future students would choose it instead of any of the hundreds of other choices open to them?’ Building new dorms and recreational facilities had not accomplished that goal; adding degrees in business and engineering had not accomplished that goal.”
She says Sweet Briar’s directors “had considered where the college seemed to be heading, not just where it was standing.” But she also says the alumnae who led the fight to keep Sweet Briar open “deserve a lot of credit,” not only for their donations but also for their dedication.
Her arguments apply far beyond Sweet Briar. “The biggest thing is, boards don’t pay attention,” Ms. Brown says over dinner that evening in Abingdon, Va. “They don’t want to hear bad news.” And too many presidents, she says, think that “if they hunker down long enough, things will go back to the way they were.” Meanwhile, the hotel she’s staying in, the Martha Washington Inn, was once a women’s college named for the same person. It closed in 1932.
Ms. Brown seems an unlikely turncoat, a voluble and energetic storyteller with a long memory, a penchant for research, and a hint of stubbornness. She “grew up in Troutman, N.C., saying ‘crick,’” as she likes to say. Her father stayed in school only as far the third grade, and her mother as far as the sixth, but “from the time I was born my parents knew I was going to Appalachian State Teachers College” — now Appalachian State University.
She held several teaching jobs before enrolling in a graduate program at the University of Kentucky. In 1984 she went to work for a two-year-old program at the university that channeled money from the Mellon foundation to small-college faculty members so they could do research or work on advanced degrees.
Out of that grew the Appalachian College Association, which became a stand-alone organization in 1993 with Ms. Brown as its president. She was “remarkable, a force of nature,” says Jennifer L. Braaten, president of Ferrum College, in southern Virginia. “She knew us and she knew us well.”
A Failure to Collaborate
Over Ms. Brown’s years at the association — she retired in 2008 — she calculates that she raised about $50 million. Initially she worked mostly with faculty members and deans, but eventually Mellon and others began suggesting that the colleges cooperate more closely, she says. Faculty members, librarians, and technology administrators did collaborate fairly well, Ms. Brown says, but presidents were “real resistant.”
She cites an experiment in which three institutions shared a central personnel office but gave it up when a three-year Mellon grant ran out. She recalls “a dinner for four or five presidents where I said, There’s $40,000 in the middle of this table. If you guys can figure out one thing to do with it collaboratively, you can take it home with you.” No luck there either.
“My great frustration at ACA was that colleges wouldn’t collaborate,” she says. “I worked at that organization for 25 years, and for 20 years I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. I drove myself crazy those last few years trying to get those colleges to work together. I thought, These colleges are gonna die if they don’t.”
Since she retired, she’s been working as a consultant and writing articles and books with titles that could give college presidents nightmares: Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure (which she wrote with Sandra L. Ballard and published in 2011), Cautionary Tales: Strategy Lessons for Struggling Colleges (2012), and Staying the Course: How Unflinching Dedication and Persistence Have Built a Successful Private College in a Region of Isolation and Poverty (2013).
She keeps in touch with a range of people, although she knows some presidents would just as soon not see her on their campuses, fearing that she might prophesy end times.
Not so Jake B. Schrum, president of Emory & Henry since 2013, who welcomes her the next morning and describes what the 1,100-student college is doing to remain healthy and avoid becoming the subject of Ms. Brown’s next dismal report. Faculty members and administrators are taking a close look at how big the college should be, for one thing, because Mr. Schrum is “trying to be realistic,” rather than promising that the college can grow its way to a stronger bottom line. At the same time, an undergraduate program called Project Ampersand — “Explore your passions and connect them to the common good” — gives admissions officers a way to frame the college’s liberal-arts offerings in a way that is distinctive and, with luck, compelling.
Mr. Schrum tells Ms. Brown that Emory & Henry ended up with 20 Virginia Intermont students after that institution closed, and also took over its well-regarded equestrian program. “We looked at acquiring Virginia Intermont,” he says. “If we’d been stronger, we might have. We would take down the nonhistoric buildings and create a Ph.D. program in innovation and creativity that would combine the liberal arts and business.”
But the numbers didn’t add up. Instead, Emory & Henry is renovating an empty hospital in nearby Marion, Va., to house a three-year doctor of physical therapy program and a two-year occupational therapy program. There will be no tuition discounting, says Mr. Schrum, who calls the new programs “our ace in the hole.” Beyond that, the college is looking at ways it could profit from land it owns on both sides of busy Interstate 81.
Afterward, Ms. Brown says, “I can remember going out to campuses, the poorest ones, and thinking, If I had money I’d give it here, because it could really make a difference.” And even though she refers to herself now as a “pessimistic curmudgeon,” she starts making a list of little colleges she’d suggest visiting — Brevard, Mars Hill University, Carson-Newman University, Centre, Alice Lloyd.
“You haven’t been to Appalachia till you’ve been to Alice Lloyd,” she says with no trace at all of pessimism. It’s half an hour from anyplace, she warns, but “it’s the epitome of a school that does what those kids need.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
