As small liberal arts colleges across the Northeast face a mass die-off, and sudden college closures wreak havoc on the lives of students, professors, and the small towns they inhabit, Marlboro College offers an example of the good that can come from thinking ahead.
“It closed when it still had assets,” said Larry Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education accrediting agency.
Those assets were just divided, said Kevin Quigley, Marlboro’s final president. “To ‘succeed,’” he said, “leaders may need to carve a path that separates the purpose and people from the place.”
Marlboro shuttered during the pandemic in 2020 after years of declining enrollment — the final count was roughly 150. And while the school’s death is still viscerally felt in this town of around 1,000, the reincarnation of its former property is “a rare good story about a campus with a lot of land in a very rural area,” Schall said.
Unlike Hampshire and Anna Maria colleges, whose financial meltdowns last spring left so many stranded, Marlboro provided a lifeline to students and faculty, who were offered a new home at Emerson.
Emerson has had its own financial struggles in recent years, but it absorbed $22 million of Marlboro’s endowment funds, in exchange for allowing the 57 students who transferred there to keep their financial aid, around 20 faculty members to keep their jobs, and their salvaged community to keep the school’s spirit alive, albeit on a new campus.
At the renamed Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, students have access to Emerson’s curriculum and create their course of study in the Marlboro tradition.
“Do I wish that I could have finished the way I wanted to finish here on campus?” asked Charlie Hickman, 27, a Marlboro-Emerson alum from Nebraska who now works year-round as an operations coordinator for Marlboro Music. “Absolutely. And also, when you take into account all of the factors, there was no way for the college to survive.”
“We all were heartbroken, but we saw that this was the only way forward,” said Jaime Tanner, who directs the Marlboro Institute’s interdisciplinary studies major and teaches biology and environmental studies at Emerson.
During the school year, Tanner commutes weekly from Vermont to Boston, sometimes carpooling with colleagues. While it’s not a perfect arrangement, she’s grateful to have a job.
The Marlboro Institute currently has around 100 students, who visit the Vermont campus every fall. “We tell stories about what it was like back in the day,” said Hickman.
Since 2020, the Marlboro experience at Emerson has been different for everyone — which is the point. “It’s very much modeled on Marlboro’s approach to self-designed learning,” said the institute’s director, Amy Ansell, who thinks of the program as a Marlboro tree “in Emerson soil.” It offers “the best of both worlds,” said rising senior Maria Anzalotti.
Not all see Marlboro’s transformation as a success; some former faculty members who still live nearby think college leaders gave up too easily, leaving a void. “The town has kind of hollowed out,” said Adrian Segar, who taught computer science at Marlboro.
When Marlboro Music acquired the campus, “the whole town breathed an enormous sigh of relief,” said T. Hunter Wilson, who taught writing and literature at Marlboro for 47 years. Still, it’s no replacement for a college known for holding schoolwide New England-style town meetings where “you learned to make a community out of everybody,” he said.
Marlboro just lost its elementary school due to low enrollment — now children must go to neighboring towns.
“Who is going to move into a town without a school?,” Wilson asked.
Quigley, the former president, knows his call to close the college remains controversial. “I definitely was a persona non grata,” he said. And yet, “among all the recent college closures in New England, I firmly believe that Marlboro had the best outcome possible,” he added, “far better than any other.”
Marlboro is one of seven colleges in Vermont that have closed or reorganized in recent years, and defunct campuses have drawn visions both grand and grandiose, from a $42.7 million luxury resort on the former Southern Vermont College campus in Bennington to an evangelical Christian university at the former Green Mountain College in Poultney.
“I mean, the people who come out of the woodwork in those moments create real instability,” said Christopher Serkin, Marlboro Music’s president and chair, who specializes in land use and property law as a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School in Tennessee.
“You’re going to get ideas from from visionary to idiotic,” Quigley said.
Because Emerson didn’t want the campus, the college put it on the market, and accepted a bid from Democracy Builders, a nonprofit whose founder, Seth Andrew, touted plans to create an associate degree program tailored to low-income students.
In spring 2021, federal authorities accused Andrew of stealing over $200,000 from a charter school network he founded, and he was later charged with fraud and sentenced to a year in prison. Meanwhile, a Canadian cryptocurrency entrepreneur announced plans to turn the campus into “a new algorithmic enterprise space,” and its fate fell into a dispute over ownership rights.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” said Quigley.
In September 2021, Potash Hill, a subsidiary of Marlboro Music, maneuvered to buy the property for $2.74 million. The music nonprofit didn’t necessarily want to own the campus, but it did want to keep its summer home; with an $80 million endowment, it had the relative luxury to make the purchase and figure out a plan.
Clemens Kalischer
Marlboro College was founded in 1946 by Walter Hendricks, who opened two other colleges in Vermont, Windham and Mark Hopkins, also now gone. A former student of Robert Frost, Hendricks chaired the English department at Biarritz American University in France during World War II, and Marlboro originally served returning veterans, among other students.
Hemmed in by the Green River, the college was fertile ground for those seeking an experimental education. Soon, Hendricks offered a makeshift space for a classical musical festival organized by the celebrated Bohemian-born pianist Rudolf Serkin and his German violinist father-in-law, Adolf Busch.
Serkin was Jewish, Busch was not. But as the Nazi regime took hold in Eastern Europe, both fled to America, settling in Vermont.
Busch told Germany he would return on one condition: “If you hang Hitler in the middle, with Goering on the left and Goebbels on the right.”
Busch and Serkin’s first concerts were in the Marlboro College dining hall — the beginning of the Marlboro Music Festival. It was “designed to reclaim music and art from nationalism, commercialism, and other external pressures,” said Christopher Serkin — who is the grandson of Rudolf Serkin and great-grandson of Busch.
Over time, the school’s revenue fell while the festival’s profile and fortune grew. College leaders wanted Marlboro Music to purchase the land, but the music nonprofit was reluctant to take on the burden of owning and maintaining a campus for 52 weeks a year when it was happy renting space for seven weeks on a long-term lease.
“One of the things we struggle with is the perception, locally and regionally, that we are rich,” said Serkin, noting ticket sales, at $20 to $40, are the nonprofit’s only revenue. Acquiring the campus has increased its annual costs by 40 percent.
The charge is to keep money flowing, while protecting Marlboro Music’s mission for future generations. The nonprofit now runs the rebranded Campus at Marlboro Music, where it launched an artist residency program and offers rehearsal studios and other spaces from September through May.
Before a recent Sunday matinee, a group of 20-something musicians sat at a picnic table looking more like camp counselors as they shared blackberries they’d just picked. “We are in a little oasis, really,” said Leo Appel, a violinist from Oxford, England.
That’s the idea — to give musicians a place to play and grow, away from the demands of the real world. “I’d like to think we have a pretty deep understanding of the culture of the college,” said pianist Jonathan Biss, the festival’s co-artistic director. “We’re trying to be good guardians.”
Vestiges of the college’s past remain. “Part of the mystery of the place is there are several buildings you can’t get into,” said Evan Gray, a bass-baritone from Switzerland. ”It’s special. It’s kind of sad as well.”
Hickman, the alum from Nebraska, recently walked through the buildings they once called home, including the dance studio where they never got to showcase their senior thesis: a partially written, partially performed piece about sustaining community in times of crisis.
“Even though the Marlboro Institute is not a perfect solution,” Hickman said, “we can be in those imperfect places.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.
