ASSOCIATED PRESS: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a press briefing at the White House
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump honored Juneteenth in each of his first four years as president, even before it became a federal holiday. He even claimed once to have made it “very famous.”
But on this year’s Juneteenth holiday on Thursday, the usually talkative president kept silent about a day important to Black Americans for marking the end of slavery in the country he leads again.
George Moses Horton: A Biographical Sketch & several poems; from local sources
George Moses Horton
George Moses Horton (1797-1893) could rightly be called North Carolina’s first professional poet.
Born enslaved by Chatham County yeoman farmer William Horton, young George Moses Horton loved the rhyming sounds of hymns, and yearned to be able to read.
As teaching slaves to read was illegal, Horton secretly taught himself, hiding in fields on Sundays. He used an old speller, a copy of the Methodist hymnal, and stray pages from the Bible, although he was grown before he learned to write. Especially fascinated with poetry, he was soon composing psalm-meter verses in his head and committing them to memory.
“In 2025 . . . celebrations of Juneteenth are being cut back or even canceled. Corporate sponsors and local governments, as well as the national government, are pulling back their support for festivals and Juneteenth events.”
[Not here. Juneteenth-related posting all day.]
Background, by Heather Cox Richardson:
“Juneteenth [is] the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.
That announcement came as late as it did because, while General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army on April 9, 1865, it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed in Texas. On that day, June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
Granger’s order referred to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought and died for the United States. They had worked as soldiers, as nurses, and as day laborers in the Union army. Those who could had demonstrated their hatred of enslavement and the Confederacy by leaving their homes for the northern lines, sometimes delivering valuable information or matériel to the Union, while those unable to leave had hidden wounded U.S. soldiers and helped them get back to Union lines.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished enslavement except as punishment for a crime. But they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
Congress refused to readmit the southern states with the Black Codes in place, and in December 1865, Americans added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Six months later, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate the coming of their freedom with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing.
By then, congressmen had turned to guaranteeing that states could not pass discriminatory laws against citizens who lived in them, laws like the Black Codes. In 1866 they wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was [meant to be] the whole ball game, the one that would put teeth behind the principles in the Emancipation Proclamation. The federal government had declared that a state legislature—no matter who elected it or what voters called for—could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
Rather than accept this new state of affairs, leading white southerners decided they would rather remain under military rule. So in March 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, calling for southern voters to elect delegates to new state constitutional conventions. And, for the first time in U.S. history, they mandated that Black men could vote in those elections.
Three months later the federal government, eager to explain to Black citizens their new voting rights, encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation. The next year, the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution remade the United States of America.
In 1865, Juneteenth was a celebration of freedom and the war’s end. In 1866 it was a celebration of the enshrinement of freedom in the U.S. Constitution after the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified. In 1867, Juneteenth was a celebration of the freedom of Black men to vote, the very real power of having a say in the government under which they lived.
Celebrations of Juneteenth declined during the Jim Crow years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as Black Americans from the South spread across the country during and after World War II, they brought Juneteenth with them. By the 1980s, Texas had established Juneteenth as a state holiday. Other states followed, and in 2021, thanks in part to pressure from activist Opal Lee, Congress made Juneteenth a federal holiday and President Joe Biden signed the measure into law.
But throughout our history, those determined to preserve a government that discriminates between Americans according to race, gender, religion, ability, and so on, have embraced the idea that true democracy means reducing the power of the federal government and centering the power of the state governments, where voters—registered according to state laws—can choose the policies they prefer…even if they are discriminatory. They have also insisted, as former Confederates did in the late 1860s, that any laws protecting the equal rights of minorities discriminate against the white majority.
In 2025, as the Trump administration echoes those people, celebrations of Juneteenth are being cut back or even canceled. Corporate sponsors and local governments, as well as the national government, are pulling back their support for festivals and Juneteenth events.
Our history matters. Juneteenth is the celebration of a new nation, one that would honor the equality of all Americans—and one that, 160 years after it was established, we are in danger of losing as those in power set about rewriting the record.
[Editor/Blogger’s introduction: As Guilford College approaches decisions that are reliably reported to be “do or die” for the school, we were approached by Jonathon Podolsky, a self-described “save college” consultant. He has been following Guilford’s recent difficulties. His personal assessment here is long, likely controversial, and has been doggedly pursued in the face of Guilford officialdom’s chronic policy of avoidance, stonewalling, and feckless message and damage control. Maybe, if Guilford survives this most recent “near-death” experience, more transparency will be part of the rescue plan. We’ll see about that.
— Chuck Fager.]
GUEST POST BY JONATHON PODOLSKY
Can Guilford College pull itself back from the brink and avoid closure after 188 years?
Time is short, but here is what they need to turbocharge their efforts. I’ve been researching and writing about colleges facing near-death experiences since 2019. Some colleges I reported on survived. Others, like Marlboro College have closed. This analysis draws on that experience.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), Guilford’s accreditor, will make a stark choice in December: Guilford will either be off probation or lose accreditation (if the latter happens, a death spiral is likely, as students will be unable to take out federal student loans).
On January 6 of this year, Guilford College announced that President Farmbry had stepped down, and board chair Jean Parvin Bordewich would be Acting President. Another board member Keith Ivory Millner ’82 would serve as Acting Chief Operating Officer (a newly created position), and three other trustees would form a special committee. They are all working as volunteers.
More recently, it has come to light that the college violated stipulations of its agreement with bondholders, and this month it was announced that the college may declare “financial exigency,” meaning it’s in serious danger of closing and could break contracts with faculty (even tenured) in order to deal with the financial emergency.
However, I’m familiar with some colleges that survived near-death experiences, so after explaining how we got here, I’ll offer some ideas for how the college can be saved.
HOW DID GUILFORD GET INTO THIS DESPERATE MESS?
Americans started having fewer children around 2007, which means that starting this year, there will be a sharply declining number of high school graduates. This is the “demographic cliff” facing higher education. Other factors contributing to the decline in overall college attendance include fewer prospective students believing that college will lead to a stable job. Moreover, fewer college graduates believe that college is worth it, so they are hearing more bad reviews from friends and family. Higher education has been undermined for a long time.
A recent fundraising appeal from Wess Daniels, Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies at Guilford College, called on Quakers to help save the college. The appeal mentions that legacy is not enough, but doesn’t offer an inspiring go-forward plan.I reached out to Prof. Daniels in May, but he declined an interview.
OTHER COLLEGES
There is no shortage of threats to higher education, and even the colleges that have recently been saved (or, like Antioch College in Ohio, have closed and then been revived) are not out of the woods. There are also some similarities among the colleges I helped or studied. The ones that are open had fierce opposition movements and less restrictive discourse than Guilford. There were also changes to their board. For example, while I have critiqued Hampshire in numerous articles, almost half of its board members left in 2019. They also have a portion of their board elected from individual stakeholder groups (students, staff, faculty, and alumni).
Let’s first take a look at how we got here.
KENT CHABOTAR, PRESIDENT 2002-2014
Kent Chabotar served on the faculty of the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education, including the Seminar for New Presidents, and raised $90 million during his tenure. He was chosen to improve enrollment and was Guilford’s first non-Quaker president. He responded to my inquiry via LinkedIn: “If your critics cannot get you on the product, they will turn to the process.”
ADULT EDUCATION PROGRAM
Cuts in state and federal funding, dating back to 2012, have significantly reduced the adult education program at Guilford, decreasing from a high of 1,300 students in 2009 to 45 in 2024, according to The Assembly. The Guilfordian reported on this loss of funding at the time.
JANE FERNANDES, PRESIDENT 2014-2020
Fernandes – Guilford
BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME
According to a book by Richie Zweigenhaft, during the Fernandes administration, the college borrowed $73 million through bonds to fund the Guilford Edge program, various renovations, and new construction projects, including a ceramics building. As mentioned above, enrollment didn’t rebound. If she had stayed longer, she likely would have received a vote of no confidence.
GUILFORD EDGE WAS A BUST
Guilford Edge was a program introduced at Guilford in 2019. It was promoted as a remedy for enrollment decline, designed to improve retention, and had various features including a different semester system.
But instead, enrollment has gone way down during its tenure, and the calendar change created impediments for adult learners. The Guilfordian campus paper highlights one of the problems, that the schedule created hardships for adult learners and could have exacerbated the decline in their enrollment. The Guilfordian also documents the Edge program’s rollback.
A consultant called Insigniam, in an article, Guilford’s Thoughtful Transformation, claimed all kinds of benefits when Guilford Edge was instituted. A current employee told me that, “the college used consultants to sell the Guilford Edge, supposedly with strong data behind it, and then hired other consultants to convince faculty to like it. [Now] almost everything in the program has been taken down…the community wasn’t all for it, there wasn’t smart work done to involve them in the decisions, and smart work wasn’t done to say what the [community] wanted instead…The Edge is gone, almost every aspect.”
And Guilford has had five presidents since 2020.
CAROL MOORE, INTERIM PRESIDENT 2020-2021
BIG CUTS PROPOSED
Soon after being hired, Moore attempted to implement a “prioritization plan” that would have imposed major cuts, circumventing traditions and rules related to shared governance. Students, faculty, and alumni were all concerned about cuts to majors, especially social justice and religious studies.
SAVE GUILFORD
“Save Guilford” was a movement formed after an AAUP webinar called “Who Will Save Guilford College” in 2020. Richie Zweigenhaft writes more about this period in How the AAUP Helped to Save Guilford. The faculty voted no confidence in Moore and the board at the time.
We’ve been here before: logo circa 2021
The founder of Save Guilford reached out to me because of my experience in save college movements. I advised her using my Five Building Block theory (which includes strategies organized into categories: re-envisioning, legal, PR, community, and fundraising). I later assisted with their re-envisioning committee. While they did a lot of good organizing work, I warned them first privately and then in articles in the Guilfordian and in the Greensboro, NC News and Record when I noticed a problem with their approach that would prevent them from making the college more sustainable over the long term.Eventually, Moore resigned, and the board abandoned the prioritization plan.
JAMES “JIM” HOOD, INTERIM PRESIDENT 2021-2022
English Professor Jim Hood had a deep history with Guilford. There were significant furloughs due to the pandemic, and some other changes occurred behind the scenes, but his tenure was well-received. He served for under a year.
KYLE FARMBRY, PRESIDENT 2022-2025
CYBER ATTACK
On October 21, 2022, the college experienced a ransomware attack. It wasn’t announced until weeks after the fact. One affected person mentioned in this Guilfordian article that the college wasn’t transparent at all about it.
The article also notes that ransomware attacks cost universities an average of $2.7million to resolve and that most colleges hush them up out of fear of lawsuits by students over compromised information. Whatever the cost of the Guilford attack in terms of hiring additional consultants and staff time to repair, it was an additional stressor and distraction on top of an already difficult transition to a new software program called Workday.
SOFTWARE ISN’T MAGIC
Workday -Software logo
Workday is cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Guilford transitioned from Banner, paper, and spreadsheets to Workday for HR, payroll, and finance. The transition was championed by John W. Wilkinson, Guilford’s CFO from 2021 until March of this year.
While their hope was that Workday would help Guilford for the next 20 years, the CFO’s endorsement of Workday seemed premature. The college had already been put on probation by its accreditor for violating Standard 13.3 (Financial responsibility). Looking back, it seems clear that Guilford should have focused on making immediate budget cuts instead. In a small college context, the main expenses are clear enough for a balanced budget to be planned without sophisticated and expensive new software. Cheaper software that is easier to work with and helps with analytics could have been added alongside their legacy software.
The transition to Workday was a huge effort by the college, which involved a substantial amount of time from senior administration down to the staff level. The project reportedly cost $3.6 million, with an expectation that it would break even in five years; however, Guilford may never reach that point.
I reached out to Mr. Wilkinson on January 18 but didn’t receive a reply. He was interviewed by Jeff Selingo, a prominent higher education journalist, during a Workday conference. Portions of the interview are available online (clips 1, 2, 3). The discussions covered topics such as AI, enrollment trends, and the talent pipeline for higher education.
Mr. Wilkinson was quoted when Workday won an award, and in a testimonial. He boasted that it gave the accounting team a clear view of where the money is coming and going. “We always say in the accounting world that every dollar has a home. Now it’s true. If I see somebody is starting to overspend, we can apply the brakes instead of upending the whole accounting system.”
WHERE WERE THE BRAKES?
The college lenders mandated an independent consultant review. According to its 2025 report, the college spent at least $10 million over budget in 2024, in part because of “Departments misunderstanding how to read the new budget reports”. Additionally, Guilford’s audited financial statements for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 utilized two different auditors, and both identified issues with financial controls. For example, the 2023 audit found a $1.4 million discrepancy in accounting for contributions and grant agreements.
Employees are still livid about the software changes, which have had unintended consequences. One told me that Workday, “has and continues to cost us FAR more than anyone projected (or admitted out loud) AND it’s forced faculty and staff to become accountants. Misery has abounded since this transition, and it’s blocked all transparency, seemingly keeping all financial info in the hands of the CFO…And what Workday has cost us, in real dollars AND in lost productivity (the time faculty and staff have to spend doing this crap) AND in blocked info flows, is HUGE and unrelenting.”
Jeff Spears, Founder of CFO Colleague , a financial management consultancy, was also displeased: “They should have never ever changed their ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] system [to Workday] in the midst of a crisis. You’ve got to be a healthy institution to change ERPs in two years, and it costs a boatload of money…But Workday is great when it works. I mean, I’m telling you, it’s one of the best there is. There’s no question about that. But was that their biggest problem?”
-Jeff Butera agrees. He is an Enterprise Architect and Technology Analyst with over 25 years of experience in higher education technology leadership. He told me that, “Any small college moving to Workday is financially stupid. It’s outrageously expensive.”
Butera added, “It’s like in your personal life when finances are tight, you say let’s go buy a new Mercedes. It’s really not the time to do that thing. This is the time to keep your Fiat or your Honda running as long as you can to get through and weather the storm.”
“So, for me, it’s not about the choice to do so, it’s about the timing. And a little more about the choice of Workday for a school that small. There are very few schools that small going to Workday because SaaS [Software as a Service] based systems are just [very] expensive.”
But Guilford is stuck with Workday. It would be bad publicity for Workday if Guilford closes, so the college may be in a good position to renegotiate its license. That might include lowered fees for a while and increased help with any remaining implementation problems.
JEAN PARVIN BORDEWICH, ACTING PRESIDENT 2025-PRESENT
Bordewich is a former Board Clerk (Quaker for Chair). She has demonstrated courage and taken steps to increase transparency, posting weekly updates on the college website, as well as increased fundraising efforts. Some other trustees have been working as volunteers. Other top administrators have left for various reasons. They include the last President, CFO, VP of Advancement, the Director of Admissions, the Dean of Students, and the Provost.
They need new Spellcheck too.
Acting president Bordewich and the acting COO (Chief Operations Officer) were on Guilford’s board for a couple years, but haven’t worked in colleges before. Bordewich indicated that the accreditor hasn’t specified how much they must reduce their deficit to get off probation. (Farmbry’s earlier statement was clearer that the budget must be balanced.) Certainty earlier in Bordewich’s tenure would have been helpful, but later she did clarify the goal was to balance this fiscal year’s budget. They have made substantial progress but as of early June still fell short in their accrual budget.
DENIAL
The tally for new unrestricted gifts, on the Guilford website June 9 2025. So near . . . And yet so far.
Much evidence suggests that the Guilford board has long been in denial or otherwise hamstrung in its handling of Guilford’s problems. According to First Tryon, another consultant, the 10-year period during which enrollment declined by 41%, total expenses decreased by only 1%. During this time, the college could have reorganized and re-envisioned in ways that involved the whole community and minimized disruptions to students and employees.
I spoke with Mark Cubberly, an alum, who has been encouraging the college to sell another parcel of land called the Jefferson property, which is not part of the easement. (I reached out to Robert Bell, Guilford’s Director of Communications, to ask about the land parcel early in June, but he hasn’t replied.)
Cubberly estimates that the college could have received $5 million if it had sold that parcel. However, the college waited too long and now says it will take months for the bondholders to decide if they will allow the college to sell the parcel. Earlier this year, the president said land would only be sold as a last resort. If the decision to sell had been made earlier, the college might have the badly needed funds by now.
SILENCE (NOT THE GOOD KIND)
Another sign of denial is that a college officer stated that it was an outside article that got the attention of the accreditor and led to probation. Aversion to press attention has surfaced multiple times in the college’s recent history. For example, Ty Buckner is Guilford’s Chief Communications Officer. A 2003 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Teachable Moment”, reports that he left voicemails with every student and a similar one with every faculty member, asking them not to talk with the press without first contacting Guilford’s public relations office.
There has also been resistance to publishing the full extent of the college’s problems in The Guilfordian in recent times. It ran a feature-length article about the fundraising in mid-April that was all sunbeams and “momentum” cheerleading. This cheerleading is also evident in Alumni and Friends of Guilford College (AFOG), which has not been publishing press accounts in their Facebook group. Most of the AFOG posts in the last year have been from one moderator, and they have been suppressing divergent voices. Neither the college’s nor AFOG’s board is elected. Altogether, this reticence has meant that Guilford lacked a correcting force, short of students not returning, lenders calling in a loan, or the accreditor taking away accreditation
MISTAKES FOLLOWED PATTERNS
The college borrowed money to invest in physical plant improvements, new programs, and software, in hopes these steps would improve falling enrollment. They didn’t work. The college should have focused more on controlling costs as enrollment declined, avoided over-relying on consultants, and involved their own stakeholders more. Sticking with fundraising for capital improvements rather than borrowing would have forced them to connect more closely with college supporters and receive a reality check, rather than a major debt load which constrains future budgets. These big mistakes were doing things that may have made sense for larger, wealthier, and more stable colleges.
HAIL MARY: THE GO FORWARD PLAN
So, as for a rescue? First, no guarantees or magic wands. But for starters, regardless of discussions of a flatter hierarchy, two senior positions need to be filled immediately: an interim Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and an interim Dean of Admissions. I don’t think the accreditor will consider the college credible without both slots being filled. This is especially urgent given the strong prospect of financial exigency and layoffs, and the recent announcement that fewer students than expected are returning in the Autumn 2025 term. Admissions should work to reduce any further erosion and investigate whether the college’s recently announced fee increases and collection of back tuition have exacerbated students’ financial concerns and contributed to decisions to transfer or drop out.
TRUST
There are multiple other crucial audiences to inspire and rebuild trust with. The keys are an inspiring re-envisioning plan, fiscal discipline, and effective fundraising. If the college does theseright, it can increase enrollment year after year. As the plan proves itself, it will gain access to larger donations from those who are skeptical at first. Many richer donors want to see a solid business plan, one that working, so any painful but necessary cuts and the re-envisioning plan are critical at the beginning.
To get started, the new CFO should lead several Zoom sessions with stakeholders to detail how the college now has effective new financial controls. A repeat of the $10 million 2024 overspending would likely be fatal. Lenders and accreditors are often portrayed as boogeymen, but I have learned they usually want to give colleges every chance possible to succeed. It’s key for leaders to communicate with them transparently and frequently.
Effective Board oversight has been lacking; therefore, the board should show that it has established new processes for transparency, effectiveness, and accountability.
RE-ENVISIONING
Some key points to keep in mind with the re-envisioning: urgency is your friend, use a slide deck, employ radical thinking, and work through successive approximations. Involve all stakeholders in Zoom sessions, moving back and forth between brainstorming, gathering feedback on ideas, and synthesizing them.
Hampshire College is a good example of re-envisioning. While Guilford’s own plan would have to be unique to Guilford, the big picture is that a positive forward vision excited the stakeholders. While Hampshire is not out of the woods, it has already survived for six years since the time when the previous board thought Hampshire had to close or merge. The plan created Learning Collaboratives to replace its original academic divisions, and assigned four questions (e.g., climate change) that are worked on collaboratively.
A recent article in The Assembly, an online startup for Carolina news, was titled,Guilford College Debates How Quakerly it Should Be. Chuck Fager wrote a blog response; he noted that there is nothing “Quakerly” in going bust, and found little debate about that. “The article was really about Guilford trying desperately not to go broke,” Fager said.
I wrote about the “debate” piece as well. My sense was that re-envisioning can flip the headline’s supposed dichotomy on its head. Guilford’s special sauce will likely be a combination of internal approaches (silence, attention, and ethics) with modern applications such as cybersecurity, AI, and second brain (a system of managing ideas and information). Can new leadership show why such a mix could be ideal for a growing niche of students seeking internal resources to navigate the complex new world of work and society in the 21st century? Are there many prospective students who are demoralized by the algorithmic popularity contest, struggling to find out how the future of work will include them?
I also spoke with Mark Dixon, Guilford Professor of Art, Guilford College, about re-visioning: “Well, one of the top opportunities that we have is to just go straight for the elephant in the room,” he said, “which is the ways in which aspects of our world have made it harder for individuals, especially young individuals, to own and direct their own attention.
“Can we help them make their minds do what they want and need to be done, rather than to allow them to be encampments or occupied by technological business efforts to claim and own people’s conscious attention… .We have to generate that [attention] on-site. And we can still have a religious studies class. We use all the things that we do as a way to get to these things, because those things are fundamental to any achievement in any of our disciplines.”
DOLLARS AND CENTS
Enrollment takes years to rebound, so Guilford should also announce a five-year fundraising campaign that will help cover the gap in operational expenses. I believe this is possible, but only with a strong and energizing vision for the future that has been lacking so far. I emailed two questions about this to the acting president in January: “What would give alumni the confidence that donating now would cause lasting change at Guilford and ensure a positive trajectory, given how the (2021) Save Guilford effort didn’t prevent the current crisis? And what will be different this time?”
I haven’treceived a response.
Guilford’s plight was discussed on the College Viability Podcast twice, on September 24, 2024 and January 7, 2025. In these episodes, co-hosts Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker discussed struggling colleges. Their approach compares colleges with peer institutions to find areas of difference. One of the key areas they examined with Guilford was a food service contract that appeared to be $1 million more expensive than its peers.
I also had a lengthy interview withJeff Spears the seasoned higher education chief financial officer, who has also served in various oversight agencies, and runs a consultancy called CFO Colleague that has worked with more than 170 institutions. Spears walked me through numbers and graphs based on Guilford’s audited financial statements for 2018 and 2024. He found huge increases in the food service and dorm costs. He also found that as enrollment dramatically decreased, (and there were rounds of staff cuts), yet the total amount the college spent on compensation remained relatively constant, and is now approximately 50% higher than the total amount the college receives from net tuition.
This is, to put it mildly, unsustainable. What other spending areas need such unpacking?
The college should renegotiate vendor contracts and adopt a collaborative approach with faculty if they want to avoid declaring financial exigency. That’s mainly how they did it during Hampshire’s crisis. By coming together, they managed to avoid layoffs, a costly and protracted legal battle, and the need for a declaration of financial exigency, and preserved advising options for students.
Here’s how my interview with Jeff Spears ended:
Jonathon: And so here’s my last thing. So my editor has been told that June 30th is do or die. If they have not balanced the budget by June 30th, he thinks they’re dead. And then I agree with you that they’re not showing that they’re willing to make the radical changes, but I’m the person writing an article that can say, “I’ve experienced these save college movements.” I’ve seen the ones that work, the ones that don’t.
And I want to tell Guilford that “I have an idea for a Hail Mary. It’s radical. I know you (Guilford)don’t want to do it, but if you’re willing to change how you do things, this is how you could survive.” But for me to say that, I’m wondering how crazy I am. In other words, if they do this, if I could use my imagination, show these wild changes that they need to make, I’m wondering for my credibility, is there a chance that if they do that later in this year, that it could still be taken into account by SACS? I will say here that at Hampshire College, I’ve read their letters to their accreditor. Accreditors do not want to close the college if they don’t have to. I mean, so that’s something I could say.
Jeff: I mean, what you’re saying is absolutely true. I don’t want to suggest that there’s no hope, whatever, because yes, if they want to take really radical action at this particular institution, then there’s a chance with help from donors and alumni and with partnering with the accreditor and getting the bank off their back, they get on top of this huge line of credit they can’t now pay off. I mean, if they were to address all that stuff…But here’s the problem. When you don’t have a CFO…how do you orchestrate this? It becomes Jonathon showing up on campus with a flag. ‘Rah rah, let’s go Guilford, we believe in you’ and you turn around and are there people behind you?
We hope there would be, but they need to be the ones that say, yeah, because it can be fixed. I just don’t know if they have the will.
Jonathon: Thank you, Jeff.
A few years back, I helped the “Save Guilford” group’s re-envisioning committee towards the end. They needed guidance and explanation on how to create a brief, aspirational overview, and it had to be completed quickly. I know the Guilford community has enough solid ideas to contribute, but you need to hear it from the outside: this has to be radical, and it must include all stakeholder groups (students, staff, faculty, alumni, etc.). Only a truly bold vision will be enough to inspire new students, donors, the accreditor, and lenders.
What if their vision doesn’t materialize quickly and is not bold enough? My editor had an idea for a snappy ending: “In which case, it’s not Hail Mary, for Guilford; it will be Dies Irae, the Latin for the Day of (Final) Judgment. Or whatever Quakers say at funerals.”
Bio: Jonathon Podolsky is a Certified Non-profit Board Consultant and Journalist Member of the Education Writers Association. He has advised five save college movements. You can learn more at www.Podolsky.cc
Your faithful blogger was old (42) to be a delegate to the 1985 World Gathering of Young Friends, but did attend as a journalist. As many of the official alumni come together this week for its 40th anniversary (admitting thereby, that many are also no longer “Young Friends”), some might find this report of my observations of interest.
AFL #52 -7/1985 Report:
Of five major speakers at the World Gathering of Young Friends (WGYF) held at Guilford College in North Carolina this month, one addressed the delegates’ condition and another identified their task. In the end, though, the effects of the former overshadowed work on the latter.
Jan Wood, from Northwest Yearly Meeting, spoke to their condition with eloquence:
Quakers today, she asserted, are not only hopelessly divided over doctrine and practice, we are also very good at finding ways of lying to each other about that reality. It is especially easy to substitute a superficial goodfellowship for the plain and difficult speaking of the truth that is the necessary precondition for laying our broken condition before God, who is the only One capable of lifting us through the pain it produces to
something beyond it.
Jonathon Fryer, a widely-travelled British journalist who came to Friends after attending a meeting in Saigon which continued in silent worship through a rocket attack, spoke of the task:
Friends in the mid-1980s, he believes, are completing a process of self-understanding which has been underway for some years.
But, he added, we must not spend too long thus inwardly-focussed, because this new self-understanding needs to be applied to the increasingly critical problems of the world, in a skillful and even professional Quaker way.
A PROMISING PRELUDE, OR A FALSE START?
For a week, the 300 delegates from all over the world attempted, as their final Epistle said,
“to envisage the future of the Religious Society of Friends, and to see how our lives should speak within that vision.”
The rest of the Epistle, however, dealt primarily with the differences obscuring this vision: “We have been challenged, shaken up, at times even enraged, intimidated, and offended by these differences in each other,” it declared. “Our differences are our richness, but also our problem.”
They said they had learned that they must, as Jan Wood had urged, lay their differences before God for forgiveness and transformation into instruments of healing.
“This priority is not merely an abstract idea,” they concluded, “but something we have experienced powerfully at work among us this week.”
So far, so good; in fact, in terms of candor, far better than the mealymouthed evasions
which have so often been emitted by many bodies of their elders.
And yet, this is talk of their condition; what of their task? What of the Future of Friends they were gathered to envision?
Here, alas, the epistle is vague and brief. It acknowledges that there are many crises in the world today, that testimonies for peace and justice ought to be borne even at
great risk, that “It is our desire to work cooperatively on unifying these points.” But that is all there is; no specifics, no proposals, no vision.
The only concrete statement came as an afterthought: they agreed, at the behest of the African delegation, to include a denunciation of racism, and especially apartheid, in a summary conference document.
SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING–WHAT?
The lack of progress in formulating a vision of the Quaker future was troubling to many participants as the gathering closed.
Yet the Epistle spoke faithfully of what had transpired during the week. What had happened to the vision process along the way?
There seem to be two main possible answers: One is that the focus on differences, and the attempt to understand and look beyond them was inescapable, and fully sufficient to take up a week of intensive labor. This makes much sense; after all, some adult groups of American Friends have wrangled over similar issues for decades with fewer results and less understanding to show for it.
From this perspective, the gathering ought to be seen primarily as the opening chapter in a continuing series of similar international young Friends gatherings, the next of which could build on this foundation of understanding and produce more concrete ideas.
But the other, less optimistic view of what happened sees in the gathering a major, missed opportunity.
It begins by questioning whether theological and worship diversity is in fact the dominant issue among Friends around the world today. Or is it, as a growing number
began to suspect by the week’s end, primarily a preoccupation, almost a major sport, of Quakers from affluent First World countries?
This impression was strengthened for some by a conversation late in the week between several Americans and a leader of the large Kenyan delegation.
Was grappling with doctrinal divergence at the top of the Kenyans’ list of
priorities and hopes for the gathering, he was asked?
Gently, he made it plain that it was not.
Questions of common work and witness around the survival and development needs of people in a poor nation were much more important to them.
For that matter, the record of Kenyan Quakerism bears this out: its three YMs have had their full share of problems and divisions, involving power struggles, personality differences, tribal and cultural problems– almost everything one can name, in fact, except theology.
But more practical priorities like these were rarely surfaced and not formally addressed in any substantial way by the gathering, though toward the end of the week there were several ad hoc initiatives under discussion in various corners of the campus.
The agenda, the format and the proceedings were dominated, no matter how unintentionally, by articulate, First World Friends and their theologically-centered concerns, to the neglect of more concrete issues which many, especially some from the developing countries, were equally concerned about.
Furthermore, there is no assurance that any future gathering will be held, or if it were that the same group of people would be present to build on what happened at Guilford.
In any case, despite the heartfelt and candid tone of the Epistle, it is sad truth that few things dissipate more quickly than noble sentiments of solidarity voiced at the conclusion of such events.
And the opportunity to develop more practical ways of embodying the witness that everyone seemed to agree was called for was, without question, allowed to slip past.
NO BLAME, BUT SOME DEFECTIVE VIRTUES
This interpretation is not intended to point a finger of blame at anyone.
Most native English-speaking attenders, including this one, arrived convinced that diversity should be item number one on the agenda. Is a week such a long time to begin to discover our parochialism?
After all, it is remarkable enough that the gathering even took place; and by collecting sufficient funds to assure attendance by a large number of African, Asian and
Latin American Friends, the organizers achieved what was probably the first truly
representative assembly of the worldwide Society of Friends as it actually exists today.
That they did this, moreover, on their own initiative, through unofficial planning committees which worked for three years and raised on their own a $150,000 budget is a testimony to their audacity, talent and vitality, of all of which we could use more among Friends.
Yet in other ways as well, the planners suffered the vices of their virtues.
One particularly grating problem was the determination by some officious planning committee members to control attendance at the gathering no matter what, presumably in pursuit of the worthwhile goal of maintaining its representative character against a feared invasion of hordes of Yankee interlopers.
As a result, however, when a handful of young Friends who arrived without certified credentials, they were in effect told to get lost, though one had come from Chile and another from the West Coast.
Even more disturbing was the shameful treatment of an older North Carolina Friend who sought to offer much-needed volunteer support, and for his efforts was made a pariah and an outcast in as disgraceful, insulting and unnecessary a series of episodes
as this writer has ever observed at a Quaker gathering.
LEST A SEED FALL TO THE EARTH…
To be sure, whatever its shortcomings, many good things are bound to come out of such a gathering as this. Contacts are made, relationships begun, and ideas planted, the results of which can hardly be foreseen at such close range.
After all, the whole process which led to the gathering began, as best as I have been able to trace it, in a chance conversation in 1979 between a midwestern American
Friend and a British staffer of the Friends World Committee for Consultation:
The midwesterner remarked that he wished there could be another Friends World Conference; the 1952 gathering in England, he affirmed, had changed his life.
The FWCC staffer responded that alas, there was not enough support among Friends groups surveyed by FWCC to make such a major gathering possible.
This Friend then added,”But the young Friends could do it.” And this thought, shared further, crystallized at the 1982 FWCC conference in Kenya in the hearts of those who then labored so long to make it happen.
Given this mysteriously leavening history, one can only hope that despite its shortcomings, the World Gathering of Young Friends will ultimately prove worth the effort in the cause of Truth as Friends bear witness to it in the future that we all must face, with or without a vision.
professional poet.
Granger’s order referred to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Celebrations of Juneteenth declined during the Jim Crow years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as Black Americans from the South spread across the country during and after World War II, they brought Juneteenth with them. By the 1980s, Texas had established Juneteenth as a state holiday. Other states followed, and in 2021, thanks in part to pressure from activist Opal Lee, Congress made Juneteenth a federal holiday and President Joe Biden signed the measure into law.
In 2025, as the Trump administration echoes those people, celebrations of Juneteenth are being cut back or even canceled. Corporate sponsors and local governments, as well as the national government, are pulling back their support for festivals and Juneteenth events.
Americans started having fewer children around 2007, which means that starting this year, there will be a sharply declining number of high school graduates. This is the “
Kent Chabotar served on the faculty of the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education, including the Seminar for New Presidents, and raised $90 million during his tenure. He was chosen to improve enrollment and was Guilford’s first non-Quaker president. He responded to my inquiry via LinkedIn: “If your critics cannot get you on the product, they will turn to the process.”
Bio: Jonathon Podolsky is a Certified Non-profit Board Consultant and Journalist Member of the Education Writers Association. He has advised five save college movements. You can learn more at 