BURLINGTON — Mike Smith needs people to write checks. The dollar amount doesn’t matter — he just needs cash. Now.
Smith is the interim leader at Burlington College, the 213-student college on Lake Champlain that is in deep financial trouble. The school’s president, Christine Plunkett, resigned two weeks ago. The college is on academic probation and has struggled to make ends meet since it bought a $10 million lakefront campus in 2010.
Smith is an expert in turnarounds. His short-term goal for Burlington College is fundraising. Long-term success will depend on increasing enrollment, probably by 30 or 40 students per year, he said.
But the only thing that will make any of that work, Smith said in his first interview with the media on Wednesday, is if the greater Burlington community decides Burlington College is worth saving.
“If I get a good community response, it’s viable long term. If I don’t get a good community response then we have to look at it,” he said.
Smith is in hyperdrive. College staff are receiving emails from him at 4:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. He knows he won’t last forever at this pace, but he doesn’t need to. He has 90 days.
“We need people to write checks. We need people to write $1,000 checks, $10,000 checks, $100,000 checks, $1 million if they’ve got it,” he said. He would like to bring in $1 million by the end of June, he said.
In his first week, Smith has met with staff and faculty. He has sent letters to parents and students. He is working on a budget and has been briefed by a developer who wants to build homes on half of the property. Everything is on the table at this point.
“I have to take the best deal for the institution,” he said.
Long term, Burlington College needs a more professional admissions department that can hire recruiters to travel across the state and around the country and use data to target students who want an alternative education, he said.
“I’ve always liked the mission here in terms of nontraditional students and veterans,” he said. That’s, in part, because of his own experience.
Smith received a college diploma in 1982 from the University of Vermont — 11 years after he graduated from high school. A self-described juvenile delinquent in high school, Smith had no money or desire to go to college, he said. Instead he became a Navy SEAL.
Burlington College was serving students like him since before it was cool, and “that innovation still is here today,” he said.
Despite his bumpy beginning, Smith has an impressive resume. He has served as deputy state treasurer, Secretary of Administration, Secretary of Human Services and, most recently, as state president for FairPoint Communications, until he retired last year.
Prime real estate
As he talked Wednesday, Smith glanced at a “cheat sheet” to make sure he correctly named several majors. Students study subjects including film, woodworking, psychology and can create their own majors.
“But not for Burlington College, some of these young adults would not be going to college,” he said.
From his sparsely furnished office, Smith looked out a picture window at sparkling Lake Champlain and the Adirondack mountains peeking from behind lines of clouds.
The school sits on perhaps the most valuable piece of undeveloped land in the city, one developers in 2010 eyed but the school grabbed.
One of the few items adorning Smith’s bookshelf is a map of a proposal by developer Eric Farrell to build single family homes and apartments on 16 acres of school property. No deal has been signed, Smith said.
Burlington College bought the land and a large brick facility from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington in 2010 for $10 million. Jane Sanders, the wife of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was president then and it was her vision to expand the school eventually to 750 students. It has about 200 now.
Sanders and then-finance director Plunkett, who later became president, promised lenders they would not only steadily increase enrollment, but actively fundraise, including a plan to get $2.7 million at the start.
But those plans fell through as leadership changed and staff left and were let go, including Sanders. The school has now fallen behind on payments to the diocese, which lent it $3.65 million in addition to $6.7 million borrowed from People’s Bank.
“You know what people usually ask me?” Smith said. “‘Should we have done the land deal?’ And you know what I say on that? ‘It is what it is. I can’t look back. I don’t have time to look back.’”
Can Burlington College survive?
The interim president wouldn’t say. What he did say is that its future depends on community support. And community money. He hasn’t gotten any checks yet.
Smith said he will be honest with potential donors.
“We will try to the best of our ability to make sure that we do everything that’s possible to make this organization successful,” he said.
In the meantime, Smith said he thinks the school has enough cash to pay its bills. If it didn’t, he said he would say so.
Within the school, Smith wants to help staff get out of fire-fighting mode and back to what they do best.
“This organization is moving from crisis to crisis to crisis and no organization can continue to do that and be effective,” he said.
The school is on two-year academic probation with the regional accrediting agency, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Burlington College officials must submit periodic reports to NEASC; on Tuesday, the school reported that it has 213 students, including one dual-enrollment student and five early college students, Smith said.
Smith is part of a three-person interim team, formed by the board over Labor Day weekend that includes former KPMG managing partner David Coates and UVM economics professor and former provost Jane Knodell.
Plunkett resigned the Friday before Labor Day after a series of news stories about her tenure and votes of no confidence from faculty, staff and students.
She unexpectedly blurted out her resignation in the parking lot of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce after a brief exchange with students, who protested during a meeting of the school’s board of trustees.
Smith would not have accepted the job as interim leader if not for Coates and Knodell, two “extremely talented” partners, he said. The call for help came over Labor Day weekend while he was at the beach on Isle La Motte, he said.
He said he didn’t know whether Plunkett received a severance package.
According to a fiscal year 2013 audit of the school’s finances, Plunkett had a contract through June 1, 2015. The audit says the school would have been liable for all salary and benefits if Plunkett did not resign voluntarily.
Jane Sanders, who resigned in 2011, was paid a year’s worth of accrued sabbatical plus retirement and other benefits totaling about $200,000, according to the audit and Sanders.
The 2013 audit indicated uncertainty about whether the school would be financially viable long term. Auditors are scheduled to come soon to perform the fiscal 2014 audit, Smith said.
The college has an operating budget of about $5 million. Nearly all of its income comes from tuition. Its endowment fund contains about $33,000, after the school borrowed $129,000 from that fund to pay operating costs, according to the 2013 audit.
Perhaps as a foreshadowing of great things to come, or a symbol of the money the school needs to raise, the right half of the diocese building stands unused at the moment because it needs $2 million in renovations before it is safe to use.
The only thing filling the empty half Wednesday was several pieces of dusty furniture and a student photography exhibition — photographs of the college’s study-abroad program to Cuba.
Within these walls or not, Smith said he hopes the school will survive.
“There’s an enthusiasm in here that needs to be tapped … that needs to sort of go out of these walls,” he said.
Note: Members of the Burlington College board of trustees and the student union did not return calls seeking comment for this story. This article was updated at 11:37 a.m. Thursday.
