Another Progressive College in Trouble... or Is It?

Last year I wrote about the difficulties being faced by many of the small, progressive, liberal arts colleges founded in the 1960s and 1970s when the so-called counterculture was able to establish experimental institutions for higher education. Hampshire College was the focus of my attention then. Early this year I learned that Marlboro College, in Vermont, had sold its beautiful, rural campus in southern Vermont and would become a "college within a college" at Emerson College, in Boston. Although Marlboro's students, faculty, and alumni hoped that it would be able to maintain its identity inside Emerson, the sale of its bucolic land in Vermont, which offered opportunities for science and nature study not so easily available in Boston, caused a great deal of sadness. I had visited Marlboro in the mid-1990s as a faculty member from another university (Brown) who was invited to be a member of a graduating senior's thesis committee. I came away very impressed with the college, its commitment to its students, and its pastoral setting. 

Now another rural, progressive school is in trouble: Unity College, in Unity, Maine. This college is one of a few in Maine specializing in environmental science, where the oldest and best-known of these is the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor. In rural Unity and the region surrounding the college, there are many environmental opportunities. Nearby in Thorndike is the home base of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, the largest such association in the New England Region, and one that hosts an annual fair that attracts 80,000 people. Unity college itself was known for its participatory and horizontal governance, giving faculty and students a significant voice in the college's decisions. Unity College had fallen on hard times before, in the 1980s, but had kept its identity and its campus; and it appeared in this century that it had turned the corner. An anonymous donor gave the school $10 million, while Half Moon Gardens and the McKay Agricultural Station in Thorndike were donated to the college. However, a new president and a new vision has transformed the institution, a transformation that was underway well before the pandemic put a strain on its finances. He is a graduate of University of Phoenix, a for-profit, chiefly online and distance-learning institution. In the past few years he and the college trustees have changed a horizontal governance into a hierarchical one, removing students and faculty from key roles in the decision-making process.

Unity College Campus, Unity, Maine

  In August Unity College projected a $12 to $14 million tuition deficit for the coming academic year. But the college had also been gradually ramping up its online educational component, and to the president of the college the pandemic offered an opportunity to convert the school to an online distance-learning model almost entirely. In August Unity's president announced that they would "permanently eliminate" its campus model. They are considering selling their 240-acre campus in rural Unity, while they have acquired a few very small properties elsewhere that can host gatherings. In any case, they will not be using the campus as a residential college much longer. In August the president also announced that eliminating the campus also means firing or furloughing 30% of its workforce. These drastic measures are meant to keep the college afloat during difficult financial times, but these measures appear permanent whereas the pandemic may not last more than a few years. The college's commitment to Unity and the surrounding region, filled with countercultural progressives of all ages, appears to be over. Predictably, there has been a good deal of opposition to the college's transformation, from faculty, students, alumni, and people living in the region.

It remains to be seen whether a for-profit, distance-learning environmental science school can succeed at all. Environmental science, like most sciences, is a hands-on affair. It's hard to do science laboratories on line. In a biology lab, unlike in a history class, for example, professors and teaching assistants need to teach technique and supervise experiments, with living objects. In a good, small, advanced science class, such as one I took in experimental morphology when I was a college student, students become apprentices to the professor. We would, from time to time, adjourn from the lab to the professor's home for an informal continuation of the discussions. This is one of the important advantages of a small residential college, but it would appear to be endangered, if not lost, at Unity. 

The example of Unity College may be a harbinger for the sustainability of small colleges in the post-pandemic era, but it's important to ask what is lost as well as what is gained when online and distance learning comes to replace face-to-face education. So far, the forced experiment of online learning going on in the year 2020 suggests that if the financial balance sheet is sustainable only through distance learning, the educational balance sheet will come up short.