Once More to the Campus Center
I stood back. She dove in. That’s the whole story.
The last book I checked out from my college’s library was When Colleges Close: Leading Through a Time of Crisis. Despite the title, the book focuses less on closures and more on mergers—specifically, the one between Wheelock College and Boston University.
Like my own college, Wheelock built its legacy training teachers and social workers. And like my college, it didn’t attract massive donor dollars, described by the authors as a “small, non-elite liberal arts college.” In the 2000s, the former Miss Wheelock’s Kindergarten Training School faced shrinking pools of college-aged students in New England, falling enrollments, a modest endowment, and nearly $40 million in debt.
Sound familiar? Swap in upstate New York for New England, and it’s the same obituary. Except Wheelock still exists—folded into Boston University after a years-long effort. At my college, eleventh-hour talks of a merger were too little, too late. There were no takers.
I wish I could do a side-by-side comparison: what Wheelock did right versus what my college did wrong. The short version? They did everything right. We did everything wrong. I can’t imagine our faculty calmly entertaining merger discussions without spiraling into fears of redundancy—as some Wheelock faculty eventually were. But Wheelock’s leadership planned for the long game. Ours, in retrospect, could barely plan for lunch.
It’s all, quite literally, academic now. I can’t picture our administration having the vision—or humility—to acknowledge the end was coming years out and make real moves to preserve the college’s mission. That stings. Because Wheelock, like us, stood for public service and preparing students for underpaid, underappreciated fields in a society obsessed with ROI.
When Colleges Close is a business book. The authors, who I’m sure are decent folks, write for aspiring administrators hungry for wisdom on this elusive thing called “leadership.” But after decades hearing my own field of writing instruction dismissed as cult-adjacent or unserious, you’ll forgive me for being allergic to leadership-speak—especially from people tossing around terms like “relational transparency” while patting themselves on the back for merging into a college in Boston.
My inbox now overflows with messages from colleges my daughter will never attend. Some she applied to. Others just got her info via the Common App, which admissions departments love because it lets them inflate their applicant numbers and, in turn, their selectivity stats.
Now those colleges are sending out emails (cc’ing parents), pamphlets, even T-shirts—as if she’s already enrolled.
These messages from Last Choice Colleges stir up a complicated stew of feelings. Not too long ago, my own college sent out similar messages, funneling prospective students through engagement software that mimicked CRM platforms like Salesforce. I know there’s evidence that Customer Relationship Management boosts enrollment numbers. But let’s be real: at this stage in the admissions game, it all comes down to three letters—ABC: Always Be Closing.
Some recent email subject lines:
Join Us to Celebrate Your Student’s Acceptance
Understanding Your Financial Letter
Top 30 Career Services in Your First Year
Top 8% in Nation for Return on Investment
I read them and feel sad. I think about how, in its final years, my college pitched itself to students like my daughter—promising a campus of self-discovery, hands-on learning, dreams fulfilled. In reality, students learned and dreamed in spite of the institution. Faculty were laid off. Programs vanished. In our English department, funding for anything beyond basic instruction evaporated.
Administrators strutted around like turnaround artists, holding performative meetings while veteran staff whispered to each other that this president, too, would be gone in two years. Nobody took real risks. Ideas that could’ve helped us survive—real mergers, shared governance, transparency—were shot down in favor of consulting contracts and empty branding.
These days, I see ghosts of my old college in strange places.
Last weekend I drove out to a suburban Lowe’s to pick up a kerosene heater. Ours had busted, and we keep one around just in case the power goes out. As I turned a corner into the appliance showroom, I spotted one of my former administrators—the kind who once managed to spin skyrocketing enrollments and faculty “bloat” into the same talking point. I was reminded of Succession—specifically, the “Living+” episode where Kendall pitches a wildly unrealistic real estate venture with juiced numbers and magical thinking. Our own enrollment strategies often felt just as delusional.
I looked for a metaphor—because of course I did—and found one. The heater I needed was technically “in stock,” but it was off-season, so it sat shrink-wrapped on the highest shelf with ten others, inaccessible without staff assistance. Meanwhile, the summer fire pits and grills sat proudly on the showroom floor.
Not only did I get to see the former administrator beaming over wine fridges with their partner—I left empty-handed.
Given all this, it’s probably no surprise I’ve begged out of doing college tours with my daughter. But I tried. Early on, my wife and daughter visited a perfectly fine college and came home full of excitement.
I met them with the joylessness of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. I grilled them about administrative bloat and which departments had been cut five years ago.
It was for the best that I sat the rest out.
She’s made her decision, and she’s happy. We’re happy. At the “accepted students day,” we visited the cafeteria, dorms, and faculty offices. We listened to student panels. It felt like a reboot of a show I used to star in—new actors, same set. Student bands. Bulletin board flyers. Professors bonding with their protégés.
This was the mise-en-scène I knew for more than two decades. A place where you could say mise-en-scène without sounding like a pretentious twat. And I fucking loved it.
Anyone who has taken—let alone taught—English 101 might catch the allusion we’re making here. In his essay “Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White watches his son skip stones in the cold lake where he spent his childhood summers.
Yadda yadda yadda—he feels his balls retract and he realizes the “chill of death.”
It was taught year after year in comp classes, because E.B. White—despite my clumsy and testicle-centric summary—is considered one of the preeminent American prose stylists. That, and the essay is short and out of copyright, so it can get taught without paying a licensing fee.
The essay’s always stuck with me. And I couldn’t help but think of it as I scanned the bulletin boards, the bad haircuts on boys, the admissions reps in their sportcoats. I watched my daughter walk—awkward at first, then a little more sure-footed, through a campus that echoed the one I used to work at and believe in. She asked questions. She lit up, even, in little moments.
And all I could think of was, fuuuuuuck, we had this once, and we fuckin’ fucked it.
That’s my version of the chill. That’s the flicker of death.
As the accepted students day went on, I watched my daughter dive in—chatting with professors, asking about classes, looking at a small, oh so small, dorm room. She’ll find herself there, in her own way. Maybe a little like I did. Maybe not at all.
As I kept remembering and remembering, I realized: it’s time to let go. I started the day obsessing over what might have been, or what was lost.
I still get the flashes. This is a real grief, a grief that used to take up whole afternoons, whole weekends, now reduced to flashes, seconds. A chill. A flicker.
It lights up my eyes. And then it’s gone.
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Daniel, this beautiful essay broke my heart. Happy to have found you and your writing on here!
Thank you so much for sharing. And thanks for linking another post from TMN a ways back. Much appreciated!