This story was updated at 10:02 p.m.
Marlboro College officials announced Wednesday they plan to give the school’s endowment and real estate holdings in southern Vermont to Emerson College, a Boston-based private liberal arts school.
Under a tentative agreement, Marlboro leaders say the school’s roughly $30 million endowment and $10 million in land and buildings will endow Emerson’s Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies program, which will be renamed the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.
The 4,450-student Boston school, which is best known for its communications and performance programs, would honor all tenure and tenure-track agreements with Marlboro faculty and enroll any Marlboro students that want to transfer at a comparable price point.
“It is not a closure,” Marlboro president Kevin Quigley said in an interview Wednesday. “It is a transition of the Marlboro program to Emerson College.”
Marlboro’s campus, however, will close at the end of the 2019-20 academic year, according to the college. Quigley said working groups from both schools would be discussing Emerson’s plans for the campus in the coming weeks.
The agreement is tentative for now. Leaders at the colleges say they aim to finalize the terms of the merger by July 1, 2020.
The opportunity to move to Emerson will not extend to staff, according to Marlboro officials.
“This transition will be especially difficult for College staff, many of whom have served Marlboro for much of their working lives. Trustees will be collaborating with the administration to develop severance packages that demonstrate the College’s gratitude,” a statement on the school’s website reads.
It’s not entirely clear what will become of the world-renowned Marlboro Music Festival, which hosts its retreat and concert series each summer on the college’s campus. Quigley said the festival holds a 99-year lease with the college, which includes obligations that either Marlboro or Emerson will have to honor. That lease was signed just earlier this year.
Wednesday’s announcement is another blow to the southern part of the state, which has been ground zero for the crisis in higher education that has shuttered three Vermont schools this year. Green Mountain College in Poultney, the College of St. Joseph in Rutland, and Southern Vermont College in Bennington all closed up shop last spring, with leaders saying declining enrollments had made their finances simply unsustainable.
Marlboro, which has seen its headcount shrink to just 150 undergraduates this fall, has been searching for a partner over the past year in the hopes that a merger could preserve the school in some form.
This July, Marlboro announced its intentions to merge with the Connecticut-based University of Bridgeport. At the time, Marlboro and Bridgeport said the intent was to keep faculty and students together on the Marlboro campus. But that deal fell apart in September.
“If we had our druthers, we would have loved to stay at Marlboro. We would have loved to stay on the hill,” Quigley said. “That idea of staying here, with our faculty and staff, essentially intact, was just too good to be true.”
Marlboro’s endowment is relatively healthy for a school of its size, and it is virtually debt-free. Those factors likely make this a financially savvy move for Emerson, which the Boston Globe noted has seen its bond rating dinged for heavy building debt and weak fundraising.
