Tag: Events

Higher education has seen a wave of university closures in recent years. While data has been valuable in understanding the scale of these difficulties, there are real people and places behind the numbers. I decided to do a classic American road trip to dead and dying colleges this past summer, chronicling what the sector was losing through ethnographic research.

The road trip was more than 3,000 miles long and brought me to 12 campuses, taking me through the Rust Belt region—to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Syracuse and Cincinnati—to Plains cities like St. Louis, Oklahoma City and Tulsa and finally back home to the West Coast, with stops in Santa Fe and Albuquerque along the way.

The Eeriness of Dead Campuses

During my tour, no one was waiting for me at campus welcome centers. I did see my share of tattered signs welcoming newcomers. They were no longer welcoming students, but rather construction crews clearing out buildings.

In physically walking through these spaces, I felt the immensity of their history. Campuses were often sprawling and in the middle of nowhere, even more so now that the somewhere had closed.

There is a concept of liminal spaces, empty yet normal settings that evoke an unease. Walking around these uninhabited campuses and buildings, I kept imagining that they were once filled with hundreds if not thousands of people. It was like exploring a lost civilization—forgotten iconography and busted artifacts in crumbling buildings.

Those crumbling buildings were part of what broke these institutions. When neglected, the costs of repair can grow exponentially. I saw firsthand the cracks in the sidewalk at Notre Dame College in Ohio and the busted concrete at Bacone College in Oklahoma.

Returning to Nature

On some of the campuses, nature was taking back what once belonged to students. Instead of undergrads napping on the campus quad, I saw buzzing insects and whistling birds in tall grass.

At Urbana University in Ohio, I stumbled on a herd of deer grazing. Alone and at sunset, it was a majestic sight.

At the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, some kind of prairie dog creature popped its head up when I was plodding across the baking desert campus. It made a loud click, a warning to the rest of its coterie that a human had returned, before diving back into its burrow.

Plants, too, thrived without lost freshmen late for class making desire paths across the grass. While no campus I visited was completely overrun, they were often shabbier than the manicured lawns I’m used to at thriving universities. The trip reminded me that grounds crews might be the unsung heroes on our campuses.

Lost Space, Lost Memory, Lost Icons

It was somber seeing cherished civic institutions, central to local identities, shuttered. The colleges I toured were third places that locals enjoyed for recreation or gathering. No more.

Cazenovia College once sat in a prominent location within the walkable downtown of Cazenovia, N.Y., before shuttering in 2023. Locals told me that they used to enjoy the campus greenery, walking their dogs or letting kids play on the grass. But now the New York State Police has taken over the campus for use as a police academy. With heightened security in place, locals have been barred from their strolls.

The campus spaces I visited held considerable cultural meaning and memories. I saw countless signs for the “Class of …” or “In Memory of…” and even gravestones.

Bacone College in Muskogee, Okla.—which has stopped enrolling students—was the nation’s “oldest American Indian institution of higher learning.” The campus is the site of a small graveyard and a memorial for tribal members lost in wars.

At Urbana University, there was a memorial for three Chinese students killed in a car accident in 2007. “Gone but Not Forgotten,” read the stone carving. I was touched by the story of these international students, far from home on an adventure, at the start of their lives, tragically cut short.

I even stumbled on what was essentially a funeral for Wells College, as a group of alumni gathered for a final tradition of ringing the dinner bell before the campus closed for good. Many were laying flowers and messages where a beloved Minerva statue once sat for more than 150 years, decapitated just days before during a bungled moving process.

The metaphor was almost too on the nose for the attendees.

Rebirth

The visits were often sad, but that was only half of the story. Some institutions were making the best of their transitions.

In Shawnee, Okla., after St. Gregory’s University closed in 2017, the campus was contentiously sold off to the owners of Hobby Lobby and donated to nearby Oklahoma Baptist University.

I was expecting a depressing abandoned college like others I had seen on the trip. I found the opposite.

When I arrived, the campus was buzzing with volunteers working to move brush and debris from a recent storm. There was even a museum started by a world-traveling Benedictine monk more than 100 years ago still in operation with an impressive collection that families were enjoying.

You see, the monks who still operate St. Gregory’s Abbey made a deal with the Baptist institution for a land swap, getting back their former college buildings.

The monks and volunteers were excited by the return and the potential new direction. Yes, it was no longer a university, but it could still be an important touchstone for the community. They were hoping that the dorms could be adapted into senior or affordable housing.

I felt similar excitement at Medaille University in Buffalo, N.Y., which was being converted into a charter school. An administrator even invited me back in the fall to see their successful launch.

What’s Next?

At the end of my trip, I visited the former Marymount California University, which sits on the bluffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula overlooking the Pacific. On a clear day, Catalina Island is visible from the campus green. This is some of the most desirable land in the U.S., but the affluent area meant upkeep was expensive and student residences were a farther drive inland.

The University of California, Los Angeles, has now taken over the campus, emphasizing research on sustainability.

Many of the people I talked to had hoped that their closing institution would be taken over by other educational institutions, whether another university or a K-12 school. Even then, the old legacy of the spaces may fade.

In Cincinnati, Edgecliff College long ago merged with Xavier University (in 1980), but its old campus became the site of luxury high-rise condos.

More colleges will close in the coming years. Some will find adaptive reuses that will carry on their educational legacies or service missions. Many, unfortunately, will not. These places, the campuses, the communities and their cultures, all deserve to be remembered beyond numbers on a spreadsheet.

The University of Chicago has received a $75 million donation to support the construction of a new cancer pavilion at UChicago Medicine, the university announced Thursday.

The gift comes from the AbbVie Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing health inequities, and will help fund an $815 million, 575,000-square-foot freestanding cancer center that will combine research, clinical treatment and patient care.

“We are deeply honored by this generous donation, as it strengthens our commitment to advancing the health and vitality of the community—a core priority of our South Side–based institution,” said University of Chicago president Paul Alivisatos. “This significant contribution speaks to the confidence that the AbbVie Foundation has in UChicago as a pioneering medical institution dedicated to pursuing globally meaningful solutions to yet-unsolved challenges.”

The building, which will be called the AbbVie Foundation Cancer Pavilion, is set to open in 2027. It “will unify more than 200 leading cancer experts, who are now spread out across our campus, allowing us to collaborate very closely with one another to create something bigger than what we could achieve alone,” said Dr. Kunle Odunsi, director of the UChicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Democracy and higher education have been good for each other. Although the first colleges on our shores were founded in colonies controlled by a monarchy in Britain, the impressive growth of universities that combined research, teaching and education of the whole student happened here as the country became more democratic. Slavery was the great stain on the nation, and the war fought to abolish this vile institution ended with promises that Black people, too, should enjoy opportunities for education, including at colleges.

The exclusion of women from institutions of higher learning began breaking down at the end of the 19th century, and, as the right to vote was finally enshrined in the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, women’s colleges were up and running and public universities were enrolling women.

It took time, far too much time, but educational institutions eventually recognized that white supremacy, patriarchy and the parochialisms that went with them obstructed learning because they prohibited certain subjects from investigation and excluded certain people from participating in research and teaching. In the colonial era and shortly after independence, colleges aimed at training clergy, but over time they saw their role as providing the country with an educated citizenry.

By the late 19th century, the research university was coming into its own, which meant fostering specialized investigation into areas that professional academics had decided were worth exploring. The professors valued their academic freedom because it allowed them to explore topics and problems that those outside the campus walls might find disturbing.

Academic freedom also allowed universities to create teaching environments free of official censorship or the soft despotism of pandering to commercial popularity. The classroom was a space for professors to share their professional expertise with students who could in turn explore ideas and methodologies without fear of orthodoxies imposed from the outside. In recent years, of course, teachers have been accused of imposing their own narrow views on those who study with them. They have been accused of abandoning their professional role and substituting their own personal opinions for scholarly investigation.

Colleges depend on the professionalism of their faculty to adjudicate claims of bias in the classroom. In the best of times, teachers debate with one another about how and what they should teach, and the more advanced the students, the more likely it is that they will have their own views on what should happen in the classroom. In most subject areas (and most notably in STEM and related fields), the issue of indoctrination rarely comes up. The classroom is focused on exploring demanding methodologies and complex content.

Everyone knows that teachers are imperfect and that there are times when the classroom is not as free and open as one might like. That’s why there are mechanisms for providing feedback so that professors can adjust how they teach. It would be far worse to rely on outside groups—like governmental agencies—to police teaching rather than expecting faculty to self-correct based on feedback regularly received. Education relies on the freedoms of democracy, and these should protect it from the interference of politicians.

That’s why what is happening now is so concerning. During this electoral season, we have seen a dramatic escalation of attacks on the autonomy of our educational institutions. These have gone hand in hand with the attacks on democracy. Both are under direct threat from populist authoritarianism in this country and around the world. When Donald Trump attacks his opponents as thugs and vermin and threatens to use the military against them, or when he proposes his own national university to replace the elites so despised by his base, he is declaring his intentions to remake higher education in the image of the violent cult he leads. Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance has declared that the university is the enemy.

Some academics and public intellectuals may shrug their shoulders, saying either that “other politicians aren’t so great either” or that politicians don’t really mean what they say. They are relying on their privileged status to protect them even as they disregard the profound threats to the freedom of expression and inquiry on which their privilege is based.

The attacks on higher education, on democracy, on the rule of law, threaten to sweep away freedoms that have been hard-won over the last 100 years. Education is a process through which people develop their capacities for exploration, collaboration and creative work. They learn to treat new ideas with curiosity and respect, even as they are also taught to critically evaluate these ideas. They learn skills that will be valued in the workforce and habits of mind and spirit that will help them flourish throughout their lives. They learn to think for themselves so that they can be engaged citizens of a democracy—not the cowering subjects of a dictator.

During periods of cultural and economic change, great pressure is often brought to bear on education because at such times people find it hard to agree on what is meaningful, let alone admirable. Ours is one such period. But we can agree that fearmongering and prejudice are wrong and that we should strive together to find ways to “cultivate individuality in such ways as to enhance the individual’s social sympathy,” as John Dewey advised.

In the United States, education and democracy can continue to protect and nurture one another. In the coming days, we must reject the cultivated ignorance that is used to fan the flames of hatred. Instead, we must defend the freedom to learn together in our schools, colleges and universities so that as a nation we can continue our democratic experiment—knowing we have a long way to go, but striving toward a more perfect union.