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.
