Chris Hardie has writ­ten a very infor­ma­tive piece about what’s hap­pen­ing at Earl­ham Col­lege, the beloved Quak­er school out in Rich­mond, Indi­ana. The news is pret­ty grim. Take this dev­as­tat­ing detail: “In 2007, Earl­ham had over 1,200 under­grad­u­ate stu­dents. This fall, that num­ber was 671. The col­lege has most­ly retained the same num­ber of teach­ing fac­ul­ty in that time…”

This has been hap­pen­ing for awhile. Then-dean of Earl­ham School of Reli­gion Matt His­rich warned us about some of this back in late 2020 when he revealed that Earl­ham Col­lege was raid­ing what had always been treat­ed as ESR’s endow­ment. By all accounts the cur­rent EC pres­i­dent is doing his best after inher­it­ing a mess but cut­ting pro­grams and reduc­ing staff isn’t goin to help turn it around.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this spi­ral is becom­ing ever more com­mon with small lib­er­al arts col­leges. The pan­dem­ic hit hard and a cur­rent drop in stu­dents (a baby bust that start­ed in the 2008 reces­sion) is just going to make things that much hard­er for these kinds of schools.

I appre­ci­ate Hardie writ­ing this. Back in 2013 I got to know him as a fel­low pan­elist at an ESR lead­er­ship con­fer­ence and we’ve kept in touch over the years. In recent years he’s been on a task almost as quixot­ic as sav­ing small col­leges: he bought a paper, the West­ern Wayne News (pub­lish­er of this arti­cle), and has been try­ing to build a mod­el of a sus­tain­able local paper. I shared his great man­i­festo in defense of the open inter­net a few years ago and try to keep up with his blog. I’m glad to see Friends are shar­ing today’s arti­cle pret­ty wide­ly on Facebook.

Earl­ham Col­lege has long been an invalu­able part of the Quak­er insti­tu­tion­al land­scape and Earl­ham School of Reli­gion fills a need that no oth­er school comes close to. See­ing these on the edge is wor­ri­some for the whole Soci­ety of Friends. Guil­ford Col­lege in North Car­oli­na has been hav­ing a rough go of it as well, though cham­pi­ons like my friend Wess Daniels have been pas­sion­ate at drum­ming up sup­port.

Earl­ham hopes big cuts fos­ter long-term sur­vival — West­ern Wayne News 

Hop­ing to con­tin­ue its acclaimed lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion offer­ings well into the future, Earl­ham Col­lege in Rich­mond is…

West­ern Wayne News