“I’m in a big transition, going from software sales to reinhabiting this campus,” says Kevin Runner, who plans to found Runchero U. as a research hub for renewable energy and a training ground for organic farming and ancient crafts.Patrick Cavan-Brown for The Chronicle
A security guard patrolling what’s left of the shuttered Saint Catharine College has a sticker on the rear windows of his Humvee: “Zombie Response Team.” It couldn’t be more appropriate, given the postapocalyptic atmosphere of the campus here in central Kentucky. In the library — proudly dedicated by administrators in 2013, according to a plaque — wires hang out of electrical boxes over the reference desk. The chandeliers were yanked out and sold off to pay debts. The books were auctioned, too, and in their place, crumbled ceiling tiles lie on the floor, evidence of a roof leak in the last squall. Black flies pile up along the windows.
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“I’m in a big transition, going from software sales to reinhabiting this campus,” says Kevin Runner, who plans to found Runchero U. as a research hub for renewable energy and a training ground for organic farming and ancient crafts.Patrick Cavan-Brown for The Chronicle
A security guard patrolling what’s left of the shuttered Saint Catharine College has a sticker on the rear windows of his Humvee: “Zombie Response Team.” It couldn’t be more appropriate, given the postapocalyptic atmosphere of the campus here in central Kentucky. In the library — proudly dedicated by administrators in 2013, according to a plaque — wires hang out of electrical boxes over the reference desk. The chandeliers were yanked out and sold off to pay debts. The books were auctioned, too, and in their place, crumbled ceiling tiles lie on the floor, evidence of a roof leak in the last squall. Black flies pile up along the windows.
It wouldn’t be surprising if trees started growing through the floorboards. But Kevin Runner isn’t worried about nature taking over. “I am worried about humanity,” says the tech entrepreneur, who is about to buy this campus to pursue his own private higher-education experiment.
March 29 was a big day for Runner, a man who has spent the past 20 years building address-verification software for higher education, which made him rich. That afternoon he negotiated a deal to get additional funding to buy this campus and create a different future for St. Catharine’s bones — and for himself. The price: $4.7 million for a set of buildings that cost $30 million to construct.
In these abandoned buildings and lawns, Runner sees a research hub for renewable energy, a training ground for cutting-edge organic farming and ancient crafts, a life raft for a rural population besieged by debt, drugs, and despair. Saint Catharine, he envisions, will become “Runchero University,” a utopian community based on cooperative living and practical skills.
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Under Runner’s plan, the university will be subsidized by executive retreats, tourism along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and leases to other higher-education institutions that want to reach central Kentuckians. A prospectus lists dozens of potential programs, although it is unclear how many the university would offer in its initial years, or how many students it would serve. Runner is also uncertain whether the university will offer accredited degrees or merely its own forms of badges and certificates.
Even on paper, it’s a big risk for a guy who got religion about climate change, environmentalism, and sustainability only 18 months ago. But he says he is willing to sell off shares of his technology firm, Runner EDQ — even sell it all — to see it happen. Higher education built Runner EDQ, he acknowledges, and he is ready to give it all back.
“I’m in a big transition, going from software sales to reinhabiting this campus,” he says. “I’m shedding the skin, man. This is what my life is about now.”
Financial problems led to the closing of the small college in central Kentucky. The campus went into receivership, and anything of value was put up for auction. Patrick Cavan-Brown for The Chronicle
Across the country, dozens of small, fragile institutions, like Saint Catharine was, struggle to pull in students, while the public at large questions the relevance and cost of a college degree. Every year many of those small colleges try to reinvent themselves, and each year, a handful of them stumble and perish, leaving behind mothballed buildings. Burlington College, on the shore of Lake Champlain, in Vermont, will become condominiums. Mount Ida College, southwest of Boston, will become a campus of the University of Massachusetts.
It’s rare to see a college die, but even rarer to see one born. Something new in higher education usually comes from a convergence of forces: economic or cultural upheaval, an idealistic fervor, a wealthy patron. Those infant institutions, too, are fragile. The iconoclastic and experimental vibe of the 1960s and ’70s produced places like Hampshire College and the College of the Atlantic, which are still teaching students today. The era also produced Franconia College, which had a run of 14 years before it closed.
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Darron Collins, president of the College of the Atlantic, says Runchero University reminds him a bit of his own institution: a start-up based on sustainability, formed to help support the local community. Runchero’s focus on sustainable technology and practices could be a powerful innovative model, he says.
“Whether that can draw people from California is key,” Collins says. “We are finding that we need to draw people from all over the world to financially support our college.”
Julian Dautremont-Smith, director of programs for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, says the outline of Runchero raises questions about the scope of the project. He wonders whether an organization that blends higher education with hospitality, tourism, farming, and research would be too sprawling to pull together effectively. “To be able to do all of them would be a challenge,” he says.
Even so, there is significant demand for programs that teach practical skills in sustainability at low cost, even if Runchero is not offering accredited degrees. “It’s pretty alternative already,” Dautremont-Smith says. “So whether it’s accredited or not probably means less to most of its likely attendees than whether they get something tangible and useful out of it.”
Looking at the bigger picture, he says, higher education needs more ideas like these. “I buy the basic premise that we have got to reinvent the model, and the way to do that is not to just attack existing higher ed, but to try something else.” Runchero might fail, or it might evolve into something different from the original vision — and either result would be an important learning experience for higher education.
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But if Runner pulled it off, Dautremont-Smith says, “it could be incredibly powerful.”
It’s too early to tell what Runchero University will be, if it becomes anything at all. But Kevin Runner feels a sense of urgency, like a man jolted awake after a nightmare.
His origins wouldn’t lead someone to think that he might one day establish an off-the-grid college community. The son of a parts clerk at a trucking company, he grew up lower-middle class and got a degree in computer engineering at the University of Louisville. He worked for IBM and Motorola before establishing his own software company in Florida that verified addresses and other contact information — a big seller among colleges looking to keep track of alumni and prospective students. He spent years on airplanes, gathering enough lanyards and name tags at ed-tech conferences to cover a coat tree in his office.
In the process, he says, he made tens of millions of dollars.
Late at night a year and a half ago, in his home theater, Runner was flipping through channels with his wife and came across Before the Flood, a documentary by Leonardo DiCaprio about climate change. Runner was hooked. After his wife went to bed, he watched it again on his iPad.
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Runner, who is now 48, had already bought land in his native Kentucky in an effort to return to his roots, but the film led to an epiphany. He started watching documentaries and reading articles about corporate influence on big agriculture, fossil fuels, and human health. He studied the structure of communes and intentional communities, like the Federation of Damanhur, in Italy, and EcoVillage at Ithaca, in New York. He drew up a structure for Runchero supported by the three pillars of sustainability: economy, environment, and society.
Imagine a college where students are pursuing a range of nontraditional studies in, say, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, or Eastern medicine. Some of those students might work on the campus farm, experimenting with new kinds of greenhouse technology or aquaponics, while others rediscover old farming techniques, like food preservation or driving a team of horses. Runner hopes to attract artisans — welders, blacksmiths, woodworkers, potters, chefs — who can live at the college or on his land. They would practice their trade while teaching life skills to others: how to grow food, cook, build things. Local people who need a place to land or a leg up might find a home there, he says.
Runner has already courted two college administrators for the project: Thecla Helmbrecht-Howard, who has doctorates in psychology and educational leadership, will be provost; she has gained attention in Kentucky for running a Native American-influenced equine-therapy camp for adults and children. The prospective president, who Runner says wants to remain anonymous, is currently shutting down a college in the Southwest.
Much of the community would be based on barter: An artisan or laborer could trade time teaching or working in exchange for food and shelter at the university or farm. Runner has a medieval vision of higher education: a cloistered community of people, pursuing knowledge and sustaining themselves against the chaos outside their walls. He even plans to set up his own currency — the bills bearing the faces of Einstein, Tesla, Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr. — along with health insurance, legal services, and a credit union, all to insulate community members from the “usury” that Runner sees among corporations.
“To me debt equals slavery,” he says. “I’m actually cashing in my 401(k) and directing it toward this project, because what’s my retirement plan? It’s Runchero. This is where I want to live.”
This special report examines how colleges’ buildings, grounds, classrooms, and public areas help them do their jobs better (or, in some cases, hinder them).
Runner plans to relocate his tech company from Florida to the college to help support Runchero, but other money would be brought in through outsiders: Tourists of Kentucky’s bourbon distilleries or horse farms might stay in the old Saint Catharine dormitories after they are converted (through bartered labor) to hotel rooms. Corporate executives and entrepreneurs could hold retreats in the houses and cabins on the land. Restaurants using food grown at Runchero could pump money back into the project. The classrooms, boardrooms, and science labs could be leased to other colleges that want an anchor in central Kentucky. And the researchers, instructors, and students might come up with valuable intellectual property for an age of stressed food systems and energy crises. Maybe one day, muses Runner, Elon Musk would need Runchero technology to grow potatoes on Mars.
That said, Runner is new to this world, and any adherent of sustainability would notice inconsistencies. He drives a big, black Ford SUV, and during a tour he points to his “hypocrite truck,” a jacked-up pickup. Black Angus cattle — farm animals that contribute heavily to greenhouse-gas emissions — are a staple of his current farm. “He has a lot of ideas, and maybe some things are in different directions at times, but we’re positive and hopeful,” says Daniel Carney, executive director of the Springfield-Washington County Economic Development Authority.
One of Carney’s biggest questions about the project is accreditation. Yet he believes the tourism aspects of Runner’s plan are viable. More than a million people visit Kentucky distilleries every year, not to mention the horse farms, the Kentucky Derby, the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory, and other attractions.
Springfield could use a boost, Carney says. When Saint Catharine closed in 2016, students stopped showing up at the retail stores and restaurants, and the town itself — population about 3,000 — lost about 125 jobs.
“It was a big blow to our spirit and identity,” he says. “We want to see life come back.”
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Saint Catharine College spent the early 2000s trying to revive itself. It went from two-year to four-year in 2003, when it started a building boom to attract students. In the process, the college amassed debt. Then it became entangled in a dispute with the U.S. Department of Education, which said the college had inappropriately disbursed money to students. The agency withheld more than $1 million in loans and grants that Saint Catharine needed to survive.
When the end came, it came quickly. Craig Mattingly, who had been running security for the college for several years, said that faculty and staff members had gotten used to meetings at which administrators laid out the college’s financial situation. But at the next meeting, the chairman of the Board of Trustees went to the podium and delivered a bombshell: The board had taken a vote the night before, and the college would close in 30 days.
People filed out of the room in a daze. Mattingly saw a professor he knew, walking around the campus like he was lost, and asked if he was OK. “I am going to look for the largest tree to hang myself from,” he recalls the reply.
In time, the creditors came for their money. The campus went into receivership, and signs with auction-lot numbers went on anything with value. The college even sued its former students, seeking to collect unpaid bills.
When Saint Catharine College was shut down, in 2016, the campus was abandoned. Now its buildings and grounds, in Springfield, Ky., are to be purchased by a tech entrepreneur, who plans to establish his own private higher-education experiment there, a utopian community based on cooperative living and practical skills. Patrick Cavan-Brown for The Chronicle
Walk through the campus today, and it’s clear it has been ravaged. In the health-sciences building, surgical sinks and lab tables have been removed, the copper pipes cut roughly with a saw. A locked basement room is littered with business documents and other papers that have yet to be shredded. Birds fly among the rafters in the gymnasium. It seems that every door, every room, and many of the hallways bear the names of alumni or local businesspeople — a testament to the fund raising it took to build this place. All those names will stay to honor the past, Runner says. But he hopes to add more names. He’s scheduled to settle on the property in early June, and will then have to persuade people to buy into his dream.
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“Maybe we can get the different distilleries to sponsor each of the rooms with their own theme,” Runner says, then laughs when he envisions the Maker’s Mark room, with door handles dipped in red wax, like the bottles. “I am going to have no shame asking these companies for assistance in building this thing, because I am all in.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.