Birmingham-Southern College to Close After Failing to Secure State Loan

U.S.|Birmingham-Southern College to Close After Failing to Secure State Loan https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/us/birmingham-southern-college-closing.html You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. After decades of financial mismanagement, the nearly 170-year-old private liberal arts school is set to close at the end […]

Birmingham-Southern College to Close After Failing to Secure State Loan

Birmingham-Southern College to Close After Failing to Secure State Loan thumbnail

U.S.|Birmingham-Southern College to Close After Failing to Secure State Loan

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/us/birmingham-southern-college-closing.html

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

After decades of financial mismanagement, the nearly 170-year-old private liberal arts school is set to close at the end of May.

A view of the quad at Birmingham-Southern College.
The question of whether Alabama should offer Birmingham-Southern College a loan had forced lawmakers, university officials and students to reckon with whether a classical liberal arts education is still valued in the state.Credit…Wes Frazer for The New York Times

Emily Cochrane

Birmingham-Southern College, a private liberal arts school in Birmingham, Ala., is set to close at the end of May, bringing a bitter end to the school’s nearly 170-year history after it failed to secure a multimillion-dollar loan from the state.

The school’s board of trustees voted unanimously on Tuesday to shut the school, with the college’s hundreds of students and staff receiving formal notice shortly after.

“This is a tragic day for the college, our students, our employees, and our alumni,” the Rev. Keith D. Thompson, the chair of the board, said in a news release. “But it is also a terrible day for Birmingham, for the neighborhoods who have surrounded our campus for more than 100 years, and for Alabama.”

The school has been mired in debt for years. The 2009 recession, and then the coronavirus pandemic worsened the toll of expensive campus investments and a dwindling endowment. But many staff and students had hoped that its future could be salvaged after Alabama lawmakers last year approved a new loan program that could lend Birmingham-Southern as much as $30 million.

Daniel Coleman, the school’s president, had proposed an ambitious plan to use the loan as a bridge to stay open while the college sought to replenish its endowment with commitments from private donors. But Young Boozer III, the state treasurer, twice denied the loan last year, citing concerns about the school’s ability to pay its debts.

“If you loan it, you will own it — it is a falling knife,” Mr. Boozer told a House committee this month.


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