In Birmingham, Ala., 192 acres of historic brick buildings and expansive green quads will soon sit empty. The city hopes it won’t be for long.
Birmingham-Southern College, which has operated on its city-adjacent campus for more than 125 years, announced last month its imminent closure. The college’s gradual demise, which began with financial troubles over a decade ago, made the announcement no less painful for the people of Birmingham.
Residents hope another Alabama institution will purchase the property so it doesn’t end up abandoned, wasting away in disrepair like a locally infamous nearby hospital, which closed in 2008 and sat empty for more than a decade. But it’s not up to them.
When a college shuts its doors, as several small, private institutions have done in recent years, leaders have to grapple with a very concrete logistical issue: What to do with acres of idyllic stretches of green space, ready-to-use facilities, and historic architecture that will soon have no occupants.
Most of the time, a campus is sold off to another college. Other times, it’s more complicated. Sometimes campuses are redeveloped — as luxury resorts, office parks, or affordable-housing complexes. Some are razed. Others are abandoned. Regardless of what a campus becomes, plans often take years to come to fruition. Leaders must ask themselves what their campus can be, if it’s not a college.
The Chronicle spoke to several experts about why it can be so hard to figure it out. Here are some of the recurring issues they identified.
Local residents give pushback.
Even in urban communities like Birmingham, a city has a vested social and economic interest in the well-being of a college. This interest is heightened in rural areas, where a college is often the center of a community’s economy.
“They don’t want to lose the college campus, so in many cases, the local community sees it as a loss,” said Brad Noyes, executive vice president of Brailsford & Dunlavey, a firm that advises colleges on their space needs and resources. Residents will often oppose any new effort to redevelop the campus because “any new thing is less desirable than what was previously there,” Noyes said.
When a shutdown is unavoidable, no one quite knows what residents want the campus to become, said Lynn Priddy, president and chief executive of Claremont Lincoln University and a former vice president for accreditation services at the Higher Learning Commission. That’s because residents “really don’t know who owns what in their own community.”
College leaders also generally don’t do an adequate job of communicating their plans with the surrounding municipality, or including residents in the conversation when looking at options for the future of a campus, Priddy said.
“Presidents of a lot of the institutions that are most likely to close rarely are meeting with the leaders of the municipality to prepare them and to talk through what this means,” Priddy said.
And when colleges don’t give communities the ample time they need to ready themselves for the loss — Birmingham-Southern only gave notice two months before closure — residents may feel blindsided. The result is a less favorable outcome for the city, Noyes said.
The legal system slows things down.
Formally closing a college takes a long time, and a lot of money. While an institution undergoes that process, a campus may sit empty for several years.
Filing for bankruptcy is done in several phases and can take months. Meanwhile, an institution must consider other costly factors involved with closing, like severance for faculty and staff members, and paying off liabilities or legal expenses, Noyes said.
If leaders are looking to maximize profit from selling their land, rezoning a campus to allow for commercial or residential development is a very public process, Noyes said, and may increase tension with the community, lengthening the process even further.
Survival Odds
A few metrics can shed some light, but the most important ones often remain hidden.
“There’s an interconnectedness between a local community and an institution that is material,” Noyes said. “If you are then going to go back to that same community and ask for a rezoning to increase the value of your land that you’re selling to a developer, that is a complicated conversation.”
Cazenovia College found a workaround to this challenge when it closed its Madison County, N.Y., campus in the spring of 2022, one that both prevented disuse and allowed it time to find a suitable buyer: In July 2023, the New York State Police announced it would lease the majority of the property to use as a temporary training facility while the campus remained on the market.
There can be few viable buyers.
Selling a campus at its full value to an individual or an organization has often proven difficult and time-consuming for colleges shutting their doors, Noyes said.
“The number of buyers for a whole campus that fully value the campus itself is just very low,” he said. “It takes a lot of time to find a buyer that is able to and interested in purchasing an entire campus anywhere near the value of the buildings and the land.”
If an institution waits until it reaches an extremely dire financial state before beginning to look for buyers, the chances of finding a suitable buyer and working together to create a fleshed-out plan for the campus’s future become increasingly slim.
“It’s kind of like dying before you have a will,” Priddy said. “You wait far too long, and then you haven’t had the proactive … conversations.”
If the process of finding a buyer and soliciting community feedback is rushed, then the consequences could be devastating to a community. In Bristol, Va., the campus of Virginia Intermont College has sat in disrepair since the institution closed in 2014. A Chinese entrepreneur purchased the campus at auction in 2016 and promised to reopen it in 2020 as a business school, which never came to fruition. With no purview over the property and an owner with no close ties to the community, city leaders can do little to address the campus buildings’ shattered windows and collapsed ceilings or the property’s overgrown grass.
“That is not an uncommon occurrence,” Noyes said. “There are buyers out there who are looking for larger parcels of land, often without an intent to develop them in the immediate future.”
Sometimes a campus closure opens another door.
Chatfield College, a small, private rural institution in St. Martin, Ohio, which closed in January 2023, tried to do things differently. The college’s leaders met with community members and groups and sent news releases directly to the community to keep them apprised of the closure.
“In these rural communities, a lot of times what you see is all negative news. Places are closing down, jobs are going away. Nothing is coming in, everything is going out,” said Robert Elmore, the former president of Chatfield College. “It was not pleasant news. [But] it wasn’t a shock. It wasn’t an absolute surprise.”
Chatfield College used what was left of its endowment to become the Chatfield Edge, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting first-generation and nontraditional students from the area through postsecondary education.
And Elmore, now the nonprofit’s executive director, has ambitions to eventually house several community-serving programs at the campus, turning the former college into a place dedicated to improving the lives of people in the surrounding area. He hopes to add economic and work-force development programs, a foster-care program, a women-in-transition program to assist formerly incarcerated or rehabilitated women, and an educational farming operation.
“That would just be huge for Chatfield,” Elmore said. “Like a big shot in the arm. Almost back to the good old days, so to speak, when this was a really flourishing campus.”
The closure of a historic college like Birmingham-Southern doesn’t mean its storied campus is necessarily doomed. College leaders just need more open lines of communication with the municipal representatives and local residents, Priddy said. If institutions understand the needs of the community, they can address them “in new and novel ways” with campus real estate.
At the Chatfield Edge, Elmore believes proactive conversation with the community and creative use of campus space have been critical to preserving Chatfield College’s educational legacy.
“This is the way we deliver mission in the future,” Elmore said. “We’re not going to hold on to the past.”
