[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.

The Trump administration has attacked higher education from multiple directions, but this hasn’t been a major factor at Guilford so far. Chuck Fager’s May 17th article, Guilford College on the Brink, mentions three Carolina colleges that have closed, and others are hanging on by their fingernails.

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  

 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. 

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 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. 

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

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. 

LAND SALE

Late last month Guilford announced that a conservation easement will forever preserve  much of Guilford Woods’ in a natural state. This is great long-term news and is expected to bring in $8.5 million — but not until 2028. That’s too late to help with Guilford’s immediate crisis.

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 these right, 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’t  received 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 with Jeff 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