The St. Paul’s College campus and the 35 buildings on its roller-coaster grounds are for sale in hopes it can continue to educate young Black men and women in this rural community.
Located in Virginia’s tobacco-growing belt, the private, liberal arts college closed in June 2013 under crushing debt and questions about its governance, and following an ill-advised foray into football years earlier.
Now the school’s 11th president presides over the largely abandoned grounds and looks ahead to the April 9 sale of a campus that has everything you’d expect of a college, except for students.
“What our ultimate goal will be is to find another college or university that will take over St. Paul’s as an educational institution,” President Millard “Pete” Stith Jr. said.
Like many of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), St. Paul’s was founded after the Civil War to educate Black men and women in the segregated South. Founded in 1888 by James Solomon Russell, an Episcopal priest who was born into slavery, the college was then known as St. Paul’s Normal and Industrial School. It ultimately shed its longer name but it still remains affiliated with the Episcopal Church.
While St. Paul’s collapse is an extreme example, many HBCUs are struggling. Historically, they never have had deep pocket benefactors like a University of Virginia, and black Americans suffered disproportionately during the recession the country is just now shaking off.
Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania who has written extensively on HBCUs, fears other “itty-bitty” colleges like St. Paul’s could face a similar fate.
She pointed, however, to “really strong” HBCUs such as Spelman, Morehouse and North Carolina A&T and Paul Quinn College, a small Dallas school that was saved by an energetic president who brought in new money and ideas.
St. Paul’s is banking on the sale to breathe new life into its campus.
The campus, which is assessed at more than $12.5 million, includes dormitories, a president’s house and other residences, administration buildings, a gingerbread Victorian house that served as an arts center, and a student center that includes a four-lane bowling alley. Reflecting its blue collar origins, some of the brick buildings were constructed by students.
Source: Diverse Education | Steve Szkotak, Associated Press
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