The grounds of Whittier Faculty are lush and the buildings stately. However the once-bustling quad is commonly all however empty nowadays, college students say, and contained in the Wanberg Corridor dormitory, carpets odor musty, the WiFi is spotty, and 25 college students share two restrooms with bogs that continuously break down and take ages to repair.
The eerie quiet outdoors and fetid bogs inside are indicators of the turmoil roiling considered one of California’s oldest liberal arts schools, President Nixon’s alma mater and the next training establishment rooted in its Quaker heritage of social justice and respect for range.
Since 2018, enrollment has plummeted by about 35%, from 1,853 college students to about 1,200, in accordance with faculty figures. Annual income has plunged by 29% over roughly the identical interval, audited monetary statements present.
Partly to save cash, Whittier reduce soccer and three different sports activities packages final 12 months, and the faculty has stated it plans to promote the president’s residence, Wardman Home, a hilltop mansion with views to the ocean.
A lone scholar walks on the campus of Whittier Faculty, the place enrollment has dropped 29%.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Occasions)
Many small liberal arts campuses throughout the nation and in California are struggling beneath monetary pressures and dwindling enrollment as the faculty age-population shrinks and tuition prices rise. The pandemic exacerbated their woes.
Greater than 850 schools have closed since 2004, in accordance with the training information supply Hechinger Report. Final 12 months, Marymount California College, a Roman Catholic liberal arts faculty in Rancho Palos Verdes, closed, and Mills Faculty, a ladies’s faculty in Oakland, merged with Northeastern College to keep away from closing altogether. Holy Names College in Oakland will shut on the finish of the spring semester, unable to get well from the double hit of pandemic challenges and the financial downturn.
However together with enrollment and monetary troubles, Whittier can also be confronting a disaster over its management and path.
Linda Oubré, who took workplace in July 2018 as Whittier’s first Black president, has championed range and depicted Whittier as entrenched with pockets of racist attitudes. Her critics say the faculty has lengthy supported range and the issue is mismanagement. At stake is the long run viability of the 136-year-old faculty.
Linda Oubré took workplace in 2018 as Whittier Faculty’s first Black president.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Occasions)
Whittier’s board of trustees faces upheaval. On March 14, Miguel Santana, who’s an alum and serves because the president of the Weingart Basis, introduced he has resigned as chair after serving virtually two years, although he’ll keep on the board. He didn’t state a cause past saying “now was the time to make method for brand new management.”
He had earlier declined a number of requests for remark concerning the faculty’s troubles.
Since late February, 5 of 25 board members have left. Three resigned, two of whom have been first suspended after which stop, alleging that the board had tried to silence them for asking questions on enrollment and funds. One other two trustees left beneath circumstances that would not be decided.
Since Oubré took workplace, greater than 20 trustees resigned throughout their time period or selected to not stand for reelection, and the board is now searching for its fourth president.
The Whittier Faculty chapter of the American Assn. of College Professors informed the board final month that the faculty suffers from “mismanagement” and is in “turmoil.” An open letter signed by greater than 300 alumni and different members of the Whittier group described an establishment in “grave misery,” and faculty information present that the share of alumni who give to the college slumped from 25% within the 2017-18 fiscal 12 months, earlier than Oubré arrived, to 11% in 2020-21. Feedback on a few of Whittier’s Instagram posts are rife with criticism from college students and alumni.
In 2021, the faculty employed Oubré’s son, Nate Oubré, as director of innovation and new ventures to assist generate income. His LinkedIn profile exhibits no work expertise within the discipline of training; his earlier job was managing an initiative to “modernize and innovate” a janitorial providers firm.
Some alumni noticed the rent as a possible battle of curiosity, feedback on Whittier’s social media allege favoritism, and the school took their considerations to Santana, then chair of the Board of Trustees. He responded with a letter defending the rent, telling the school that Linda Oubré recused herself from the hiring and doesn’t straight supervise her son.
Linda Oubré informed The Occasions that the board decided earlier than her son was employed that bringing him on didn’t violate coverage. Nate Oubré didn’t reply to emails searching for remark.
The Occasions spoke with Linda Oubré for about 20 minutes and later despatched her and Santana detailed questions. Oubré replied that her workforce would “work on official solutions to your questions as many are inaccurate.” In the end, Kenya Williams, the board’s governance chair who was named interim board chair after Santana’s resignation, despatched an official assertion, however it didn’t deal with specifics.
“Whittier Faculty is a robust establishment in the midst of a difficult chapter,” and alumni, school and employees “have raised vital questions on Whittier’s future path,” the assertion stated. “We’re assured and supportive of the method being taken to safe Whittier’s future.”
Whittier president says faculty is wholesome
Former lacrosse captain Alex Coco in November, after Whittier introduced it might finish its soccer, lacrosse and golf packages.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
When Whittier introduced Oubré as its fifteenth president, it lauded her government and entrepreneurial expertise. She holds an MBA from Harvard Enterprise Faculty and served as dean of the Faculty of Enterprise at San Francisco State College.
In her company profession, she led two consulting companies and was a founder and president of BriteSmile, a teeth-whitening spa enterprise that she helped take public on Nasdaq. Within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, Oubré held managerial positions on the enterprise facet of the Los Angeles Occasions and its then-owner, the Occasions Mirror Firm.
Final month, in her annual deal with to the faculty, Oubré maintained that Whittier is “financially sturdy and never at risk of closing.”
Trustees unanimously handed a $4-million plan to extend on-line certification packages, which they imagine will assist increase the faculty’s income and make training accessible to extra individuals. The school has considerably decreased its debt, and final 12 months its endowment was valued at $126 million.
On the finish of 2020, Whittier acquired the biggest single grant in its historical past, $12 million from MacKenzie Scott, the philanthropist and former spouse of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, given to assist the varsity’s work on fairness and inclusion.
For a decade, greater than half of Whittier’s undergraduates have been individuals of colour. However in an hour-long speak at a South by Southwest training convention earlier this month, Oubré informed attendees she encountered attitudes at Whittier corresponding to, “‘We will’t have too many Hispanics,’ no matter, fill within the clean, ‘as a result of the white children gained’t be snug.’”
Oubré moved to diversify management and college. She stated that the faculty has employed two Black male PhDs, considered one of whom is on a tenure observe, and that she promoted to her management workforce a transgender man, a Black lady and a Latina.
In her current deal with to the faculty, Oubré addressed criticism of her management: “One of many greatest obligations of leaders is with the ability to not solely take heed to the individuals who assist you however to the critics. And I admire the critics as a lot as I admire the assist, as a result of it’s the criticism and the battle that helps us enhance.”
Plunging enrollment
The Whittier Faculty campus earlier this month.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Occasions)
Tucked within the Puente Hills Protect, about 12 miles southeast of Los Angeles, Whittier was based by Quakers in 1887 and named after poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Nixon, who was scholar physique president, graduated in 1934.
The school grew to become secular within the Forties. In 1974, it bought a regulation faculty in Costa Mesa, which it ran till 2017, when Whittier shut it down after enrollment had dropped by greater than two-thirds. Immediately Whittier affords one graduate diploma, a grasp’s diploma in training.
From 2010, Whittier’s undergraduate enrollment held regular within the 1,600s, reaching a peak in 2019 with 1,776 college students. Then enrollment plunged. This time period, school report the variety of undergraduates is simply 1,027.
In a optimistic signal, Whittier says, the variety of first-year college students elevated for the final two fall semesters, and in her state of the faculty deal with, Oubré stated the varsity’s numbers “actually align with a number of the opposite establishments that we compete with.”
A Occasions evaluation exhibits that whereas most of Whittier’s non-public faculty friends in Southern California skilled a drop in undergraduate enrollment since 2018, about half have rebounded above the place they have been then. Whittier has seen one of many steepest and most sustained falls.
Whittier’s monetary challenges are pushed by the enrollment nosedive, which interprets to far fewer college students paying its virtually $49,000 annual tuition. For admission in fall 2021, Whittier acquired the bottom variety of candidates since 2010, in accordance with the varsity’s figures.
Threats, concern of retaliation
In her speak at South by Southwest, Oubré stated she has “acquired demise threats which are racialized.” She informed The Occasions that she and others at Whittier, together with board members, have acquired threats, and that these are beneath investigation by campus safety working with native regulation enforcement.
A Whittier Police Division spokesperson informed The Occasions on March 21 that it had no stories of threats made in opposition to Oubré, the college or the board of trustees.
Some former board members, alumni and others cost that Oubré’s administration has stifled dissent and instilled a tradition of concern.
“Individuals are afraid to voice their opinions, as a result of it’s a very poisonous and punitive setting that they’re dwelling in proper now,” stated Rachel Homel Rice, who was president of Whittier’s Alumni Assn. from 2004 to 2008. In its letter to the board, the Whittier Faculty chapter of the American Assn. of College Professors famous that many school members didn’t signal as a result of they “concern private or programmatic retaliation.”
Oubré informed The Occasions she holds “open workplace hours for college students and college and employees,” and in her annual deal with stated she wished to “hear everybody’s critiques.”
College students stroll on the campus of Whittier Faculty earlier this month.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Occasions)
A bunch of alumni and others have shaped a bunch referred to as Save Whittier Faculty, which has criticized Oubré’s management.
Attorneys for Whittier and the board of trustees have despatched two cease-and-desist letters to a distinguished member of the group, Elizabeth Energy Robison, who was Whittier’s vice chairman of development from 2007 to 2015 and has been a donor to the varsity.
The first letter demanded that Robison cease all communication with Oubré, and the second demanded that she “stop making statements or participating in different conduct that undermines President Oubré’s repute, authority and place.”
Robison has refused to conform, calling the letters a part of a “sample of intimidation.”
College and college students hit laborious
College salaries at Whittier have fallen behind native peer establishments, in accordance with a spring 2022 report issued by a college committee. The college had additionally stopped paying contributions to college retirement plans, although just lately Oubré introduced a “phased reinstatement” scheduled to start April 1.
Whittier’s figures present that the variety of full- and part-time school dropped by virtually 15% from 2018 to 2021.
“Many school have expressed considerations about if the faculty will likely be right here in 5 years,” stated Anne Sebanc, president of Whittier’s American Assn. of College Professors chapter.
College students stand to lose essentially the most. Alessandro De La Torre is a junior finding out laptop science. “The college is wonderful,” he stated, echoing many others. “They care about college students loads.”
The school has lengthy prided itself not solely on its school but in addition on offering a vibrant residential group. But for greater than an hour on a current Monday morning, hardly any college students could possibly be seen strolling across the campus, a emptiness De La Torre attributes to the decline in enrollment. “At different faculty campuses, you see college students hanging out within the central components of the campus,” he stated. However at Whittier, “There’s barely anybody right here.”
This text was reported and edited along with the investigative journalism program at USC. The reporters could also be contacted at [email protected] and [email protected]
