Dear Commons Community,
The Chronicle of Higher Education had a featured article yesterday of how small-town Aurora, New York was coping with the closure of Wells College, its economic and social-cultural engine. Here is an excerpt from The Chronicle article
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.”
As the article implies, college closings in small towns will accelerate in the coming years leaving many of these communities devastated.
Tony
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