A Requiem for Things That Don’t Die

April 27, 2025

A day ago, amid all of the intentionally-contrarian pomp and circumstance surrounding the death of Pope Francis, another missive of mourning came my way: the announcement of the closure of my alma mater, St. Andrews University in the piney lowlands of North Carolina. The announcement arrived, as such things do these days, not by way of an eloquently-drafted and compassionate letter but by way of a rather matter-of-fact social media post. Just as well, however, since those charged with conveying the news are obligated to make the public statement, but they have no business trying to craft an obituary for a place and a spirit they never knew. That task belongs to the bearers of the original vision that took root in this unlikely rural community in the mid-twentieth century–faculty, students, alums, and even administrators and trustees. 

While the passing of Pope Francis and St. Andrews may seem unrelated except for a shared notion of saints, the two actually blend together in my mind. One was a gentle contrarian who stood up for the meek, the mild, and the mistreated–human or otherwise. The other, cast in the unlikely and frankly ill-fitting vestments of an “institution,” offered shelter to sojourners of all kinds and showed us that a life well-lived is a life well-conceived (and gladly celebrated). The intertwining thread for me in reflecting on these two passings is that they both serve as reminders not just of the necessity but also of the utter urgency of service. Service to people and service to planet. A living exemplar of a Buddhist koan, there is joy in that servitude. 

I love stories of audacious ideas that should have never come to fruition. St. Andrews is one of those stories. Born out of the merger of two small colleges in Eastern North Carolina, blending their gendered histories into a “coed” community situated in the heart of racial tensions and inequities, the St. Andrews campus itself represented new inroads for higher education, as it was designed to be the first barrier-free, handicapped-accessible campus in the US. By the time I arrived in the early 1980s, the campus lingo included “wheelies,” for those in wheelchairs, and the wheelies’ occasional retort, “TABs,” or “temporarily able-bodied” for the rest of us. Campus designers transformed a flat and hot location into an ideal environment for us all, with walkways and ramps winding through a labyrinth of buildings situated around a newly-dug lake. 

A long causeway crossed the lake, bridging the residential and academic sides of campus, ensuring that we all would pass and meet multiple times per day, as we walked and wheeled our way across that artificial divide, often stopping midway to sit and talk on the flanks of the causeway. I realize now that when those of us walking stopped to sit on the low walls bordering the causeway, we were at eye-level with our friends in wheelchairs, allowing for extended conversations in the generous Carolina sunshine, thanks to the design of a campus that built community in creative ways. 

And there was much to discuss, thanks to our profs who, literally for decades, conjured up multiple iterations of the nationally-acclaimed “St. Andrews General Education” program, aptly dubbed SAGE. SAGE was a four-year curriculum that literally walked us through human history, from the Big Bang and accompanying creation myths to the modern era. Professors took their disciplinary roles as “stone turners” quite seriously – every hire was expected to contribute to the telling of that long-winded human history, upturning what we’d assumed were stationary stepping stones and introducing us to a humus-rich underside of human existence. 

When you have physicists, philosophers, historians, evolutionary biologists, religion scholars, mathematicians, literary scholars, rogue poets, and others constantly cultivating a living curriculum dedicated to awakening the consciousness and rousing the conscience of college students, you’ve helped dislodge problematic cultural norms and assumptions. However, that was just half the job at St. Andrews. The second part of that task was to help students put the world back together in a meaningful way and to encourage them to rearrange those stepping stones into a new pattern and perhaps in a new direction. 

  Somehow, that ever-shifting group of extraordinarily talented and passionate profs used our time in a small rural community surrounded by cotton fields to split open our world views and introduce us to reenvisioned images of ourselves and our roles beyond the bounds of that idyllic campus. In fact, they refused to let us get too comfortable in that shell of a world. They took us – equipped with sandals, boots, and backpacks, unaware of our own naivete and innocence – to castles, coral reefs, slums, museums, prisons, art openings, multinational gatherings, and concerts. We seldom returned the same. We were like insects or reptiles, shedding one skin after another. Somehow, our parents survived the trauma of our fast-paced evolutions, perhaps because, in the end, they saw we were learning that the world was about more than just us. We saw better versions and more complete visions. We saw new possibilities, for ourselves, for others, and for the planet that sustains us, despite our thoughtless assaults.

I’m not going to mourn what at first glance seems lost as yet another college closes its doors. Rather, I choose to celebrate all that was gained. I was fortunate to be a student and then a staff member and instructor at St. Andrews during a period that I feel (perhaps with bias or ignorance) might have been its apex. I could not have been more fortunate–it was the best college experience anyone could have had. In fact, at the time, the SAGE program was highlighted as one of the top three “general education” programs in the US, alongside Harvard. 

Sadly, higher education in the US has shifted dramatically in the past several decades. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, but so have the costs of delivering an education deemed acceptable by students, parents, accreditors, and employers. I’m not sure if the financial model is unsustainable or the publicly-funded financing is lacking. I’ve seen enough budgets and spreadsheets to know that a bricks-and-mortar-based college education as we currently envision it is generally not viable without significant governmental and philanthropic support. And I also know what it’s like to spend three decades in higher education with a “modest” income and face the prospect of trying to help our children find a way to get the kind of extraordinary experiences my wife and I had. It’s a sobering irony that the numbers don’t add up. 

Perhaps my refusal to mourn the closure of St. Andrews is a PTSD response. You see, I watched another beloved institution, Green Mountain College, close its doors in 2019. Affectionately known as “GMC,” Green Mountain College was languishing financially and seemingly adrift in search of a new identity when the academic dean of St. Andrews, Dr. Thomas Benson, left to take the helm of GMC in 1995. Tom’s vision was to leverage the lessons learned from the SAGE model to transform GMC into the nation’s first “environmental liberal arts” college. That vision propelled GMC into the national spotlight, receiving recognition as the top environmentally-focused college in the US over the course of multiple years. I joined several other colleagues from St. Andrews at GMC in 1996 and began to build a 23-acre organic farm, an undergraduate curriculum in sustainable agriculture and food systems, and eventually the nation’s first online graduate program in Sustainable Food Systems.  

Despite all of the successes of students, alums, and faculty, Green Mountain College came to a financial reckoning point, and the board of trustees voted to close the college. The weight of bricks and mortar is heavier than ever in higher ed these days. The US is also confronting a long-predicted demographic decline in traditional college-age students, along with a cultural shift in attitudes about the value of a college education. Students and families are grappling with quite justified concerns about the costs and financing of a college degree. In the meantime, more affordable online education opportunities and professional certificate programs have proliferated, especially post-COVID. 

I bailed out of GMC just months prior to the announcement of the closure. The writing was on the wall. I was devastated to see 23 years of work in building curricula and facilities vaporize–all the while thinking that the foundational work my colleagues and I were doing would serve students, faculty, and the regional community for years to come. Whether rightly or wrongly, I found myself furious with some among the administration, faculty, and the board for not acknowledging the realities and consequently adapting what, how, and where we provided our education. The “why” remains the same: Service to people and to planet. 

Over the past six years, I’ve slowly worked through the grieving and the anger at the loss of an institution. I now know what truly endures: not the campus but the commons, not the curriculum but the lessons, not the titles but the relationships. 

That’s a lot to celebrate.

"Education is not about knowing things or taking lessons but about being able to use three lingos: those of the head, the heart, and the hands... learning so that you can think about what you feel and do, can feel what you think and do, and can do what you feel and think. Unity within a person."   Pope Francis