When Gown Leaves Town

Overnight, the fire department in Aurora, N.Y., lost a quarter of its volunteers.

The sole local doctor found herself reassuring anxious patients that they would still be able to get treatment for heart disease and diabetes.

And Jim Orman, mayor of the small upstate village, had to come up with $200,000 to keep the community’s water-treatment plant, operated for nearly a century by Wells College, running. “Do you want a public-health hazard on your hands?” he said.

All of this upheaval had a single cause: The abrupt announcement this spring by Wells, a private liberal-arts college, that it was closing its doors. The decision, made public just a week before final exams, left students — including members of an already-admitted freshman class — scrambling to find a new college for the fall. Professors, who had missed the academic hiring season, were out of a job.

The impact of college closures reverberates beyond the campus, though. Higher-education institutions are often among their region’s largest employers, and their graduates can feed into the local work force. Students keep the coffee houses and by-the-slice pizzerias humming. When their parents visit, they pay for nice dinners and dorm-room supplies.

And the relationship between colleges and their communities runs deeper than dollars and cents. Colleges can be cultural magnets, neighborhood anchors, gathering spots, partners in solving everyday challenges.

“This is no longer a time when communities or colleges see the edge of campus as a boundary line,” said Matt Wagner, chief innovation officer for Main Street America, an organization that promotes community preservation and revitalization.

While many of us associate the words “college town” with football-playing flagship universities, America has hundreds and hundreds of college towns like Aurora, which was home to Wells for 156 years. In these communities, the college is part of the fabric of the place, central to its identity.

That identity is also under threat. College closures have been picking up since the pandemic, averaging about one a week this year. In addition to Wells, Goddard College, in Vermont; Fontbonne University, in Missouri; and Birmingham-Southern College, in Alabama, have shut down in the past few months.

Financial pressures, a demographic squeeze, and growing skepticism about the value of a degree could lead more to disappear. Fitch Ratings recently called the outlook for American higher education “deteroriating.” Many of the most vulnerable institutions are small colleges like Wells in small towns like Aurora.

For some of these places, the college “is the center of their universe,” said Jonathan Nichols, who wrote about the demise of Saint Joseph’s College, in Indiana, where he taught English. “When that falls away, you have to find a new universe.”

The dynamic adds a new wrinkle to town-gown relations: Given the tumult in the sector, are there ways that colleges in tough financial and enrollment straits can better prepare their communities for contraction or closure? Could town leaders and businesspeople do more to help support the viability of this critical part of the local economy? And if a shutdown becomes inevitable, can colleges work with them to sustain the community left behind?

“It should be a joint effort,” Orman, Aurora’s mayor, said, “because we’re the ones who have to live with it.”

If Ezra Cornell had had his way, Wells wouldn’t have been in Aurora at all.

Cornell, the philanthropist and inventor, wanted his friend Henry Wells to open a college for women in Ithaca, N.Y., where he had already started Cornell University. But Wells, a founder of Wells Fargo and American Express, decided to set his college 30 miles north. He built a home facing the heart of campus instead of picturesque Cayuga Lake, where sunsets glint yellow and orange and pink on placid waters. “He had a vision for women’s education,” said Karen Hindenlang, a Wells alumna who has fought for the campus’s historic preservation.

When the college was founded, in 1868, the United States was in the midst of a period of rapid higher-education expansion. In frontier society, colleges, like churches, represented legitimacy and civilization — to have one was an early sort of civic boosterism. Unlike Europe, with its relatively small number of mostly urban universities, this country was dotted with hometown institutions. At one point, nearly all of Iowa’s 99 counties had their own college, said Kimberly Zarecor, an Iowa State University professor who studies rural quality of life.

In many places, college history is community history; the two grew together. “For these small towns, the college may be the most prestigious thing in the community,” said William Plater, dean of the faculties emeritus at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Even when there is town-gown friction, said Plater, who helped develop a special Carnegie classification for community-engaged institutions, the college “is a real point of pride.”

When Janet Murphy came to Wells as a student in the 1980s, Aurora was a “company town.” A Wells job could be handed down from generation to generation, and faculty members and their families lived in homes surrounding campus. Professors bellied up to the bar next to farmers for Friday happy hours at the college-owned Aurora Inn. If Murphy stayed late at The Fargo, the watering hole in the center of town, a bartender might give her a ride the mile back to her dorm.

“It felt like the village took care of us,” said Murphy, who met her husband in Aurora and is now on the village’s Board of Trustees.

“I know everybody thinks this,” said Hindenlang, who moved back to Aurora when her husband was hired to teach at Wells, “but Aurora is a special place. We thought the community here was a strength.”

For Erin Weber, Wells’s Olmsted-designed campus was a playground for sledding, Easter-egg hunts, and games of capture the flag. She attended Peachtown Elementary School, on the campus’s northern end, trick-or-treating in the residence halls and performing her school play on the Wells stage. When the bells in the college’s red-brick Main Building rang out at dinner time, it was the signal for Weber and other kids to head home. “That was the rule for my dad growing up, too,” she said.

Weber left town to go to college, but she continued to feel more connected to Wells than to her alma mater.

Patti McGill Peterson, the president of Wells from 1980 to 1987, recalls a “symbiotic relationship” with the village. She hosted birthday parties and baby showers on the lawn of the president’s house. Wells owned a number of local properties, so “when the stove broke down at the Aurora Inn, I got a call,” Peterson said. “I don’t think those things come across most presidents’ desks.”

During her tenure, the college’s head of buildings and grounds also served as the village mayor.

After Peterson’s time, Wells and Aurora began to grow apart. The college, which went coed in 2005, became more insular, said Murphy, the alumna and village trustee. As it hired more adjunct professors, fewer faculty members could afford to live in Aurora, and students kept more to campus. Falling enrollment and financial concerns occupied more of administrators’ time.

A major source of tension was the decision by one of Peterson’s successors, Lisa Marsh Ryerson, to allow Pleasant T. Rowland, an alumna and donor, to take over and revitalize much of the college’s downtown property, which was becoming a drain on Wells’s already-shaky finances. Over the past two and a half decades, Rowland — the creator of historically themed (and pricey) American Girl dolls — has remade the village, turning the Aurora Inn and other buildings into a collection of boutique hotels, catering more to upscale visitors than to students or residents. Some have called it kitsch. A bakery, a women’s clothing store, and other longtime businesses closed or lost their leases.

Still, the college and the village remained intertwined. Wells started and hosted the local farmers market. Its former infirmary became the community health center, treating not only students but more than 2,000 townspeople.

When the village needed to purchase a new ladder truck for the fire department, residents and local businesses raised the funds. The only structure in town tall enough to require the special equipment? The bell tower in Wells’s Main Building.

Orman, the Aurora mayor, got the call the weekend of his daughter’s wedding. Heather MacAdam, director of the Aurora Community Medical Center, received an “urgent” Sunday-night text from Wells administrators. She thought at first that there must be a student emergency, maybe even a suicide.

The official statement went out at 7 a.m. the next day, Monday, April 29. “It is with profound sadness that we announce the forthcoming closure of our beloved Wells College,” said the announcement, signed by Mary Chapman Carroll, chair of the college’s Board of Trustees, and Jonathan Gibralter, the president.

Students, who had already received their housing-lottery numbers and registered for fall classes, were shocked and furious. At a meeting with administrators, they shouted down Gibralter. Barb E. Blom, an alumna and minister for the United Ministries of Aurora, held a “lament” for tearful students at a church near campus. “It was just raw,” she said.

The closure also unsettled community groups located on the Wells campus but not technically part of the college. Peachtown Elementary, which typically enrolls 30 students and operates on a year-to-year lease, “needed to know if we were going to get kicked out on June 30,” said Barbara Post, its founder and a Wells alumna.

The school had been a fixture on the Wells campus for 30 years; the community medical center for more than 50. The agreement had allowed Wells, which might not otherwise have had the resources for its own health-care providers, to have an on-campus doctor.

The region is federally designated as an area with a shortage of health professionals, and MacAdam is the only primary-care physician for more than 15 miles — a not-insignificant distance in a part of the country frequently buried by heavy winter snow.

Since April, she has typically spent the first minutes of each office visit allaying her patients’ concerns about the medical center’s future. When rumors spread that a fence would be erected around campus to keep trespassers out, some panicked that they would be cut off from care.

MacAdam, who has run the center for 27 years, has offered to buy the low-slung brick building, and the village is willing to take it over for her to continue to lease. But neither has been possible as the college deals with the legal requirements of shutting down the campus and satisfying creditors. She has looked for other space nearby, but property in the village is all owned by Wells or the hotel, the Inns of Aurora. The college’s official position is that any sale must be approved by the state attorney general.

For now, MacAdam is going on as normal, seeing as many as 25 patients — ages 12 to 102 — a day. “Denial is my go-to,” she said. If Wells sells the campus, what new owner “would want to come and kick out the local doctor?”

One recent fall afternoon, harmonizing voices and the tinkling piano of a Peachtown music class next door were all that broke the silence of the empty campus. Like MacAdam, Alyssa Gunderson, the head of school, is caught in the limbo of the Wells closure. She, too, hopes to stay in the cozy school building — decorated with cheery art projects and photos of past classes — that was once the college dean’s cottage.

A move would likely force Peachtown, which can be a refuge for students who struggle in local public schools, to raise tuition, putting it out of reach of some families, Gunderson said. Already, the school has lost students who moved away because of the Wells closure.

The domino effect of college shutdowns on other educational institutions isn’t unique. The now-closed Goddard campus is also home to a secondary school whose future is now in question. When Alderson Broaddus University, a private institution in mountainous West Virginia, announced it would cease operation just weeks before the 2023 academic year, a longstanding campus day-care center had to work out a deal with bankruptcy court to stay open.

Alderson Broaddus’s shuttering, precipitated by state regulators’ revocation of its ability to confer degrees, was so sudden that employees didn’t have time to clean out their desks, leaving half-empty mugs of coffee and dying plants in their abandoned offices, said Cheryl Wolfe, executive director of the Barbour County Development Authority.

The community was left to deal with the aftermath. Police from the town of Philippi patrolled the grounds, marking doors with chalk to show that the rooms had been checked and secured. Volunteers cut the grass. The local library inventoried the college’s books.

Before it closed, Alderson Broaddus owed nearly $776,000 in unpaid utility bills, leading Philippi officials to threaten to turn off services. Households and businesses are paying higher water and electric rates to offset the college’s debt and the loss of what was the region’s largest utility customer, Wolfe said.

Aurora had the opposite problem: For more than 90 years, Wells operated the pumping station on Cayuga Lake that supplies the village with drinking water. Aurora lacked the staff, expertise, or money to run it.

The village had to negotiate with the college and state regulators to get a license to operate the station, although it is still owned by Wells, Orman said. Town officials “raided” the modest rainy-day fund to hire two former Wells employees, and they purchased a boiler this fall when the college turned off the heat to campus buildings, including the water-treatment facility.

Orman, whose first job in high school was working in the Wells dining hall, hopes state funds can help pay for the plant’s continuing costs. “There’s no way we have the tax base to absorb it,” he said.

The population of the no-stoplight village, 750, has been cut by more than half with Wells’s departure. Some worry Aurora could become so small that it would lose its post office.

After years of declining enrollment, Wells had fewer than 350 students at the end. But college closures, even small ones, can create considerable ripples in the economies of rural towns and small communities like Aurora. Their spending — on hiring, on purchasing, by attracting visitors to cultural and athletic events — can have a bigger impact than in larger, more diverse economies, said Anna Brown, vice president of higher-education consulting for Lightcast, a firm that does economic-impact analysis and other advisory work for colleges. “They’re little fish,” she said, “but it’s a little pond.”

When that spending dries up, it can be gone for good. More populous areas have more colleges that students can transfer to, keeping their tuition and housing dollars in the region. There also may be more jobs locally, both in academe and for staff members in less specialized roles.

When St. Joseph’s closed, some faculty members were hired at Purdue University, about 45 minutes down the road from the small Indiana city of Rensselaer. One of them was Nichols’s brother, now an instructor in the university’s liberal-arts core. Nichols himself moved several hours away, to Illinois, where he is now an assistant professor of English at Waubonsee Community College. But other former colleagues have left teaching or higher education altogether.

In West Virginia, some former Alderson Broaddus staff members are working at grocery stores or a nearby coal mine, said Eric Ruf, chief executive of the Barbour Community Health Association, who has hired a couple to do clerical work. “They had to find jobs where they could.”

Although a number of the colleges that have recently shut down are private, many served a largely local student body. Their closure raises access concerns; if these institutions no longer exist, potential students “might just give up” on getting a college education, said Robert Elmore, the former president of Chatfield College, in Ohio, which shuttered two years ago.

That could have a long-term effect on the educational attainment of future generations and on the local economy. For instance, Alderson Broaddus’s nursing and physician-assistant programs provided a pipeline of health-care workers in a rural and aging area that might otherwise struggle to attract them.

Neighboring West Virginia Wesleyan University will consider offering some allied-health courses on the former campus, which was purchased this year by a local businessman. Renamed Battlers Knob, after Alderson Broaddus’s athletic teams, it is now primarily an events and office-rental space.

Chatfield decided to use what was left in its endowment to start a nonprofit organization to support the college aspirations of first-generation and nontraditional students, enabling it to continue its mission. “We’re a different institution,” said Elmore, who became the group’s executive director, “but we’re still a community resource.”

But while the economic consequences of college closures can be outsized in rural communities, when residents talk about what they’ll miss, said Zarecor, the Iowa State professor, “it’s not about the economic footprint but quality of life.”

Zarecor, who has a National Science Foundation grant to study shrinking rural communities with highly satisfied residents, said lifestyle and cultural concerns are often at the root of community unease: What will happen to educational quality if there are fewer professors’ kids at the local school? Will the cool restaurant disappear without the college crowd? Without speakers and performers brought in by the college, will locals feel as connected to the world? Will the buyer of the beautiful campus maintain it?

In some cases, colleges have sold or donated some of their facilities, like gyms, pools, and student centers, to the community when they leave. But local residents often feel the loss of “the presence and vitality of young people in their community,” Zarecor said. In Aurora, Wells students interned at the public library, worked as classroom assistants at the elementary school, and volunteered as EMTs for the fire department.

In larger cities, with greater cultural amenities and opportunities, the stakes of a college closure may not seem as significant. And in those places, such decisions are made by anonymous administrators, largely unknown to the broader off-campus community, said Paula Langteau, who was the last president of now-closed Presentation College, in Aberdeen, S.D.

By contrast, in a small town, the president crosses paths with residents at the grocery store, at church, at the dump; they’re all neighbors. “Everything is personal,” Langteau said.

Despite the tight ties, many in Aurora felt blindsided by Wells’s closure. Although the college had been struggling financially and with enrollment for years — and had even borrowed from its endowment — few had any idea that the situation had grown so dire.

In part, that was a result of college leaders’ nothing-to-see-here stance: In late February, just two months before the decision was announced, Gibralter wrote to village trustees to debunk closure rumors. “We are full steam ahead,” he wrote, noting that Wells was accepting enrollment deposits, hiring staff, and doing budget planning for the next academic year.

Greater transparency could have eased the community’s shock and helped leaders plan for a Wells-less future, said Murphy, the village trustee. “After 156 years together,” she said, “I thought we’d have a better breakup.”

Wells’s handling of the shutdown spurred Rachel May, a state senator who represents Aurora, to introduce legislation that would require New York colleges, public and private, to announce closure decisions a year in advance; release plans for student transfers and the future of the physical campus; and hold meetings with residents and other stakeholders. Without open discussion, “rumors are more likely to poison” the process, she said.

A second bill proposed by May, a Democrat, would treat campus closures like other state-declared disasters, mobilizing government agencies to assist in the recovery. Neither measure was passed by the State Legislature, but May said she plans to reintroduce both.

Aurora is the second community May has represented that was rocked by a college closing. In the spring of 2023, Cazenovia College, in the village of the same name, shut its doors.

In Cazenovia’s case, the college announced the closure six months in advance and made a priority of communicating with residents and local officials. David G. Bergh, the college’s final president, said he and Kurt Wheeler, the mayor, talked daily — and have kept talking. When Wheeler and Bergh, now interim president of Vermont State University, spoke to The Chronicle a few weeks ago, they were prepping for a joint presentation for a redevelopment-planning grant for the Cazenovia campus.

While college leaders’ first obligation is to their students and employees, Bergh said, “we had wanted to be a good neighbor as a college, and we wanted to be a good neighbor on the way out.”

The advance notice allowed the village to form teams to study future campus uses and examine other communities that had lost their colleges for best, and worst, practices, Wheeler said. The campus was temporarily converted into a training academy for the New York State Police, which assumed responsibility for its upkeep, and Wheeler said he was hopeful that long-term redevelopment plans would soon be announced. “The sky doesn’t have to fall,” he said.

Chatfield, in Ohio, announced it would close when the college still had the funds in its endowment to continue operating for a couple of years. Making the decision early allowed for a smoother transition for those on campus — employees got a semester’s notice and severance — and to its second life as a community-focused nonprofit. “We didn’t want to be making decisions when we were past the lifeboat stage,” Elmore said.

Langteau, who now advises other colleges on closing with “compassion and dignity,” decried the practice of “more and more institutions, without warning, locking their doors.”

At the same time, she said she understood college leaders’ hesitancy about going public, which could cause students to withdraw and worsen the financial spiral. As a president, “you don’t want to be pegged as someone whose college didn’t make it,” Langteau said.

At Presentation, she drafted early plans for closure alongside other options for keeping the college open, a process that she recommends to others.

As possible strategies for viability, colleges facing financial difficulties could work with employers to develop certificates and programs that have high local demand, collaborate on neighborhood revitalization efforts to better attract students and faculty members, and turn to government officials for land-use and other favorable regulatory changes. Still, it’s not clear that community support can avert closures, Langteau and others said.

In Aurora, village leaders had agreed earlier this year to convert zoning for the Wells campus from institutional to mixed-use, allowing some of the buildings and land to be used for noneducational purposes or sold; they had previously approved smaller sales of college property. (Village trustees revoked the rezoning plan, which had not yet been made official by the state, after the closure announcement and have said they do not want the campus to be commercially redeveloped or sold off in pieces.)

Susan Henking, who became president after Wells and Gibalter “parted ways” following the closure announcement, said she wishes it was initially handled differently. “We’re better off overcommunicating than undercommunicating,” she said. The process of shuttering a campus is opaque, and requirements — like getting sign-off from the state attorney general and first repaying the college endowment — may not be widely understood.

If Henking could “travel back in time as president,” she said she would want Wells to appear regularly at village meetings to answer questions and discuss pressing issues. She would hold sessions on community engagement for the college’s board of trustees. Such practices would have been helpful during the earlier stages of closure — and as part of regular town-gown relations, she said.

Many in Aurora continue to feel frozen out. “Why aren’t they trusting the people who have loved Wells for decades?” asked Weber, the longtime resident.

The campus, which was once a haven for exercisers and dog walkers, is now largely deserted. Barricades block paths, admonishing all but the college’s handful of remaining employees to stay off the grounds. (Henking said the warning signs were posted for insurance and safety reasons.)

The future of the campus property itself is the source of great apprehension. After the Inns of Aurora swallowed much of the village center, locals and alumni fear that the college, on the south end of town, could also be redeveloped for fall leaf-peepers and summer visitors boating on the lake.

More than a dozen of the college’s oldest buildings — including Main Building and Glen Park Residence Hall, formely Henry Wells’s Tuscan-style villa — are on the National Register of Historic Places. A group of alumni, known as the Wells Legacy Society, have been advocating for state officials to step in to preserve the campus’s cultural heritage, especially after the college announced it was turning off heat and water to the buildings this fall. (A second alumni group is raising funds to file suit to stop the closure.)

Many locals would like to see the campus remain an educational institution, and proposals have included turning it into a boarding school for international students or an indigenous college.

But in late August, when the academic year usually begins, there was a “different energy” in Aurora, said Blom, the minister. Her home overlooks the college, and many afternoons, she used to hear the voices of students echoing up the hillside.

Now, silence. “That’s very hard,” she said.