MARLBORO — For Tobias Lyon-Callo, a freshman at Marlboro College, the announcement earlier this month that his school would close its campus at the end of the academic year and transfer its assets to a school in Boston did not come entirely as a surprise.
“I was expecting Marlboro would close sometime soon. I wasn’t expecting my first year,” he said, sitting in a first-year common room last Friday.
There were certainly clues Marlboro was not long for this world. A shrinking applicant pool is putting a strain on small, tuition-dependent colleges, and doubly so at institutions that specialize in the liberal arts, as prospective students grow increasingly wary of taking out loans for degrees without concrete pathways to employment. Vermont – and particularly the southern part of the state – has been hit exceptionally hard, with three schools shuttering this year alone.
Marlboro, which has always been small – the school is built for about 300 students – has seen its enrollment steadily decline, and had only about 150 undergraduates enrolled this fall.
In many ways, Marlboro has had the softest landing. In Rutland, the College of St. Joseph ran out of cash before making it to exam week. At Southern Vermont College in Bennington, school officials have been hit with several lawsuits from former donors. And at Green Mountain College in Poultney, the campus, nearly $20 million in debt, sits empty.
In a tentative deal struck with Emerson College, Marlboro has agreed to gift its $30 million endowment and its campus in southern Vermont, worth about $10 million, to the Boston-based school. In exchange, Emerson has promised to honor all tenure agreements with Marlboro faculty, and to accept all Marlboro undergraduates for comparable tuition.
Marlboro operates according to a principle of shared governance, with faculty, staff, and students voting on major decisions at so-called “town meetings.” (Merger negotiations excluded.) And instead of choosing majors, students, often working one-on-one with professors, are expected to design their own course of study.
Emerson will rename its interdisciplinary program the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. But while administrators from both schools have assiduously avoided the word “closure” – often opting for “alliance” – few believe that all, or even most, of Marlboro’s essential elements will carry over.
“Moving from this, like, family, kind of, to Boston – we’re going to have close to 4,000 students. It’s just kind of tough to transition,” said Anastasia Stevens, a sophomore who graduated from nearby Leland & Gray in Newfane and who picked Marlboro specifically for its small scale and tight-knit community.
And even seniors, who will be the least impacted by the merger, say they’re sad.
“In the four years that we’ve all been here, we’ve all grown so much as people. And that’s been so based on the Marlboro identity and the culture here. So it hurts,” said Marlboro senior Nathaniel van Osdol.
Todd Smith, a Marlboro science professor, said conversations about keeping the school viable have been a constant in his two decades at the college. He’s been on task force after task force assigned to study the problem. And a series of administrators have tried strategies to bolster enrollment, including by establishing a graduate school and creating a scholarship program.
Since the college’s announcement, former faculty and alumni, many of whom still live in the area, have expressed shock and bewilderment at the merger.
“If you’re not hearing all those pieces of the conversation, you might think that there’s some steps that the college can take to quickly reverse the circumstance. And it just isn’t the case,” he said.
Smith, alongside 22 of his fellow tenured and tenure-track faculty members, signed on to a public statement last week supporting the proposed merger with Emerson. (Only three did not sign.) In it, faculty said that while they would much prefer Marlboro stay as-is, they realized the school’s current model was “no longer sustainable without an unprecedented infusion of money to our endowment.”
“At this point, it is clear that we have two choices: either begin the process for closing soon after this current year or make a choice to preserve as much as possible of our progressive, interdisciplinary, student-directed educational model,” the statement continues.
Smith has noticed that those students feeling optimistic about transferring to Emerson tend not to be too vocal about it, out of respect for their peers, many of whom are still extremely upset. He feels similarly conflicted when he thinks about Marlboro staff, whom he often collaborated with on teaching projects.
“Whenever I find myself thinking, oh, this might be kind of cool to be part of trying to create this new structure at Emerson, I realize a huge number of my colleagues in the staff are just not going to have that. Their job is going to end. So it’s brutal,” he said.
Kevin Quigley, Marlboro’s president, has become a divisive figure on campus. Many blame him for the college’s financial woes, and believe he gave up far too quickly. Others are far more sympathetic, and think he had the unlucky job of delivering news nobody wanted to hear.
Quigley – who, alongside all of Marlboro’s staff, will lose his job at the end of the academic year – acknowledges that many still believe that college leaders did too little to find a way forward that would have maintained Marlboro’s programming in Vermont.
“The Trustees explored that option extensively, an option that was everyone’s preferred option. There is no credible evidence to suggest that Marlboro can make it on its own,” he wrote in an email.
True to Marlboro’s participatory spirit, Quigley was cast in a student production of “Hamlet” on Friday evening. For the classic tragedy, reenacted in the school’s black-box Whittemore Theatre, Quigley played the ghost of the murdered king.
The community reaction to Marlboro’s news, too, has been mixed. At a meeting held over the weekend, alumni, Marlboro residents, and former faculty and staff gathered to talk about the campus’ future. Many were full of recriminations for the college’s current leadership, and complained bitterly that alternatives to the merger hadn’t been adequately investigated.
But still others suggested ways to move forward. Dan MacArthur, a longtime school board member, said the district had contracted with an architect to investigate if part of the campus could serve the town’s elementary students.
For his part, Lyon-Callo isn’t sure what’ll happen next. He doesn’t think he’ll want to go to Emerson, although he’s a little bit more inclined to do so after Emerson’s president, Lee Pelton, visited last week. He’s also considering maybe transferring to one of the Five Colleges, a consortium of liberal arts schools in western Massachusetts, or maybe taking a gap year.
“I think that there are more options than I gave credit to. And I think Marlboro has taught me that,” he said. “There’s always going to be people trying to create something. Even if nothing sticks.”
