2025 has been a tough year for small colleges in the Carolinas. Two have closed, a third is in what looks like death throes, and then there’s a fourth on the brink, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Down and out are St. Andrews, in Laurinburg, a hundred miles southwest of Raleigh in Scotland County; and Limestone University, about 60 miles west of Charlotte, just over  the border in Gaffney SC. In Raleigh itself, a venerable HBCU, St. Augustine’s University, is hanging on by a thread.

St. Andrews and Limestone officially closed after commencements early in May.

St. Aug’s, as it is called, is on life support, having lost its accreditation, it appealed, unsuccessfully. Then it managed a stay of execution until an arbitration process is completed.

Even if it wins the arbitration, St. Aug’s enrollment this year was around 200, down drastically from 1100 in 2024; plus it is facing lawsuits for millions of dollars. It gave out a few diplomas in May too, asserting that as long as its disaccreditation was not final, the degrees were legitimate. Odds are, they will be the last.

While not widely-known, these schools aren’t fly-by-nights: among them they have delivered almost 350 years of academics in the region, over seven generations. But time, demographic change, management and debt can be pitiless, and the combination caught up with all of them.

As it seems about to catch up with yet another: Guilford College in Greensboro, which opened 188 years ago, in 1837.

Guilford’s crisis echoes Ernest Hemingway’s famous dictum about how one goes bankrupt: “gradually, and then suddenly.” We’ve reported on Guilford’s decline in this blog more than once —as early as 2015, and during the runup to its current difficulties.

This week, in mid-May, Guilford’s plight got an in-depth and unflinching analysis in a lengthy piece by Matt Hartman of The Assembly.This aggressive online startup has been doing a fine job of covering  many major topics largely lost in the smog of social media exhaust that has filled the vacuums where so many local newspapers once thrived.

Hartman’s piece is thoroughly excellent, except for an awkward headline (and in the good old days, reporters could usually blame editors for such lapses.) Here it is:

Guilford College Debates How ‘Quakerly’ It Should Be

For pete’s sake: No, Guilford is not doing that. Here is a more accurate version:

Guilford Is Struggling to Survive, with Time Rapidly Running Out.

Yes, Guilford was founded by Quakers, though it soon opened its doors to pupils  outside the denomination. Quaker numbers in North Carolina have been dwindling for over a century. Besides, while Quakers take (humble) pride in their “distinctives,” they share one key feature with almost all the rest of humanity, namely: they have bills to pay. And at Guilford, bill-paying has become steadily harder.  After ten years and more of juggling, stalling, avoidance and dissembling, the college has six weeks left to close a yawning financial gap. Or else.

How big a gap? The Assembly’s Hartman dug through heaps of obfuscation, books-cooking, and years of what is at least gross mismanagement (and could even include patterns a prosecutor should hire a forensic accountant to sort out.) The total hole Guilford needs to fill? Hartman says the current management

which took over this year, is aiming to raise $5 million in gifts, cut $3 million in expenses, and generate $3 million in other revenue by June 30.

I was not good at math, but I can add 5 + 3 + 3, and it equals 11.

Eleven. Million. Bucks. For years the repeatedly-quoted — but bogus — deficit figure was around two million. And at this writing, on May 16, there are 45 days to get it fixed; six weeks til Judgment Day, June 30.

A big chunk of the running deficit is produced by interest payments on tens of millions of dollars of bonds Guilford issued to finance  renovations and upgrades of  dorms —  to house an expected bulge of student body growth.

The dorms got rebuilt; but the student bulge did not arrive; enrollments sank instead. And the bond payments made for chronic deficits, and the bank that owned the bonds has potent legal options in the case of default.

Gradually the deficits grew, and then suddenly, last December,  the crisis arrived. (Details here.) In March of this year, an “emergency” fundraising campaign was launched (not, by the way, the first) for the $5 million in gifts.

How is it going? Hartman says,

School officials say they have raised $3.3 million since March but have not met their goals for cutting costs and raising other revenues.

On May 14 a Guilford staff meeting was told expense cuts were coming, but specifics were vague. This raised a familiar ominous question: would expense cuts also mean staff and faculty layoffs, of which there have already been several rounds?

The responses were vague; but if the target for expense cuts is $3 million, it is hard to credit any hope that more job cuts can be avoided.

And finally, there’s an even more vague category, “raising other revenues.” How? Bake sales? Bingo or raffles? (Certainly not! Quakers have long been against gambling. And don’t get me started on wine tastings. But . . . $3 million??)

Hmm. What else could there be —what other, “other sources?”

. . . “Other?” Oh, no, some quietly gasped. No, not that. Surely not that!

Yet there were those inside and outside the May 14 meeting who were thinking — YES, that:

That, or rather those, are The Guilford Family Jewels.

Not ordinary gems, diamonds or pearls; traditional Quakers sternly shun such worldly baubles (there’s since been some slippage); Guilford’s are more precious than that:

Green jewels: the woods. The land.

There’s a lot of it at Guilford, almost 350 acres. The actual campus takes up about 90. Much of the rest is mostly woods.

Nice woods. Walkable woods. Historic woods.

Developable woods.

Woods that maybe could be turned into “other revenues.”

But $3 million worth?

Who knows?

At least one active alum wants to find out: Mark Cubberly, who spends much of his retirement free time working to save his alma mater. Hartman reports that

In its current economic climate, [Cubberly] says, Guilford has no choice but to do what [some] others are desperately trying to avoid: Think like a business. . . .

Recently, Cubberly said, he helped facilitate a meeting between Guilford’s then-CFO and a real estate broker to discuss selling part of the Guilford Woods, an undeveloped, 240-acre section of campus.

Faculty and staff have been opposed to their sale for years because of what [the acting president] called their “historic value and environmental value,” largely due to their connection with the Underground Railroad, which area Quakers were part of.

. . . But no deal has come to pass.

Instead, one longtime faculty member is pressing a plan to replace most of the upper administration with a council that would operate much like a local Quaker meeting for business, and support a communal ambiance that would attract new students.

There is more than a tinge of romantic nostalgia to this idea. Quaker meetings can indeed offer warm-fuzzy community experiences. But they are also prone to what some sociologists call “the paralysis of analysis,” though Friends prefer to call it “discernment.” Often the bigger the stakes, the longer this “Quaker process” takes.

So, what does this plan, even if adopted, have to do with bringing in $11 million by the end of June?

Lucia Safran Messina, another active local alum, was blunt: “This kumbaya stuff is for the birds now.”

[The acting president]  said selling land is “something we would only do in extremis,” and that her team is looking for ways to monetize the woods instead. One option is a conservation easement with the Piedmont Land Conservancy, though no deal has been reached.

Well, if Guilford was a train station, the In Extremis Express, enroute to Or Else Junction, would be rounding the bend, rolling steadily closer, the big headlight flashing right/left, shrill whistle booming, rails humming.

What would  In Extremis deliver for Guilford? From The Assembly article and other inquiries, three scenarios emerge for post-June 30.

Best Case: Guilford shows it has $11 million in hand or rock-solid committed. The budget is balanced, their accreditation overseers smile and bow, and The Family Jewels are unscathed.

Next Case, Or Else #1: Receivership. Guilford defaults on bond payments. The bondholders exercise their right to put the college in receivership. That means putting it under the control of a court-appointed overseer, authorized to make drastic changes by decree, such as selling off as much of The (green) Family Jewels, along with job and program cuts, to erase the deficit while preserving a functioning and viable, if quite different Guilford.

Worst Case, Or Else #2: The college defaults, the bondholders take full charge, close the school  and liquidate all available college assets to recover as much of their failed investment as possible. The Family Jewels are gone; Guilford joins St. Andrew’s, Limestone (& St. Aug’s?) in Carolina dead college oblivion. Only memories and the historic markers remain.

I’m not a fortuneteller, but I will venture that today the best case sure looks to have pretty slim odds. I will also dare to say that the apparent divergence between being “Quakerly” and being “Businesslike” voiced by some at Guilford rings quite false to what I know of historic Quaker life and witness.

Indeed, “businesslike” attitudes have been integral to Quaker practice since the first generation, and a serious businesslike way of operating (including making the tough calls) is also “Quakerly” and has a very long pedigree.

[NOTE: Since this article was posted (May 16) there have been rumors about a deal involving some of the wooded acreage taking shape; but these are not yet confirmed.]

Other than that, my hat is off to Matt Hartman and The Assembly, for showing that quality journalism in Carolina survives amid that legacy industry’s rubble.

Would that more of its small colleges can do likewise.