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The last commencement

Bradford's financial problems caught up with it. "We ran out of time," says college president Jean Scott.

Bob Smart cut off his 12-inch-long ponytail on Thanksgiving weekend. He braided it, soaked it in mineral oil, stuffed it into a Ziploc bag, and stashed it in the glove compartment of his truck.

Smart had worn his hair in a ponytail for 10 years. At Bradford College in Haverhill, where he has taught English since 1983 and serves as the director of the writing program and chair of the faculty senate, Smart is beloved. His colleagues compare him to the prep school English teacher Robin Williams played in Dead Poets Society. And the ponytail was his trademark. To many people, it was the trademark of artsy, unconventional, innovative Bradford itself.

When he returned to campus the following Monday, Smart's transformation symbolized what had happened six days before in Conover Hall. On that day, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the administration canceled classes and summoned students, faculty, and staff to a campus-wide meeting. Flanked by the trustees, President Jean Scott told the packed auditorium that after 197 years of operation, the financially troubled college would shut its doors forever at the end of the academic year.

The gasp from the crowd of 700 could be heard almost across the Merrimack River in downtown Haverhill. Students and faculty were stunned. Many wept openly. President Scott herself was in tears. And a furious Bob Smart went home and took a pair of scissors to his ponytail.

"It was a sign of mourning and defeat," he says. "I was so angry. I felt so betrayed."

Bradford had been in precarious financial condition for years. But when the end came, it was swift and unexpected. In the eyes of many, an academic institution represents stability and continuity, especially one that has been in existence since the year the Louisiana Purchase was signed. Because Bradford is so small - just 500 students - and because relations between students, faculty, and staff have traditionally been so close, the decision to shut it down has felt like a death in the family.

As Bradford prepares for its final graduation next weekend,may 20 a mood of sadness, anxiety, and anger continues to grip the campus. Students have been spending much of spring semester saying farewell to classmates and teachers and scurrying to apply to new schools for the fall. Faculty have been getting their resumes in order and preparing to dismantle their offices.

Meanwhile, alumni worry about how they will obtain academic transcripts and whether they will ever have another class reunion. The college's immediate neighbors and the city fathers of Haverhill fret about whether another school can be found to take over the 70-acre campus. And many people are asking if enough was done to save the college - and if small liberal arts schools like Bradford, once the backbone of American higher education, are increasingly an endangered species.

Bradford is one of those New England colleges that look as if they should be around forever. Located in a historic residential district of Haverhill, the campus features wide lawns, handsome old brick buildings, a pond (with fish), woodlands, wetlands, and fields. Academy Hall, the 1870 four-story, white-pillared structure that serves as a combination administration building, dining hall, and dormitory, is one of three buildings at Bradford listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The campus features 50 unusual specimen trees and plants; its flower gardens even boast the school's own pale yellow iris - the Bradford Promise. The 1960s-style Dorothy Bell Study Center houses the second-largest collection of Sandwich glass in the United States.

The school was originally founded in 1803 as a girls' academy, becoming a women's junior college in 1932. But only under the reign of Dorothy Bell, who led Bradford from 1940 to 1967, did it gain a national reputation. During those years, Bradford Junior College (BJC) was considered the most intellectual of the Little Sisters (the junior-college version of the Seven Sisters), attracting the daughters of wealthy families like the Armours and the Rockefellers. "It was a very classy school," says Dr. Patricia O'Malley, a Bradford history professor and the author of a history of the college. "But it also had strong academics, especially in the creative arts." (The late writer Andre Dubus was the most well-known professor.)

BJC women dated Dartmouth men, were served formal dinners at the dining room in Academy Hall, attended Sunday-afternoon vespers, and were required to wear their class blazer whenever they went into town. Longtime college employee and Haverhill native Judy Bologna recalls being awed, as a high school student, by the "BJC girls" she encountered on the streets downtown. "They had such a sophisticated look," she remembers. "We'd say, `There's a BJC girl. You can't talk to them!' "

But in the social ferment of the late 1960s and early '70s, things began to change, even at exclusive Bradford. In 1972, Bradford became a four-year school and admitted men for the first time. "It became evident that two-year women's schools were not going to hack it," says O'Malley. "We have been trying to keep our head above water ever since."

In 1982, the trustees hired a "whiz kid" from the Carnegie Foundation named Arthur Levine. At 33, he became the second-youngest college president in the country. Levine had made a splash in educational circles with a book called The Quest for Common Learning, which advocated a rethinking of liberal arts education. Bradford became the laboratory in which to test his ideas.

The new president developed what became known as the Bradford Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts. It had a variety of components: interdisciplinary majors, a "practical minor," internships, a four-year honors program, and a senior project. Levine had charm and vision and was able to attract a dedicated faculty.

"Arthur could inspire and move the institution," says Bob Smart. "He talked half of us into taking cuts in pay to come here. I was one of them. I remember him talking me into it, sitting on a ratty couch, with the plaster falling down."

Enrollment, which had dropped sharply in the '70s, began to grow. And Levine was a master at getting media attention. He recalls one Christian Science Monitor article that profiled four colleges in America that were doing important things in education: Harvard, Princeton, UCLA - and Bradford. "I liked to think of them as the Big Four," says Levine, today the president of Columbia University's Teachers College in New York City. The 1989 edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges raved, " `The Life and Times of Bradford College' reads like a rags-to-riches, great-American-dream story. . . . Suddenly, it's the Bradford College, earmarked as one of the most innovative and up-and-coming schools of the '80s."

But while the school basked in national attention, Bradford's finances remained a problem. In the early '90s, when economist and author David W. Breneman visited Bradford, one of 12 schools he profiled for his book Liberal Arts Colleges (Brookings Institution, 1994), he was "surprised at how rough its financial circumstances were."

According to Breneman, now the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, a "rough rule of thumb" is that any time a school's enrollment is fewer than 1,000 students, that represents "a reasonable gauge of stress." Bradford was never able to grow to more than 600. "The place was pretty thin beer," said Breneman.

Even in its glory days under Levine, Bradford had trouble attracting and keeping students. Close to half of the students in a particular class would leave before their four years were over, often transferring to larger schools. In part, this may have had to do with the kinds of students Bradford attracted - unorthodox, restless individualists drawn to a school whose slogan was "Dare to be different."

There were other reasons, too. With such a small faculty, students found themselves taking courses with the same professors over and over again. Lack of facilities was a drawback as well. Bradford didn't have a student center, and when the old gym was converted into a student center in the '90s, then it no longer had a gym. (Students received memberships at a health club a couple of miles away, instead.) Dormitories were crowded.

The admission and retention problems were major for a school that had a small endowment and depended on tuition to cover most of its operating costs. In order to lure students, Bradford, like many other small colleges, discounted tuition heavily, up to 50 percent. While the "sticker price" to attend Bradford was in the neighborhood of $28,000, the college was taking in barely half of that per student.

Levine left in 1989. The new president, Joe Short, shored up the college's deteriorating physical plant and more than tripled the endowment. But Short lacked Levine's ability to inspire. And although the faculty remained top-notch, the school was forced to become less selective in terms of students. (Although it still receives a three-star Fiske Guide academic ranking, the same as Boston College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.) By the time Short left, in 1998, to be succeeded by Jean Scott, the interim president of the State University of New York at Potsdam, many had become convinced that the school was stagnating.

Still, by the summer of 1999, as Scott began her second year, things seemed to be looking up. She brought in a new financial manager, academic dean, and admissions director. The faculty was in the midst of an ambitious strategic planning process to revamp the school's curriculum, replacing its glut of majors with "signature programs" that offered greater academic depth.

But before Bradford could reinvent itself once again, the college's financial problems caught up with it. Operating losses over two years amounted to $11 million. The college had floated an $18 million bond to build new dormitories and renovate old ones. But the gamble that the new dorms would attract more students didn't pay off; Bradford was stuck with the interest payments. In September 1999, the school suffered a shortfall of 31 students. The trustees became convinced that the situation was untenable.

"We ran out of time," says Scott.

Jenny Cobuzzi's junior year at Bradford hasn't been what she expected. Cobuzzi, who grew up in Stoneham, is a dance and business major who wants to have her own dance studio someday. When the college announced it would close, Cobuzzi spent the entire day crying. "My reaction was, `Oh, my God, you're closing my home,' " she says. "I didn't even think of the transferring part until a trustee mentioned it."

Now on a Friday in March, the "transferring part" is suddenly very real. She is heading to New York City for a dance audition at Marymount Manhattan College.

Cobuzzi had planned to be in Florence this semester, studying dance. But once the closing was announced, she canceled her study abroad - she realized she would have to spend spring term finding a new school. To make matters worse, she lost her work/study job at the Bradford admissions office. (There was no one to "admit" any longer, after all.) For much of the semester, she has been living off her tax refund.

"I'm making the best of it," says Cobuzzi. "But I get mad at the school a lot."

When Scott announced the closing of the college, she promised seniors "a year of which they can be proud." Karen Sughrue, class of '70 and chairwoman of the board of trustees, was determined to shut down the college in "the most humane way" possible. But it turned out to be far more complicated than they thought.

Not that Bradford didn't do its best to ease the situation. The administration sponsored two "college fairs" on campus, in which representatives from nearly 90 colleges around the country made their pitches to students. It established a Transfer Advising Center, where students could find college catalogs, financial aid applications, and a computer providing links to the Web sites of other colleges. The school hired a placement service to give advice to faculty and staff about finding jobs.

Right from the beginning, though, the students weren't going quietly. In the days just after the Thanksgiving announcement, there was a sense of determination, even exhilaration, among them; they were going to save their school. They rallied at Academy Hall, they threatened legal action, they went on the Today show. "It definitely brought people together," says campus activist Mike Freysinger of Haverhill. "It created the first really strong sense of community."

Perhaps it was because of this solidarity that Bradford experienced a low rate of student attrition between semesters. The administration had feared that as many as half of the students might not return after Christmas break; in fact, the decline in the second-semester enrollment rate was only slightly above normal. "That was absolutely amazing to me," says Scott.

But when the students did return, the exhilaration quickly faded. They found fewer courses to choose from than expected: Although almost all the 35 full-time faculty members remained, most of the cadre of adjunct faculty had been let go. Library and computer room hours were cut; the campus post office was shuttered most of the day. As the semester went on, paper and supplies became hard to find.

Even more distressing, a few days before the semester started, students received notices that their work/study jobs had either been significantly reduced or eliminated altogether. More than three-quarters of Bradford students receive financial aid, and many have traditionally depended on work/study funds for spending money. Since money to pay for course books is taken out of work/study paychecks over the course of the semester, some students found themselves forced to pay for books out of their own pocket; many didn't have the cash to do so.

Mike Ruggieri, a senior from Saugus who is president of the student senate, lost 75 percent of his anticipated work/study money and says he hasn't bought a book or a notebook and can barely afford gas for his car. "I'm poorer than poor," he says. "I'm $300 in debt."

Bette Maya, a junior from New York City, found her work/study cut from an anticipated $2,000 to $500 this semester. Luckily, "an emergency baby-sitting job" over Christmas break netted her $1,300, making up the difference. "I live in the Townhouse dorms, which means we buy our own groceries and make our own meals," she says. "Without that baby-sitting money, I wouldn't have been able to pay my phone bill or do grocery shopping or buy shampoo or deodorant."

It wasn't clear how much students were actually suffering, especially in the hothouse environment of Bradford, where rumor fed upon rumor. The administration and some faculty cast doubt on student claims. "We put out the word that students could come and talk to us if they were having problems," notes Carmen Fortin, dean of enrollment management. "They haven't been breaking down our doors."

Whatever the actual situation, the cutbacks and the stories about student hardships were having a souring effect on campus mood. "This is a completely changed campus," says Kristen O'Brien, a junior from Kennebunk, Maine, and vice president of the student senate. "There are few activities. Most clubs have ceased to exist. Students are drinking themselves silly. Everyone is so unstable. You just don't know what will come out of someone's mouth."

She adds: "Bradford was the stable thing in people's lives. Now, that is gone. People don't know where to turn."

Juniors were afraid that schools they were applying to wouldn't take all their credits and would make them repeat a year. Some, with almost enough credits to graduate, were taking twice as many courses as usual in a desperate effort to graduate and avoid having to look for a new school. Many who were trying to transfer were choosing larger - and presumably more financially stable - schools, like Boston University, Northeastern, or UMass.

For many, though, classes and classwork provided an anchor, the one "normal" aspect of life at Bradford during the school's last days. Senior Ben DalPra of Manchester, New Hampshire, editor of the Bradford ReView, the campus literary magazine, says, "We owe it to our professors to do our best."

Their professors have returned the compliment. Since the Thanksgiving announcement, students and faculty have become closer than ever. David Crouse, assistant professor of writing, handed out $10 bills to students on the first day of class so they could buy books. He let students use his office computer when the computer center was closed. Other professors hired students to do weekend jobs, like cleaning their basements, to help students earn extra cash.

And, like their students, if there is one thing that has kept these professors going, it has been classes. "This semester, I've had a marvelous time in class," says Smart. "They have been some of the best classes I've ever taught."

Not surprisingly, a major preoccupation for the faculty has been finding positions for the next year. In a crowded academic job market, that isn't easy. John Cigliano, associate professor of marine biology and environmental science, who has been at Bradford for four and a half years, is typical. He and his wife have a 2-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Although he is one of Bradford's most popular professors, it was only in early April that Cigliano received his first job offer.

"Bradford is a teaching college," he notes. "The teaching workload is high. There is committee work and extracurricular activities. The emphasis is not on scholarly work. That is hurting many of us in finding jobs. It is personally hurting me."

Faculty members claim that the late-November closing announcement hurt thir chances of finding new positions, essentially cutting them out of the first round of job applications for the coming year.

If many members of the faculty have had trouble finding new positions, the middle-level administrative staff has been having an easier time.

At the Peddler's Daughter, the downtown Haverhill watering hole where faculty and staff members gather on Friday afternoons after work, bitterness about the college's closing alternates with optimism about life after Bradford. One administrator is interviewing at a large Internet company. "I want to get into corporate America and make money," she says. Academic support adviser Judy Bologna says that people are even turning down jobs because the salaries are too low.

But even when positions in the outside world are plentiful, leaving the tight little island of Bradford isn't so simple. Bologna, for instance, has spent almost her entire adult life at Bradford, working for 38 years in capacities ranging from public relations assistant to director of financial aid. Her two daughters went to college there. For her and other long-term employees, the emotional impact of the closing is wrenching. "I had planned to retire in two years," she says. "I thought I'd drive by and chitchat with everyone I knew who still worked here. I thought I'd play with my grandkids here."

Bologna is hopeful that another institution will take over the campus and will need administrative staff. If that happens, she says, "I will be at the front door with my resume."

In late October, just a few weeks before Bradford announced its closing, Stephanie Seale Baum, '94, flew to Haverhill from Boulder, Colorado, where she lives, for her fifth Bradford class reunion. That weekend, she had no idea that it would be the last reunion she would attend on the Bradford campus. She also had no idea that her old school was in financial trouble.

"The trustees never let on that there was a problem," says Baum, a computer programmer who has established a Web site (Bradfordnow.com) that she hopes will function as an online alumni magazine. "If they had given us any indication early on, we would have stepped up to the plate. It makes us angry."

Baum is not alone. Among alumni, faculty, staff, and students, the perception is widespread that the board of trustees managed the college poorly and then cavalierly shut it down without trying hard enough to save it.

Bradford is a small school, a close-knit community. Some people think they should have been consulted about the college's problems, brought into the deliberations. Isn't that what Bradford is all about? they ask. Isn't that what made the school distinctive? When that didn't happen, when decisions were made behind closed doors, people assumed that someone was hiding something. "There was such secrecy," says professor of philosophy Margaret Walsh, who has taught at Bradford for 27 years. "You've got to wonder why."

In the absence of an open process, speculation becomes increasingly accepted as fact. The trustees' 1997 decision to float the $18 million bond issue for dorm construction and renovation is widely cited as the final blow to the school's finances. But the administration and trustees insist that the bond was merely one factor among many. Smart tends to agree, attributing the closing to lack of academic vision and leadership as much as anything else. "The bond was not the blow that brought the beast to its knees," he says. "It was just the most visible thing."

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. Everyone involved with Bradford has an opinion about what wasn't done, what should have been done, who should have been consulted, and who is responsible. "It is natural to blame someone," says board of trustees chairwoman Karen Sughrue. "There are never adequate answers for many people whose lives have been turned upside down by this."

Sughrue, a producer at CBS-TV's 60 Minutes, insists that the board did everything possible to keep the college open. Among Bradford's donor pool, she says, there are about a hundred people who have traditionally given 95 percent of the money. "We went out to enough of them to get an indication that we were not going to raise anywhere near what we needed," she says. "We felt we had to let the students know by Thanksgiving what the future would be. We had a month to raise the money - and we couldn't."

Sughrue adds: "None of us ever thought we would participate in something like this. We were as much in denial up to the last minute as anybody else on campus that this was going to happen. It all collapsed very quickly."

Questions about the management of Bradford aside, the closing underscores the fragile financial situation of many small liberal arts colleges. One trend among small colleges, according to the University of Virginia's Breneman, is that "the spread between the wealth of the top institutions and the bottom institutions is growing dramatically. The ones at the bottom are struggling."

As for Bradford, he adds, "I don't know if I would fault anyone in this case, if there was any real strategy that could save it."

Meanwhile, in Haverhill, the final act is playing out. In February, the trustees hired The Recovery Group, a Boston-based turnaround and crisis-management firm, to search for an "appropriate successor" to take over the campus, whose physical plant is, ironically, in its best condition in years. Although there have been discussions with a number of educational institutions, so far nothing has happened, according to The Recovery Group's Bruce Erickson.

Everyone - from the trustees to Haverhill public officials to the college's neighbors - say they want an educational institution to replace Bradford. But Erickson emphasizes that the college's creditors cannot be held at bay indefinitely. "We have to be prepared for other options," he told a public meeting on the Bradford campus in late March. If the Recovery Group finds no likely suitor by the end of June, the college's creditors will "take over and be in a position to make the decision as to what to do with the property," according to Erickson.

Closing the school involves other decisions, as well. There are the questions of what to do with the 60,000 books in the Bradford library; the precious institutional artifacts - old portraits, the class pins from 1859, the invitation to a graduation exercise in 1880; the collection of Sandwich glass. The school has to find a repository for student transcripts, which, by law, must be preserved in perpetuity. (Plans are for a company specializing in archival data to scan them onto CD-ROM.)

There is the issue of what to do with what is left of the college's endowment - much of it earmarked for specific purposes; the Massachusetts attorney general's office and the college will make decisions on where that money will go.

One memento of Bradford's last days has already found a home. When Bob Smart took a group of Bradford students to a small college in Ireland this winter, as he had the year before, he stopped in at a pub on the Dingle Peninsula. The owner asked him what had happened to his ponytail. After Smart told the story, the owner asked him if he would be willing to send it to him - he would hang it up in his pub alongside other mementos.

And so, on the wall of Mick O'Neill's pub on the west coast of Ireland, next to the soccer jerseys and the trophies, a little bit of Bradford College - and the passions that accompanied its demise - will remain.