Constance Weems, who is almost 90 years old, has kept a diary for one brief period of her life: a two-day stretch in May of 1991. Scrawled in pencil on lined notebook pages that have been stapled together, Weems’ makeshift diary recounts the days after Tuesday, May 14, 1991, when she and 16 others were laid off in a round of job cuts at Middlebury College, her employer of 11 years. The diary, along with stacks of letters, news clippings and photographs, is tucked into a grey-green, weathered shoebox kept on her bookshelf.
“This wasn’t just administrative fact; it was a story. And I think that’s maybe one reason why I’ve kept stuff. Because I thought stories like this should be told,” Weems explained on a morning earlier this year as she pored through her self-made archive of this moment, remembered bitterly by some in the Middlebury community as “Black Tuesday” and unknown to or forgotten by many more.
The image of stability that had long characterized staff life at the college shattered in the wake of these layoffs, which were announced so abruptly and executed so negligently that they made national news that year. Headlines described a community reeling from a round of shocking staff cuts that caught 17 people — 14 of whom were women, many nearing retirement age — largely unawares. The college’s use of a Chicago-based outplacement firm to manage the process was another major source of outrage. Black Tuesday set off a dramatic backlash at Middlebury and eventually spurred the resignation of the college’s president, Timothy Light.
Fears that population decline would give rise to reduced enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities influenced the prevailing belief among Middlebury administrators in 1991 that the college needed to cut costs quickly. In the intervening years, though, the people involved have wondered whether the layoffs were necessary to begin with, as the financial woes foreseen by higher education prognosticators failed to materialize in the 1990s.
But now, as memories of Black Tuesday fade, the same conditions that gave rise to the 1991 layoffs have reappeared — and this time, the material consequences are very real. At Middlebury, budgetary shortfalls have prompted a new wave of staff reductions, and many colleges across Vermont and New England have found themselves in full-blown crisis. Schools like Green Mountain College and Burlington College have been forced to shut their doors for good amid drops in enrollment, and even venerable institutions like Hampshire College in Massachusetts risk meeting a similar end.
[Listen to the Deeper Dig on why Vermont colleges are closing.]
Thick flakes of snow began to fall outside the window of Weems’ apartment in a Montpelier retirement complex as she revisited the moment that has since been recorded in the college’s history books. Weems’ job loss set off an especially strong outcry in the tight-knit French Language School where she worked. In the ensuing weeks, she received a flood of letters from colleagues and students commiserating and offering condolences. As the layoffs received more widespread media coverage, Weems got swept up in the flurry, quoted time and again by reporters to represent the staff perspective.
Fifty miles south and 28 years later, back on campus, employee life at Middlebury was recently thrown into question again. The college’s current round of staff cuts concluded in late May as the academic year came to a close. College administrators, apparently taking lessons from Black Tuesday, conducted this process slowly and publicized it widely. But as college employees voiced lingering anxieties about the recent cuts, memories of 1991 resurfaced, reminding administrators how even the most well-intentioned decisions can backfire, and who suffers the consequences when things go wrong.
Before the Middlebury community had any inkling of staff cuts, college administrators and experts in the field of higher education were uneasy. The 1990s seemed to represent a new and challenging era economically. A threat of declining enrollment pushed colleges and universities across the country, particularly in the Northeast, to scale back and reduce expenditures. “Downsizing” became a buzzword for strategic long-term planning.
“There has been a sense over the years that higher education was in a period of decline in terms of enrollment, particularly in certain parts of the country — New England being right up there,” explained Judith Block McLaughlin, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who runs the school’s yearly seminar for new college presidents.
A July 1991 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, focused on the layoffs at Middlebury, situates the Middlebury saga in a broader “era of fiscal desperation.” It reads:
“Middlebury’s story is a dark tale from the front as colleges and universities —some for the first time in their history — struggle to find the proper way to reduce their work forces in an era of fiscal desperation. Rising costs and dwindling resources have spurred dozens of colleges to lay off scores of workers, many of them long-time employees.”
At first glance Middlebury’s imposing campus may not square with this “dark tale” of downsizing. The college towers over Addison County, with its hilltop buildings rising high above the cornfields that dominate the largely agricultural surrounding area.
The college, which has long been the county’s largest employer, plays an outsized role in the area’s economic health. But periods of upheaval at the college ripple through the community unevenly. While professors and administrators tend to come here from elsewhere, college workers are largely Vermonters, raised in nearby towns and drawn in by the school’s gravitational pull. As a result, administrative actions at the college make their effects felt far beyond the confines of the campus.
“The firing of staff affected the town in a way that the firing of faculty would likely not,” said Bob Buckeye, who worked as the college’s archivist in 1991 and is now semi-retired and living in Middlebury.
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, a gap began to widen between Middlebury’s global aspirations and its ground-level reality in Addison County. Although the college has long coveted an outsized reputation, many today point to the transformational presidency of Olin Robison, who arrived in 1975, as the period during which the college began to earnestly cultivate a spot on the world stage.
Robison, a Louisiana native and ordained Baptist minister, had served in the State Department under Lyndon Johnson, and brought to Middlebury ambitions on a grand scale. Under Robison’s watch, the college expanded its curriculum, launched a high-profile student exchange with the Soviet Union, and established new schools abroad before he announced his retirement in 1989.
Robison also reshaped the Vermont campus. During his tenure, Middlebury renovated its football stadium, remodeled its student center and broke ground on an $18-million arts center — a costly building spree that some now blame for the financial issues that followed.
Compounding the college’s spurt of spending was a nationwide economic recession — and a seemingly dire climate facing the entire higher education industry.
“There was a belief — turned out to be mistaken — that the ’90s were going to be a very rough time financially for higher education,” explained John McCardell, who then worked as Middlebury’s provost. McCardell often thinks back to a moment when the chair of Middlebury’s board of trustees warned that “the ’90s aren’t going to be like the ’80s.”
“By that, he meant that looking at the demographic data, looking at the state of the economy, it was going to be a much more challenging time financially in higher education, and that some form of austerity likely lay in the future,” said McCardell, reached by phone in Tennessee where he now serves as president and vice-chancellor at Sewanee: The University of the South.
As the years have passed, the details of Middlebury’s financial concerns during this period have grown muddled. According to news reports at the time, the college was facing a $2.8-million budget deficit — a claim that many today still remember. Others, like John McCardell, admit to having little memory of the college’s exact budgetary situation.
With that uncertainty has come more speculation about the circumstances of the hiring of Robison’s successor, Timothy Light. Light, a native of Kalamazoo, Mich. and a scholar of Chinese language and religion, was serving as acting president of Kalamazoo College when a headhunting company contacted him in the spring of 1990 about filling the vacancy at Middlebury.
Since 1991, many at Middlebury have circulated a theory that Light was no more than a “hired gun,” brought on by the board of trustees with the explicit mandate of cutting costs dramatically. Such speculation littered the pages of The Campus, the college’s student newspaper, in the aftermath of Light’s resignation the following fall.
“It seems to me that the board signed on Light for a purely transitional role,” wrote one student in an op-ed. “Someone who could take up the slack and clear the way for the next president.”
But such speculation had not yet developed around the autumn of 1990, when Light took the helm at Middlebury amid great fanfare, including an inaugural parade. As community members spoke highly of Light’s work at Kalamazoo, his reception on campus “seemed rhapsodic even to the verge of giddiness,” according to “The College on the Hill,”a 1999 book on the school’s history. If the economic anxiety pervading other universities existed at Middlebury, it was outweighed by the excitement that greeted the new president.
“When the academic year started, nobody in the faculty or the administration that I know of would ever have imagined that things would turn out the way that they did,” recalled John Emerson, who worked as a math professor and later worked on the staff reduction effort, serving under Light. “There was this sense of optimism and forward-looking.”
But Light, now retired and splitting his time between Michigan and San Francisco, insists that he was not hired with any staff-reduction mandate. In fact, he claims that there was no budget deficit at all — only a years-old directive from the board of trustees to cut costs wherever possible. It was not until months into his presidency, Light said, that the board informed him that more drastic action needed to be taken to reduce staff compensation — by far the school’s largest expense.
Looking back, administrators struggle to recall a moment during the fall of 1990 when cost-cutting shifted from a vague goal to an urgent effort. One precipitating factor, though, was Light’s formation of a budget and personnel committee, whose four members included Emerson and McCardell. Light asked the committee to identify areas, such as staff compensation, where spending could be reduced.
“President Light meets with us and says, about as directly as he can, ‘I don’t want you to avoid making tough decisions about personnel,’” McCardell remembered.
So committee members began reaching out to staff department heads across the institution, asking where they would make cuts if they had to. “That produced a list of potential staff reductions. And we saw that list and I think were, as anyone would be, uneasy about it,” McCardell said. “Partly because of the numbers, partly because of the seniority, partly because of the simple composition of that list.”
That composition was dominated by women, many of whom had worked at the college for many years and were nearing retirement. At one point, committee members stepped in, hoping to convince Light to avoid staff reductions altogether by presenting an alternate plan.
“We were talking one day, and said, ‘You know, for our own good and for our own self-respect, the president has insisted that we present him with a budget that includes staff reduction, and so we will do that. But, we are also going to give him an Option B, and that Option B will be a way of balancing the budget without letting anyone go,” McCardell remembered. “We presented both of those options. And we know which one he chose.”
By this time, relations had deteriorated between Light and his colleagues. Rumors circulated on campus that Light had an explosive temper that he took out on his subordinates, and those around Light found his management style to be aloof and autocratic. The 1999 history book quotes an unnamed faculty member, recalling a meeting with Light:
“We met with the president for at least an hour, and he talked at us for most of it. He seemed as uneasy as we did — but he plainly worked to keep control. At the end, in a weird way, he cut off the so-called discussion and looked around the circle of us, fixing one after another with an intense, prolonged, and very puzzling stare. No one knew how to react appropriately.”
After watching their alternative plan be rejected by Light, his subordinates say they struggle in retrospect to imagine how else they could have put a stop to a process that had already been set in motion. At that point, Emerson said, members of the committee were “not free to express our own views publicly,” and recalled feeling frustrated and helpless.
McCardell remembered feeling equally powerless. “Let’s suppose we’d all resigned. I don’t think it would’ve made a bit of difference,” he said. “I don’t think any of us were particularly proud of that moment. But I also think that this was going to happen no matter what.”
Light, though, now believes he could have found an alternate path.
“I think that was simply my fault,” Light said. “I’ve always regretted it and if I’d thought more carefully, really carefully, I would have prevented it from happening.”
But with no other options in sight at the time, administrators moved forward with staff cuts. They soon faced a roadblock: the group of academics had little clue how to actually implement them.
“We sat around the table saying, ‘Well, we don’t know how to let people go! We don’t know how to lay people off! We’ll probably just make a terrible mess of it if we have to do it,’” McCardell said.
Around that time, Stan Kemmerer, a 1965 graduate of Middlebury, made a routine sales call to the college on behalf of his employer: a Chicago-based outplacement firm named Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Challenger, well-known for facilitating large-scale layoffs in corporate settings including law firms and insurance companies, had little experience in small educational communities. But Kemmerer soon learned that the college happened to be in the early stages of staff reductions, and found interest on Middlebury’s side. By early spring, Challenger had consultants on the scene, advising Middlebury administrators.
Nonprofit institutions like Middlebury were new to Kemmerer, and the culture was an imperfect match for his style. In particular, he found unexpected resistance to Challenger’s approach, which was based on the concept of “tough love” — a term that has grown infamous at Middlebury in the ensuing years.
“Not-for-profits tend to have a somewhat simplistic view of compassion and love, which doesn’t entertain tough love, which is a very useful concept,” said Kemmerer, who still works as a vice president at Challenger.
And as he dealt with the Middlebury administrators, Kemmerer grew troubled by how often Light would interfere with the decisions of the budget and personnel committee. “They would go in one direction and then he would countermand it. And it would come without warning,” Kemmerer remembered.
In retrospect, Kemmerer can identify the moments in which things began to go wrong. The process began with the aim of cutting down on all non-essential work, rather than specific jobs held by individual people. Over time, though, those “person-blind” reductions evolved into a specific targeting of jobs held by long-tenured employees. Kemmerer believes that department heads charged with identifying positions to cut conflated this process with past staff reductions, which had made use of early retirement programs targeted at older employees. The end result was disproportionate harm inflicted on the 14 women whose jobs were eliminated — seven of whom were 58 or older.
“That was regarded, probably properly, as cruel,” Kemmerer said.
Making matters worse, the timeline for the layoffs, which Kemmerer hoped would extend into the summer, was condensed into a narrow window — the result, he says, of pressure from the board of trustees. This meant that the layoffs would take place before commencement, with the campus still fully populated — the recipe for a public relations disaster.
While Kemmerer was accustomed to “tough love,” he said the Middlebury administrators seemed unaware of how big a backlash such a strategy might cause. “For a period of a year or two, you’d better be prepared to be the biggest son of a bitch in the valley,” he said. “Because it’s going to be a hit.”
But Light now says he had doubts all along. McCardell, too, says he knew things were heading in a worrying direction.
“It’s not unlike tragedy, right? You see a tragedy play itself out on the stage and if the tragedian has been successful, the audience keeps wanting to get up on the stage and say, ‘No wait, stop! Don’t you know how this is going to work out?’” McCardell said. “And yet there it goes.”
By any measure, Connie Weems was overqualified for the job she lost without warning on Black Tuesday.
Her unassuming job title — secretary of the French Language School — belied the fact that she was fluent in that language, that she had once worked as a research analyst for the CIA, and had a doctorate in history from McGill University. But around 1980, Weems, a newly divorced single parent, needed to find work. Overqualified as she was, she still thrived in her position at the French School, which gave her intellectual stimulation and a chance to converse with students in a language she loved.
“It was the right job for that period in my life, which was a little bit difficult at the time,” Weems remembered. “They were good years.”
The first entry in her brief diary is dated Tuesday, May 14, 8:45 a.m.
John Berninghausen, Acting Director of the Language Schools, enters Sunderland Language Center with John McCardell, Provost of Middlebury College and Vice President for Academic Affairs. He points at me as he passes my office. (I call a cheery good morning!) A few seconds later McCardell came into my office (alone) and closed the doors. “I am sorry to tell you that your position has been eliminated. I would like you to come with me to a meeting of the people affected.” “Right now?” “Yes.” “May I have a few minutes?” “No.”
Weems sat in her living room in Montpelier and read aloud from the notes she remembers scribbling each night in the days following Black Tuesday. The news of her layoff, delivered by a visibly uneasy McCardell, left her stunned.
“He was as upset and embarrassed as I was, I think,” she said. “I had no clue. There were rumors flying around, but not me. You don’t believe that.”
One by one, across campus, the terminated workers were met at their desks, most by their immediate supervisors. Some, like Weems, were told their jobs no longer existed; others were simply told they needed to leave immediately, without explanation.
“They weren’t allowed to waste a minute. They weren’t allowed to get coats or sweaters or purses or personal possessions or anything,” said Judy Olinick, a staff member who worked as a coordinator for several academic departments. She and her husband, Mike, a math professor, would become vocal advocates for the laid-off staff in the coming weeks.
The supervisors, largely academics, had little notion of how to fire anyone — let alone a close colleague. Ron Rucker, the director of the college library, was charged with informing a 38-year veteran of the college that her job no longer existed.
“I was just beside myself,” Rucker said. “People felt betrayed.”
“It was one of the most uncomfortable things I have ever had to do,” McCardell remembered.
The now-former employees were shuttled in college vehicles to the Hadley Barn, a little-used building bordering the college’s golf course on the outskirts of campus. Weems, who was driven by McCardell in his own car, was greeted at the barn by Kemmerer.
Weems’ voice drips with disdain as she describes Kemmerer, whom she found intensely insincere. “He was the kind of person that you read about and you don’t think exists,” she said. “He behaved like a caricature in the comics of the bad guy. So full of himself, so on the defensive.”
[Kemmerer] takes my hand in both his and says soulfully that he is pleased to meet me. (Grrr!) I am one of 14 or 15 people in similar states of numbness, anger or shock – some in tears, some furious, some blank. Only one or two seem to have been aware that they might be fired.
Tim Light spoke first, with the employees seated before him. Weems wrote in her diary that Light’s speech was “hasty and awkward,” delivered without ever looking at the people whose fates he was responsible for changing.
“This is one of the hardest things any leader has to do,” Light began, according to a transcript of his prepared remarks. “That’s true for me.” After thanking employees for their service, he told them that “by acting promptly, we have saved programs and jobs.”
Light framed the layoffs as a symptom of the economic struggles facing other colleges in the region. “Later than most, Middlebury has faced the fact [that] it is not isolated from the pressures affecting higher education in general,” he said.
Looking back, Light remembers his remarks as truthful, if not exactly persuasive. “I used the usual explanations,” he recalled, “but I wasn’t trying to justify it beyond that. And I wasn’t trying to calm their anger, ‘cause that would’ve been phony. I would’ve been as angry as they were.”
Kemmerer spoke next. Weems recorded his words in her diary.
Kemmerer gives us a little (double)talk. His first word was not to phone our offices or colleagues at Middlebury, not to return to the office. If we have belongings we need immediately someone else will fetch them.
When we tell friends or family of our “outplacement” we should take a positive tone and not criticize the “company,” or it might jeopardize our job search. Giving even our closest friends a negative impression of the proceedings or a critical attitude towards our employers might have repercussions in our image as a future employee.
Our continued pay and benefits depend on our cooperation with the program organized by them, i.e. a three day seminar followed by weekly meetings during which we report on our job-search progress.
“That is not negotiation — that’s threat,” Weems said, looking up from her diary as she read aloud.
Kemmerer recalls the meetings with the “affecteds” proceeding much like they would at any other company.
“Some are angry, some are sanguine, some will say they saw it coming,” he said. “It was all over the map.”
In her diary, Weems describes “drifting in and out of many emotions,” and “feeling trapped by Kemmerer’s voice.” As former employees sought answers from Kemmerer, Weems documented the exchanges.
Question: What criteria for choosing us?
Answer: Don’t think about that. What difference could any answer make?
Question: We are trying to process a traumatic change in our lives and need information.
Answer: No need to know, just forget and look ahead.
Question: What will our benefits/departure package be?
Response: We can find that out after we have gone through the “outplacement” program.
When the seminar ended that day, employees were loaded into vans, driven to their homes, and told they were not allowed to return to their offices. Weems disregarded the warning, walked back to campus and met up with her colleagues from the language schools — “All in or near tears and very angry,” she wrote.
“I did every single thing they told me not to, with deliberate intention,” she recalled, smiling mischievously. “You could order a lot of things, but you don’t agree to erase yourself. At least, I didn’t.”
News of the layoffs did not rock the campus instantly. Students, in the middle of final exams, took several days to process what had happened. Staff, even those whose jobs appeared to be safe, feared retribution if they spoke out against the layoffs, according to Judy Olinick.
“People were like, ‘I could be next, they’re just going to start firing people,’” she said.
It was Mike Olinick who took the earliest action, writing a petition Tuesday night and circulating it among faculty and staff. The petition, signed by over 100 faculty and staff, made news in its own right for its incendiary language.
“Is this nightmare from Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia? No. This is Middlebury College in May, 1991,” the petition reads, after condemning the “Gestapo-like tactics” employed by the college.
Looking to publicize the layoffs beyond Vermont, library employee Pamela McClain called the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education to pitch articles. Over the ensuing months, both outlets would publish coverage of the events at Middlebury.
McClain then turned to more dramatic means of raising awareness. The following Friday, 10 days after the layoffs, McClain organized a protest to take place outside Old Chapel, the college’s administrative building, which houses its boardroom and the office of the president. Unbeknownst to McClain, the board of trustees had just arrived in town for their annual spring meeting, and were inside Old Chapel as the protest began.
“It was the most fabulous coincidence,” she said.
More than 400 faculty, staff, students and Middlebury residents marched down the hill from Mead Chapel, the college’s central and iconic gathering space, to the lawn facing Old Chapel. The marchers were dressed in black, some carrying signs bearing the names of the 17. A melancholic drum beat set the pace.
Having reached Old Chapel, organizers ascended its staircase to deliver speeches. Onlookers watch white-faced mimes perform a piece of “guerrilla theater,” organized by McClain, including an abstract re-enactment of staff members being fired and marched out of their offices.
News cameras rolled as Liane Barrera, a library employee who had served as president of the Middlebury College Staff Council, stood atop the staircase and condemned the layoffs. “Being a part of a small town has certain implications,” she said. “We need each other, so we must work together to solve our problems. Paramount in all things that treating people with respect and sensitivity. It is when we don’t deal with others respectfully that everything begins to crumble.”
Before long, those inside Old Chapel, including the president, came out to get a better look. Judy Olinick, who had led the procession of sign-holders, spotted Light. She approached him, and unsure of what to do next, decided to drop her sign at his feet.
“And then everybody who was behind me did the same thing,” she said.
A photograph published in the next day’s Burlington Free Press shows Light standing alone, running his hands through his hair with signs piled at his feet. “I stood out there with the people and they all yelled at me,” he remembered. “But I thought that was my duty.”
Those involved remember the protest as a collective release of the tensions that had built in the small community over the past several days. “That represented symbolically the attitudes of an awful lot of people in the community,” Emerson said, “not only the student body but in general.”
Much of the outrage, McClain explained, stemmed from the loss of the college’s image as a friendly, stable place to work. “Employment at Middlebury College was considered to be basically lifetime employment,” she said. “There were very few other businesses like there are now.”
With the layoffs came a newfound cynicism that had never before existed at the college. “One of the myths that got destroyed in this layoff process was the notion that we’re this happy family, or even a family,” remembered Mike Olinick.
Buckeye recalls feeling “distressed” after a neighbor of his, who was 62 and had a history of heart problems, lost her job in the layoffs. “She was hoping to hang on one more year so she could begin normal Social Security when she retired,” he said. “It seemed unfair that she could not be kept one more year.”
Anne Baldwin, one of the 17, is a native of Middlebury, and went to work at the college right out of high school. She stayed for six years before seeking employment elsewhere, eventually returning to the college in 1986 to take a job in data processing. For Baldwin, the job was as rewarding as it was necessary — until she abruptly lost it in the layoffs.
“It certainly was a surprise, something you didn’t expect the college to do,” she remembered. “You just didn’t figure that there was anyone there that would handle it the way it was handled.”
Baldwin, who was 60 at the time, said that she had planned to stay at Middlebury for several more years, since she enjoyed the stability of work at the college. After losing her job, Baldwin, who was nearing retirement age and supporting herself as well as her aging mother, struggled to find other steady employment nearby.
As for Weems, her self-described “rebellious” nature and spotlight in national media earned her the title of “cause-célèbre” among her French-speaking colleagues and friends. In the ensuing weeks, she received an outpouring of messages offering support and expressing outrage at the elimination of her position, which carried with it years of institutional knowledge that could not be so easily replaced.
“It really challenged a lot of people’s feelings. Middlebury’s an old college and it was founded by the town as opposed to some denomination,” reflected John Elder, a retired professor of English at the college. “There’d always been a sort of a contract where the college was a wealthy institution in a rural area which benefited from the quality of the environment and provided support for the surrounding towns.”
Elder believes this reciprocal contract, which he described as a defining characteristic of the community, was never the same after Black Tuesday. “Many people felt, including the faculty and certainly many of the people in the surrounding towns, that there was a broken trust,” he said.
On the administrative side, too, people emerged from Black Tuesday feeling wounded. In particular, McCardell and Kemmerer both took offense to the language used by Mike Olinick in the faculty petition, which compared the college’s actions to those taken by Nazi Germany.
“I resented that for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that my wife was born Jewish,” McCardell said. “I’ve never forgiven him for that.”
Days after the climactic protest on May 17, Middlebury’s campus began to empty out for the summer. Students completed their final exams, and the trustees left town after finishing their meetings.
But inside Old Chapel, administrators continued to wrestle with the aftershocks of the layoffs. The college community demanded more generous benefits packages for the 17 workers, and balked at the stipulation that the laid-off staff attend all of Challenger’s coaching sessions in order to receive benefits.
“It was a rough summer. The strategic planning process had essentially broken down,” McCardell said. “I think that moment really was the tipping point for Tim Light.”
During that summer, among the president and his fellow administrators, doubts bubbled to the surface about Light’s ability to serve effectively as president.
“In the spirit of doing the right thing I was ready to continue on,” Light remembered. “But grimly, at that point.”
Meanwhile, as the college refused to guarantee Weems retirement benefits, she explored the option of lodging a civil rights complaint alleging gender discrimination. Women had been so unevenly affected by the layoffs, Weems explained, because they largely filled the college’s secretarial positions at the time.
“That was before consciousness had been raised in women’s issues,” she said. “The staff was women and the men were in the upper echelons and the teaching staff.”
Although Weems’ potential lawsuit made headlines in local newspapers, she ultimately decided not to pursue it, having been told by lawyers that her odds of succeeding were slim.
“The advice I got was that we could make a splash but we probably wouldn’t get anywhere,” Weems said.
Now, she wonders whether she should have followed through with the civil rights complaint anyway. “I should have been a crusader,” she said. “I was mad enough to be for a while.”
By June, the force of the backlash had compelled administrators to offer a wider, more generous set of benefits packages to the laid-off employees. The group of 17 were given the chance to opt out of Challenger’s outplacement services, and promised cash bonuses based on their years of service.
Then, unexpectedly, Middlebury rehired five of the 17 who lost their jobs on Black Tuesday. Weems was one of them. Within months, she was back on campus, working in Old Chapel as an assistant to the Dean of Faculty, and later as assistant to the dean of the College.
But the jobs were dreary compared to her past work at the French School, and Weems chafed under the dean’s harsh management style. “He wanted me to be his stenographer and he pretty much told me to stay in my place and not try to doublethink him,” she said. “He didn’t want someone with a mind of their own, who was willing to act on their own. And I was not very conducive to changing my ways.”
As the new school year began in September, the Campus reported that staff across campus were “exploring ways to increase their input in administrative decisions” — including the possibility of forming a union. Staff including Buckeye and Judy Olinick would ultimately spend much of the next four years organizing a union drive — an effort that shut down in 1995 after failing to amass enough support among staff.
Then, as students were still moving back into their dorms, the college community was struck with more shocking news on Saturday, September 14: Light had resigned.
“For much of the past year I have, quite honestly, wondered if there was a good fit between myself and Middlebury College,” Light wrote in a letter placed in students’ mailboxes that morning, co-signed by the chair of the board of trustees. The letter also announced John McCardell’s appointment as interim president.
In the pages of the Campus, tight-lipped trustees refused to elaborate on the exact circumstances of Light’s resignation. Students expressed shock at Light’s sudden departure, just days after he had presided over convocation for the incoming class of freshmen.
“The student body is confused and angry and rumors abound,” read a Campus editorial. “If no scandal was involved, why will no one talk?”
Though described at the time as a mutual decision, Light recalled that his resignation was, in fact, requested by the board of trustees. “The trustees told me that they thought that should be it,” he said. “I was relieved.”
Light’s time at Middlebury, he now says, had been doomed from the start.
“I never really connected with Middlebury, and I realized that within a couple of weeks of having arrived on campus — that I’d made a terrible mistake,” he said. “I should’ve listened to those doubts better. Not that Middlebury’s not a great place. But it’s not a good fit for me, and I was not a good fit for them.”
McCardell, hastily inaugurated as acting president in a ceremony in Mead Chapel, took the helm amid what he described as “incredibly low morale” across campus. Yet staff, even those who viewed him as complicit in the layoffs, credit him with beginning to heal the wounds opened up by Black Tuesday over the course of his 13-year presidency.
“McCardell was very suave about always publicly thanking the staff, saying that he supported the staff,” Judy Olinick said. “So people felt reassured.”
Still, some of those who lost their jobs in 1991 struggled to put their lives back together in the ensuing years. On May 14, 1992, the one-year anniversary of the layoffs, Anne Baldwin sat down at her typewriter and addressed a letter to John McCardell. After congratulating him on his recent permanent appointment as president, Baldwin told McCardell how the loss of her job had continued to hold her back in life.
“From my past experience, and that of other family members, the College had always been a secure place of employment. Since I am self-supporting, I had hoped to finish my employment years to the time of retirement, in a job I thoroughly enjoyed, and looked forward to going to each day.
Needless to say, I was devastated by the news presented to me one year ago today, May 14, 1991. This came less than two months after it became necessary for my 93-year-old Mother, with whom I has always lived and cared for, especially during her declining years, to enter a Community Care facility.
As of this date, I have been unable to find part-time or full-time employment. For personal reasons, I have confined my job search to the Middlebury area. Since I am a native, it has been a very demeaning experience to make numerous contacts with people whom I have known all my life. It makes one feel like one is “begging” for work.”
Baldwin said she never received a reply from McCardell. She still lives in Middlebury, at a retirement community less than a mile away from the college campus.
For Tim Light, staying in Middlebury was not an option. Immediately following his resignation, Light and his wife left Middlebury and went back to Michigan. The following winter, the Lights drove to Vermont to clear out their belongings from the president’s house so John McCardell could move in. Light never returned to Middlebury.
Since 1991, those involved with the layoffs at Middlebury have had to reckon with a supreme irony: the climate of financial anxiety that gave rise to Black Tuesday turned out to be largely unfounded.
McCardell, who had been warned by a trustee to expect hard times ahead in the 1990s, watched as that trustee’s prediction proved to be erroneous.
“The ’90s indeed were not like the ’80s — they were better,” McCardell said. Between fundraising totals, endowment growth and total enrollment, “it’s almost impossible to believe that anyone in 1991 would have thought that we were in for really hard and tough times,” he said.
The U.S. emerged from its economic recession by the spring of 1991. And many of the institutions that expected population decline to be their death knell, McLaughlin explained, were ultimately able to tap into new sources of revenue by stepping up alumni fundraising efforts and hosting more non-curricular programs on campus. Colleges also identified new pools of students by soliciting applications from outside the United States.
“Things weren’t as bleak as many people had feared,” she said.
But retrospect, McCardell said, is easy. “It’s very hard to put yourself back in the place of people who don’t know how the story’s going to turn out.”
Today, higher education is facing a trial far more serious than it faced in the 1990s. Small institutions, especially residential colleges in rural areas, are experiencing existential crises, brought about by the very same factors that spurred fears in 1991.
“What people were saying in the ’80s and ’90s was going to happen — it did happen a little bit, but not with any high visibility or frequency — right now is quite serious,” McLaughlin said.
According to Thomas Greene, founding president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts and previous president of the Vermont Higher Education Council, schools in Vermont and across the country are increasingly threatened by declining enrollment and the changing shape of higher education.
“There are some people who think that we’re in an era of the biggest change since after the Civil War, when almost half the colleges in the country closed because there weren’t any students,” Greene said. While he thinks the most dire predictions are exaggerated, Greene does believe that small colleges are in real danger — resource-rich institutions like Middlebury included. The popularity of the small-college model, he explained, is decreasing with the rise of online education and the ability to obtain a degree later in life. Even elite colleges like Middlebury, given their high tuition and demographic challenges, are being forced to make cuts.
Elder, who has worked in Middlebury and lives nearby in Bristol, worried about how the college’s cutbacks might harm relations with its neighbors. “The resources available to everyone within the circle of Middlebury College are rare. And they’re in pretty strong contrast to rural America,” he said. “We have choices that not every community would have and knowing that, what we do ramifies. Ethically, I think it’s important for us to bear in mind that what seem like internal decisions, looking at our ledgers, are actually community decisions.”
Colleges are generally very good employers, and oftentimes in rural communities they represent some of the only places to work, Greene explained. “When the college goes away there’s a vacuum that can never actually be filled,” he said. “It changes the town irrevocably to lose a college.”
A college’s closure can then do damage to the rest of the town’s economy. “Because those jobs are going away, all ancillary businesses that grow up around an institution — whether it’s restaurants or bars or clothing stores or record stores — are no longer going to be able to sustain themselves,” Greene said.
If the ’90s did not take the financial toll on these colleges that many had expected, the coming decade may present a far more pressing need for cutbacks. In the past six years almost 40 small, private, nonprofit colleges have been forced to close or merge, according to the PBS NewsHour.
And Middlebury, too, has recently faced a situation not unlike what it faced in 1991. For the past several years, the college has operated a budget deficit, which peaked at $16 million in the 2016 Fiscal Year. Some attribute the deficit to poor administrative decisions in the recent past: a venture into online language instruction, a shortsighted tuition-cap policy, and the acquisition of an international studies graduate school in Monterey, Calif. Like in 1991, the college has also said that growing staff compensation costs have contributed to its current struggles.
As a result, the college informed employees in June 2018 that it was seeking to cut staff across the institution, with the goal of shrinking compensation costs by $8 million, or about 10%, by the end of the academic year. The college announced in a May 21 message to the community that 35 staff had taken buyouts — a total it described as “slightly lower than we had hoped” — which would produce over $6.1 million in savings. In that same message, the college announced it expects to return to a budget surplus after the 2020 fiscal year.
In the wake of this good news, Middlebury President Laurie L. Patton said she believes that the college is insulated from many of the fiscal pressures affecting other schools.
“Middlebury is not threatened. We just achieved a milestone in financial sustainability,” she wrote in an email. Patton cited the college’s closing of its budget deficit and the continued growth of its $1.1 billion endowment. “This is the best fiscal situation we’ve had in decades,” she wrote.
She distinguished Middlebury from many of its neighbors, noting that the college has seen surging enrollment in recent years as others have faltered. “The schools that are threatened have lower endowments, lower enrollments, and higher debt,” she said.
Patton also acknowledged that memories of 1991 have influenced how the college thinks about staff reductions today. “The main thing is to focus on trying to do the work in a way that is humane and gives people more of a choice, and also invites them to think about the institution in a way that helps sustain it for the long haul,” she said.
But for many on campus, the recent round of staff reductions is the only one they have experienced at Middlebury. Before this year, the college’s most recent cuts took place about a decade ago, when today’s students were in grade school and many faculty and staff had not yet arrived.
Even fewer on campus have any direct knowledge of what happened in 1991. Mike and Judy Olinick write periodic letters to local newspapers, recounting how employees were removed from their offices, “on the advice of the notorious outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.” They urge that “the community should keep this event in its collective memory,” lest the college make the same mistakes in the future.
But few mechanisms exist that would keep Black Tuesday fixed within that collective memory. News articles and administrative files that document the layoffs are archived in the basement of the college library. Of the 17 staff who lost their jobs in 1991, many are no longer alive; others have long since left Vermont and lost touch with those who remain here. Many of the people interviewed for this article — even those directly affected by the 1991 layoffs — now struggle to recall basic facts from that period that they once knew intimately.
If history repeats itself at Middlebury, then, only a few remain to recognize its import. Much like they did in 1991, college administrators last fall asked department heads across the institution to identify areas where non-essential work was being done. Instead of naming specific staff members, though, the department heads submitted lists of positions that could be eliminated through voluntary buyouts. Staff working in those positions received buyout applications in February, although only a fraction of them needed to take the buyouts for the college to achieve its goal.
While some staff felt the process went as well as it could, other employees expressed continued dissatisfaction in the following months, wondering how “voluntary” the buyouts really were and faulting the administration for a lack of communication.
In May, the Campus newspaper quoted an employee who said that stress among staff was the highest she had seen in her 18 years at Middlebury. Judy Olinick, who still works at the college, told the Campus in February that morale was “terrible” among her fellow academic coordinators, who felt especially at risk of seeing their positions cut.
For those left at Middlebury with enough institutional memory, even cloudy recollections of Black Tuesday are enough to caution against making the same mistakes twice. But beyond Middlebury, on college campuses now entering uncharted territory, there may not be the same history available to learn from.
