When Your College Is Staring Death in the Face

This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “Surviving as a Small College,” available in the Chronicle Store.

In 2020 Marlboro College closed, one of several small institutions to do so over that year in Vermont alone. Marlboro began in 1946; we just missed our 75th anniversary. It had been founded by a visionary educator and a small group of GIs, just home from the war and released from service. They settled on an old farm, renovating the three-story barn as a classroom building; they built in the morning and had classes in the afternoon.

By the time I graduated, in 1972, the roads were paved and there were some amenities, but the student-faculty ratio was still about 6:1. There were 175 students; everyone ate lunch together in the dining hall, including students, faculty members, the president, and the one maintenance person. The college community governed itself as a New England town meeting (complete with volunteer fire department). All students spent their junior and senior years working on an independent, interdisciplinary course of study, culminating in a project that was defended before the professors and other students. Much of the work was done in tutorials. We reveled in our identity as one of the smallest colleges in the country.

It sounds too good to be true, and I guess it was. I became a trustee in 2008, and some time after that it became clear (at least in hindsight) that we were in trouble. In our final year before crying uncle, we enrolled only 39 new students. Our accrediting association continued to praise the quality of our pedagogy but became increasingly concerned as we drew from our endowment to meet our budget. We were in danger of being put on probation, which would have made it even more difficult to attract students.

Few experiences are more painful than being a trustee of your alma mater when it is staring death in the face. Because we still had enough endowment money to survive for a few more years, we faced a hard choice. We could: fight to the last penny, risking an implosion ending in bankruptcy and chaos, but maybe saving the college; leverage our remaining endowment as a “dowry” to make a deal to merge with another institution; or close the college in a dignified way.

Those are choices that trustees of small colleges across the country increasingly face. Since 2016, nearly 100 colleges have either closed or merged. Many more are in financial peril. Trustees must figure out if they are acting in the best interests of their institutions, if they are letting personal feelings unduly influence their decisions, and if they’ll know if and when it’s time to let the institution die.

As I had learned in my board orientation, being a trustee meant “holding the college in trust.” A previous president had often declared, There must be a Marlboro. But what did that mean? Was it any educational enterprise that occupied that campus and bore that name? Or were there pedagogical changes so drastic that the institution would no longer be the same entity? Did the institution equal the current faculty, staff, and students, or was it a more abstract educational mission?

At one point, when the clouds were gathering on the horizon, I engaged in a thought experiment. What, I wondered, if we had a choice? What if some college in Oregon were to offer to adopt Marlboro’s educational mission, our pedagogy, our name, our traditions, and our method of governance? It would mean leaving our beloved campus and accepting that few of our students, faculty, or staff would be interested in moving to Oregon. Or … we could stay on our campus, teach out our current students, and continue to employ all our staff and faculty members by turning ourselves into an online college with an emphasis on business. On the one hand, the mission would survive, but the people and campus would be sacrificed. On the other, the location and people would be protected, but the mission would be changed beyond recognition.

To whom did we owe our first duties? Many alumni and emeriti faculty members were outraged by our final choice to close the institution and merge with Emerson College, a large institution in Boston. Emerson offered a very generous deal: All tenured and tenure-track employees would be given full employment at their same status; all students would be allowed to complete their degrees at Emerson, still paying Marlboro’s very low tuition.

Our faculty and endowment would go toward strengthening Emerson’s liberal-arts offerings and creating a Marlboro Institute that would emphasize interdisciplinary, self-directed study. But just as in the thought experiment, it meant trade-offs. We would have to sell the campus. As a result, much of the college’s identity — which was tiny and rural — would be lost.

There were serious tensions between alumni, current students, faculty members, and townspeople. Many alumni and faculty emeriti were bitter that we were “betraying the dream” and accused the board of a failure of nerve. Current students and faculty members were mostly relieved to know that they would get their degrees and keep their jobs. Social media was predictably ugly, but one alumnus expressed a rather startling point of view: Given how many alumni that Marlboro had produced over the years, compared with the fairly small number of current students, faculty, and staff, how could we justify putting the interests of the latter over the former? In that view, each graduate of the college counted equally with each current stakeholder. But was that the correct view? And did it matter whether individual graduates had supported the college over the years?

Another stakeholder was the town of Marlboro, with its population of under 2,000. Many townspeople were alumni or former employees; residents enjoyed access to the campus’s ski and hiking trails, library, and cultural activities. Zoning laws restricted the 500-acre campus to noncommercial purposes, but there wasn’t consensus on how it should be used.

In addition, the college was landlord to the Marlboro Music School and Festival. The festival had been founded on our campus in 1951, and we were close partners in many endeavors. We had recently signed a new, 99-year lease. It seemed clear to me, at least, that if we sold the campus, we had a duty to find a buyer who would be a responsible landlord to the festival.

From the beginning of the process, I struggled to make sense of what moral duties I had as a trustee of a nonprofit. One of the few helpful resources I found was David H. Smith’s 1995 book, Entrusted. Smith describes three core principles of trusteeship, which I tried to apply to the decisions we had to make at Marlboro.

Fidelity. Fidelity could mean loyalty to a lot of things: the institution’s mission, its traditions, its donors. But I thought it should mean loyalty to the people whose immediate lives would be affected by our decision: current faculty, staff, and students. For them, a merger was the right way to go. Had we chosen to fight to the last penny and lost, our current students would probably have been fine, but any new ones we had accepted would suffer. Additionally, faculty members would be facing unemployment; Marlboro’s teaching-intensive culture did not set up faculty members to easily get academic jobs elsewhere, in a more research-competitive environment.

Common good. How did our institution contribute to the wider good of society? If our society was higher education, and we were a beacon for a specific kind of individualized, interdisciplinary education, then our death would be tragic. But in the end I came around to the viewpoint of another board member. Her eye was fixed on the future of liberal-arts education in America. For her, the important thing was that, by moving to Emerson, we kept alive the kernel of at least some of that, and planted seeds in new soil.

Community of interpretation. The founders of any nonprofit have a vision for the institution, and as years pass, and circumstances change, it is up to the trustees to interpret how the original vision can be reconciled with the overall good of society in the future.

In our case, it was clear from reading the papers and memoirs of the founding generation that self-governance and civic engagement were indispensable parts of Marlboro’s vision. To quote the college’s founder, Walter Hendricks, the aim at Marlboro was to “promote democracy not merely as a subject but as an objective.” Town meetings were the embodiment of that democracy in action. Here the college community gathered to debate “life together”: issues like cars and pets on campus, dormitory behavior, and smoking policies. The experience of the entire campus community — all of us able to fit into the dining hall, everyone with one vote (the president got voted down more than once) — addressing those issues with passion and civility was pretty inspiring.

However, there was no way town meetings could survive a merger with a larger college. Merging with another tiny, idealistic rural college was pointless — two sinking ships were no better than one. A larger college would have no history of this kind of self-governance, and probably little taste for it. Therefore, if self-governance were a nonnegotiable piece of the “mission,” merger could not be the right choice.

We decided to merge with Emerson. The Music Festival bought the campus. All but two of our faculty members chose to make the move, and about two-thirds of our students followed to Emerson. The final class of transfer students has just graduated. Only one staff member was invited to Emerson, but because we closed with plenty of money left in the coffers, we could provide staff members a generous severance program. Two of the college trustees have joined the Emerson board.

Were we loyal to our stakeholders? Some of our alumni would say no, but virtually all the faculty members and students who were directly affected by the merger would say yes. Were we loyal to the original mission, of being “about” democracy? In some sense yes, although in a different way. “Doing democracy” as a small group of flannel-shirted quasi-Athenians is gone, but some of that commitment survives in Emerson’s commitment to using communication education to foster democracy. Twenty-plus faculty members going to Emerson as a cohesive group was an effective way of transplanting at least some of what made Marlboro special. The Marlboro ethos will hopefully become part of Emerson’s DNA.

This was the most excruciating experience of my life, as an alumna and a trustee. Trustees of private colleges don’t serve for money or glory or to further a political agenda; they serve because of their love for the institution. To have that institution fail on their watch is indescribably painful. At our final meeting, many trustees broke down in tears.

With small, private colleges facing challenges thick and fast, it is easy to be preoccupied with the immediate pressures that face us. Student debt and budget shortfalls, demographic cliffs, Supreme Court decisions, and political brickbats from the left and the right are more than enough to keep any board member up at night. But precisely because so many colleges are facing possible existential crises, it is essential that we take the time to ask foundational questions: What is the core of our institution’s identity? What is the sine qua non of our college, the thing(s) without which it would cease to be itself and become something else?

And if a college cannot survive, then who or what do you try to save? What kind of moral contract does a college have with its students, faculty, employees, alumni, and others? The time has long passed to begin to take those questions seriously.