What Happened Before Burlington College Threw In the Towel

It was no secret that Burlington College was in financial trouble. The small Vermont institution had for years been buckling under the debt from a doomed land deal engineered by a former president, Jane Sanders, who is the wife of the U.S. senator and Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders.

On Monday, two days after celebrating its 35th commencement, the college made the announcement: It would be closing its doors in less than two weeks. Although the news didn’t come as a galloping shock — the college had only about 200 students — it did raise many questions. For instance, what had the institution’s leaders done to try to stave off its demise?

Burlington College

Yves Bradley, chair of the college’s Board of Trustees, spoke to The Chronicle about attempts to save the college — including a last-ditch proposal to merge with another institution — and what it was like to decide that time had finally run out. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. When did you and the Board of Trustees come to the decision that you would have to shut down the college?

A. It’s no secret that the college has been struggling financially for a while. It has never been far from our minds that the day might come when we might have to close. It’s not that it sort of came to our attention. It’s been a gradual buildup.

The beginning of the sequence of events that led us to believe that there would be no other option occurred about six weeks ago, when our lender informed us that they were not willing to renew our line of credit, and it would be until it was expired, until the end of the month of June.

Six weeks ago began the beginning of saying, “All right, we have reached a very big fork in the road. We need to find either a solution extremely rapidly or accept the fact that this is it.”

I did speak to the bank personally. I called them afterwards and spoke with the loan officer and said, “You realize what this means for the college,” and he said, “Yes we do.”

They knew that their action was going to potentially result in the closure of the college.

Q. Do you know why they pulled their line of credit?

A. A lender-client relationship is a good one that can become tenuous when a client comes into difficulties financially, but they are willing to go along with it and work with you, work with you, work with you. And there comes a point when you finally lose faith, and I think the lender lost faith that we’d get to where we said we were going. They said, “We don’t believe it anymore.”

Q. In recent years, have there been talks or efforts to do a Hail Mary pass or last-ditch efforts to save the college?

A. How many of them have there been? We could have closed two Labor Days ago, when Christine Plunkett, who was then the president, essentially left without any real notice and left us without a president. We had not found and put together that interim team to come in and run the institution. That Monday, the Neasc [New England Association of Schools and Colleges] would have said, “OK, it’s over.” That was Hail Mary No. 1 right there.

Our last Hail Mary we kind of gave up on Wednesday night at 8 o’clock, when we found out the institution that had been working very hard to try to orchestrate a merger which would not proceed with what we had discussed.

Q. Was that Green Mountain College? [Local reporters asked similar questions about Green Mountain College at a news conference on Monday, but the college’s president declined to comment.]

A. I can’t say.

Q. For a while the college’s model was working, and attracted enough students to be sustainable. What was the nail in the coffin?

A. I think that the biggest nail in the coffin, frankly, was about two years ago. We began what I call “the troubled period.” Which is when a lot of media called us out and had nothing but negative things to say about the college, particularly beginning with President Plunkett’s resignation and the behavior of the students around that.

All the perceptions around that began a ripple effect that we were told and we understood was going to happen. It had a very heavy effect on enrollment. The enrollment dropped pretty precipitously, to a little bit below what we had predicted to be in the worst case. It caused us to be in the red, and even by reducing the debt by $7 million and reducing the operating budget by over $1 million, it still wasn’t enough.

Q. What steps did the college take to reduce that debt?

A. The big one was the sale of the land. We realized that we had 32.4 acres that we would never use. Our campus would never grow to a size where we would need that much land. In order to cut our debt, we needed to find a partner to take that land, to take that debt off our hands, and do something with it that would be beneficial to the college.

Q. When did you realize you wouldn’t need the land based on your enrollment numbers?

A. The process for recruiting a partner started about two and a half years ago.

Q. Why do you think the partner backed out?

A. The development partner moved forward. In terms of partnerships for the university, that’s been ongoing. We’ve developed several partnerships to join with the university to bolster it and sort of fund it, and it wasn’t enough. In terms of the partner who we’ve been working with, it sort of waned back and forth. Like all deals, it came to an end, unfortunately.

Q. Do you think that part of the college’s problem was that it lacked a large group of alumni or a big endowment?

A. Absolutely. I think that what occurred that was difficult for us as an institution was that the purchase of the diocese’s property was made and there was a big intake of air by the community, saying, “Wow, they are really swinging for the fences for this one. Are they really going to pull it off?”

Unfortunately, that influenced donors and supporters because they may have believed in the college and supported the college, but if you are in doubt about whether the college is really going to be there in the long term, what is the likelihood that you’re going to write a large check or fund an endowment or a scholarship? It’s significantly less so, until you come out and are obviously sustainable, and that’s been the issue. We’ve never really come out of it.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.