BRATTLEBORO — Last week, Emerson College President M. Lee Pelton announced that the Boston-based college was exploring an alliance with Marlboro College.
If the plan comes to pass, Marlboro College's campus will close next year, its programs and willing faculty and students absorbed into the college of approximately 3,800 undergraduate and 633 graduate students.
While trustees for the two schools have yet to agree to a merger, Pelton shared early details.
Emerson would inherit Marlboro's $30 million endowment and its real-estate holdings, valued at an estimated $10 million.
In return, Marlboro's tenured and tenure-track faculty could teach in Boston, while Marlboro's students could complete their degrees at Emerson, which would also honor their tuition and financial aid packages.
In addition, Emerson would rename its liberal arts and interdisciplinary studies program the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.
The announcement of a merger with another institution is the second this year for Marlboro College, which has struggled to remain financially viable amid declining enrollments. The college briefly explored a partnership with the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.
Three other small Vermont colleges have closed in recent years, casualties of the shifts in higher education that have toppled many small liberal arts schools in the country.
“You're seeing all these words like 'mergers' and 'acquisitions,'” said Ken Schneck, professor of leadership in higher education at Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio.
Schneck, who served as dean of students at Marlboro College from 2007 to 2013, said of the merger announcement that it “is not a done deal, but whatever happens next, you will not see the words 'Marlboro' and 'College' together anymore.”
It's sad news for those connected to the school, past and present.
For Schneck and others watching Marlboro and similar schools struggle, the immediate question is how to ensure that students who transition from Marlboro to Emerson will succeed.
Meanwhile, the big-picture question: How do independent, liberal arts schools remain relevant? And what about the communities they occupy?
The loss of terroir
In his video announcement, Pelton called Marlboro College and Emerson “cultural allies” with their shared emphasis on independent, self-directed, and experiential learning.
For Schneck, the comparison is not apples to apples.
Students choose schools for different reasons, he said. Marlboro students specifically chose a rural campus. Teaching and learning in the Marlboro environment is fundamentally different than it will be in Boston, he said. It changes the “tenor of the conversation.”
“That sense of place is a huge loss,” he added.
Marlboro's alumni are losing the place where they had the freedom to discover who they are, Schneck continued. They're losing the physical representation of where many formed their identities.
“I can't even wrap my mind around what it must be like for my former colleagues,” he said.
Where does Marlboro fit into the bigger picture of higher education woes?
Schneck said that it is impossible to divorce the bigger changes happening in higher education from Marlboro. But, he added, the college's struggles with enrollment aren't recent, either.
Who hasn't heard the old do-you-want-fries-with-that joke about the value of liberal-arts degrees?
Schneck said that under the Obama presidency, the conversation around higher education turned to one of transaction, with a focus on employment outcomes - in other words, college should be a simple equation of pay tuition, get a job.
As a result, the perception of the value of liberal-arts degrees took a beating.
This, despite several studies Schneck has read where Fortune 500 CEOs say they favor candidates with liberal-arts degrees because of the emphasis placed on skills such as problem solving, communication, information analysis, and collaboration.
Declining enrollment is another blow to liberal arts schools.
Schneck remembers eight to nine years ago when Marlboro's enrollment declined to 315 and the finance department sent a survey to all staff and faculty asking for suggestions of money-saving measures.
He said he was told at the time that if the school's enrollment were ever to hit 275 it would be a “crisis.”
The school now has approximately 150 students.
Transferring existing connections to a new campus
According to Laura De Veau, students pick a college for its community and culture as much as for a major.
“Majors are at many schools,” she said. “Connection is at one.”
De Veau is the principal and founder of Fortify Associates, a consulting firm specializing in optimizing workplace culture, located in Newton, Mass. She also serves as a consultant with the organization Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions, which consults with schools in the throes of merging.
She was vice president of student affairs at Mount Ida College, which closed in 2018 after its campus was acquired by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Right now, a lot of focus is on the details of the merger, she said - but, she warned, for any merger to be successful for the students, the schools will also need to merge cultures.
The decision makers behind the potential Emerson and Marlboro merger need to ask themselves, “What will this community look like five years from the merger?” she said.
De Veau points to the recent closure of Mount Ida, which she characterized as “small campus, high touch.”
When the school closed, Mount Ida's administration negotiated an agreement with the UMass Dartmouth campus to allow Mount Ida students to seamlessly transfer.
But because many students had chosen the school because its small campus provided close relationships with faculty. De Veau said that despite the decision makers' efforts to provide students with a good option, students were nevertheless angry.
In some ways, that merger was a boon for Mount Ida students because a UMass-Dartmouth degree carried more cachet than one from Mount Ida, she said.
Yet, students told her that they could have chosen UMass if they had wanted to, and not all chose UMass-Dartmouth. Many seniors did because “it was easier” to simply complete their degrees, she said, but the freshmen and sophomore students mostly “scattered” to other schools.
Like UMass-Dartmouth and Mount Ida, Emerson and Marlboro are “two very different places,” De Veau said.
So, despite Emerson being a “great place to go to school,” especially for media studies, students from Marlboro didn't initially choose an urban location, she pointed out.
De Veau said she still hears from unhappy students who feel their new school lacks the connections they had at Mount Ida.
The students who ultimately were more successful in their college careers were those who transferred to schools where they felt included, De Veau said.
“Those who felt like new members of a community did much better than those who were a data point in an enrollment package,” she said.
Emerson will face this challenge of welcoming Marlboro students into their community. But, said De Veau, this challenge is also an opportunity.
The schools that handled this challenge well intentionally created a transition process for Mount Ida students.
According to De Veau, Regis College in Weston, Mass. ensured that former Mount Ida students were housed together and also connected them to faculty who had also transferred from Mount Ida.
These efforts made the transition less disruptive to students, she said.
The first six weeks of a transition are crucial, in De Veau's opinion. If she were, hypothetically, working at Emerson, she would deputize any Marlboro faculty who transfer to Boston to provide the former Marlboro students with extra support.
In so doing, the school could intentionally create an environment for success, one where the students eventually could build new connections with an integrated campus community.
In De Veau's mind, building new connections also must continue through to the alumni.
Emerson will need to intentionally create a new relationship with Marlboro's alumni so that the affiliation is “not in name only” and extends beyond requests for transcripts, she said.
De Veau recommended that, if staffing allows, Emerson hire a member of Marlboro's alumni office - or at least keep one on retainer for a year in a consulting role - to help transition alumni into the Emerson community.
A second reality: staff
De Veau said with college mergers and closures, there are two realities. First is taking care of students, faculty, and the campus.
Yet often staff and the surrounding community are living a second reality.
“These are places where people had jobs,” she said.
De Veau herself was hit by Mount Ida's closure in ways she didn't expect.
“I lost my job, I lost my identity, and I lost my housing in one fell swoop,” she said.
Meanwhile, community members also lost their jobs as campus staff. And in the process, local restaurants lost their part-time student workers. Families lost their babysitters. Pet owners lost their dog walkers.
“People don't realize how many ripple effects there are” when a college closes, she said.
Towns need to prepare for college closings, De Veau said.
Marlboro College staff have expressed concern about what their futures will look like once the potential merger solidifies.
In internal documents obtained by The Commons, members of the Committee on Staff compiled a recent report to the Board of Trustees. The fall report followed up on a similar report issued in May.
According to the report, staff make up approximately 25 percent of the Marlboro community (compared to faculty, at 12 percent). Yet staff have lacked representation during the college's hunt for a partnering institution.
In the report, the committee notes that a seat on the Strategic Options Task Force, one originally designated for a staff member, was given to the president, Kevin Quigley.
“[Staff] should have input in the merger process, just like faculty and students,” wrote the committee. “This lack of involvement is perceived by staff as unethical in a community that professes to espouse democratic principles.”
“The partnership search, as we've heard repeatedly, seeks to preserve 'people, place and purpose,' but staff represent a large portion of the 'people' and there is no evidence that effort is being put into our preservation or even simply our welfare,” wrote the committee.
Also, morale is low because staff are unsure about their futures. According to the report, most staff assume they will be laid off because the campus will eventually close.
This reality raises their concerns about severance packages.
The committee recommended that the board generate a written policy on severance packages so staff can prepare for whatever comes next.
“The Board recognized that this transition will be especially difficult for College staff,” wrote Timothy Grader, Marlboro's consulting director of marketing and communications, in a statement to The Commons on Tuesday. “The Trustees are collaborating with administration to develop severance packages that demonstrate the College's gratitude for their hard work and commitment to campus. The College will also provide staff with additional support including assistance with resume and job search, counseling and other opportunities.”
Meanwhile, the Marlboro community as a whole is also working through the transition.
In an email to The Commons, resident Robin MacArthur wrote about the losses that have, and will, ripple out into the wider community.
“I think most people in Marlboro are still reeling from this news,” wrote MacArthur. “The collective grief I've witnessed in town illuminates just how beloved and integral place the college is for so many of us here, and all that will be lost.”
“There are the physical losses - many jobs, neighbors, friends, access to a campus which has generously hosted many town events - and then there is the loss of the legacy and spirit of this college, which has been an integral part of the lives of a large number of us living here,” she wrote.
“The college has fed this community in literal and spiritual and intellectual and artistic ways for 70 years, in a beautiful symbiosis of education and place and community,” she continued.
“I think many of us are happy for the faculty and students - this proposal would offer them job security and a new campus where they can continue their work,” MacArthur said, “and at the same time, I'm not sure any of us are prepared for what this town will be without the spark and vibrancy and pulse of this college on Potash Hill.”