Now that our country is lodged in the slow-grinding maw of recession, we can assume there will be plenty of casualties. Businesses by the hundreds or thousands, large and small, will wither like endangered plants pushed too far under harsh conditions. Soon to follow, governments of towns, cities, and states will suffer undeservedly, as will nonprofit organizations — hospitals, museums, community centers — regardless of the value of their services. Higher-education institutions, those with large endowments as well as those with not-so-large ones, will have changes forced on them, temporarily at least.
And somewhere in that miserable mix, my little college is supposed to die.
Higher-education analysts have predicted it: The global financial shambles will cause the closing or merger of a growing number of colleges. At the top of the endangered list, rural colleges: That would be me. And tuition-dependent: Me again. With endowments you could stuff into your back pocket: Guilty. A history of operating deficits: What can I say? And small, especially small, colleges: Yikes!
My college is so rural that it's not close to anything. (Here in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, there is not even a word for "traffic.") Tuition is our lifeblood. What's left of our endowment I could fit into a thimble. A genuinely balanced budget is not wishful thinking, like winning the lottery; it is a goal, like climbing Mount Everest. And among the tiny minority of independent colleges with fewer than 750 students, mine, with 100 students, may be the smallest.
Even with ambitions to grow to all of 125, we have no models, fiscal or curricular, to follow. But there are dire warnings, pronouncements of imminent doom, usually offered up with a disturbing example from the past. A popular one is too close to home: In the late 70s, Windham College in Putney, Vt., shut its doors and turned off the heat. In a few years, the red squirrels took over. By the time the campus was finally bought, rain was pouring through a library skylight and flowing down the central staircase.
At least three other liberal-arts colleges in Vermont are among the nation's smallest. For me, their histories ring with tales of loss, yes — but also of survival, of emergence, of strength, of accomplishment.
The first, Marlboro College, is my alma mater and also where I worked as an administrator for 19 years. In the late 1980s, Marlboro was down to 165 students and had $200,000 in the bank, enough to cover a couple of paydays. Bennington College, just 30 miles west and more than a decade older, was just as fragile but better known. It didn't matter. Both were on the ropes. Goddard College, too, was losing undergraduates and bleeding money.
Compared with my college, those are mature institutions, with 60 or 70 years of experience in undergraduate education and their most difficult years behind them. Today, Marlboro and Bennington have achieved something close to fiscal security, and their national reputations are deservedly robust. Goddard found a different way to maintain its progressive mission and successfully concentrates on graduate studies.
This is what you learn: While economic slumps might shutter a business, at these small, mission-driven colleges, such downturns provide impetus to change, adjust, work harder. It is management by tenacity. This fall, two well-respected foundations that focus on education shut their doors to my college, but not on the merits of a proposal. One foundation turned us down because we are too poor, the other because we are too small. You shake it off. You move on. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you keep moving, keep teaching, keep to your mission.
You learn to do your part and take up old battles, like fighting the simplistic and ill-conceived notions that the education obtained at a small college is less than that delivered by a large college, and that wealth and status equal quality. To us, wealth represents longevity; it increases the odds that you will persist — that's all. And status is merely a perception.
You learn, too, that it is only institutional character and educational quality that ultimately drive, and save, small colleges: a distinctive curriculum, expertly taught; a philosophy of education, articulately expressed; engaged students seeking their strengths; inquisitive teachers serving as mentors. That is really all we have to offer to compete with the long-lived behemoths of our industry. That and philanthropy, of course — our sun and moon, our small collection of the like-minded and determined.
We can cobble a fix to almost any of the inevitable but unpredictable new threats that will arise. We will rely on our strengths, and luckily we have some not listed by those who are engraving our headstones. Maybe those strengths are the wrong strengths for this moment. Maybe they are the perfect ones to match the day.
But we are now in the thick of a crazy slow-motion blizzard that is not going to abate anytime soon. We are in the middle of it: a small, young, rural, tuition-driven, endowment-lacking college, apparently swaddled in the institutional weaknesses that are killers in such terrible weather. Character-building weather — that's the only way I'm thinking about it.
William R. Wootton is president of Sterling College, in Craftsbury Common, Vt.
0 comments:
Post a Comment