Urbana University — Johnny Appleseed’s New Church College, Closed by a Branch Office Decision

Summary

Urbana University, in the small city of Urbana, Ohio, founded in 1850 by followers of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, announced in April 2020 that it would cease operations at the end of that spring semester. It was 170 years old. It did not close as an independent institution making its own last decision; it closed as a line item — a branch campus of Franklin University, a Columbus institution that had acquired Urbana's assets in 2014 and folded it into its own accreditation as a branch campus in 2017. When Franklin's leadership looked at a campus that had been losing money and students for years and then watched the coronavirus pandemic arrive, the math resolved itself, and the oldest Swedenborgian college in America was switched off by a board that sat seventy miles away.

The institution that closed had begun as one of the more unusual experiments in nineteenth-century American higher education. The New Church — the Swedenborgian denomination, also called the Church of the New Jerusalem — chartered Urbana College in 1850 to build a school around Swedenborg's theology and philosophy, and it became, after Oberlin, the second institution of higher learning in Ohio to admit women alongside men. Its founding folklore is the kind most colleges would invent if they could: the land was secured with the help of John Chapman, the Swedenborgian missionary the country remembers as Johnny Appleseed, who persuaded a friend to donate the acreage southwest of town. The college suspended operations during the Civil War, reopened, ran for a century as a small junior college, became a four-year institution in 1968, and took the name Urbana University in 1975.

By the time it closed, the religious mission was a heritage line in the catalog rather than a living subsidy, and the college was simply a small, tuition-dependent institution in a part of the country with too many of them. Of the roughly 1,254 students enrolled at the end, only about a quarter — some 350 residential and commuter students — were the traditional undergraduates a campus closure most disrupts; the majority were in off-site and online programs that Franklin could continue without the Urbana campus at all. That fact is the whole diagnosis. A college whose remaining value to its owner lived in programs that did not require the campus did not need the campus. About 111 employees lost their jobs.

Timeline

A College Built on a Vision

Urbana belonged to a vanishing species: the denominational college founded not to capture a market but to embody an idea. The New Church, the small American body that took its theology from the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, wanted a college that would teach in the light of his writings, and in 1850 it built one on donated land in west-central Ohio. The donation came through the agency of John Chapman, the itinerant nurseryman and Swedenborgian evangelist whom American memory has flattened into the cartoon of Johnny Appleseed; the man who scattered orchards across the frontier also helped seed a college. From the start Urbana carried two marks of an unusually progressive founding — a coeducational charter that made it the second college in Ohio to admit women, and a curriculum animated by a coherent religious philosophy rather than mere sectarian custody.

For most of its first century, Urbana was small and stayed small. It paused during the Civil War, reopened, and settled into the unglamorous role of a regional junior college, the kind of institution that gave the children of a farming county their first two years of higher education close to home. It became a four-year college only in 1968 and a "university" in 1975, growing its programs and its athletics — eventually a full slate of NCAA Division II teams — without ever growing the endowment that would have made those ambitions safe. The Swedenborgian vision that had founded it receded, over the decades, into a heritage detail, and what remained was a familiar American thing: a tiny, tuition-dependent college in a state with far more colleges than its demography could sustain.

The Branch Campus Years

By the early 2010s Urbana was in the trouble that would eventually claim dozens of institutions like it: too few students, too little reserve, and a balance sheet that depended on filling beds it could no longer fill. In April 2014 the answer arrived from Columbus. Franklin University, a private nonprofit built around adult and online education, purchased Urbana's assets, and in August 2017 it took the further, decisive step of folding Urbana into its own accreditation as a branch campus. The arrangement looked like a rescue, and in a narrow sense it was — it kept the lights on for six more years. But it also changed the fundamental fact of the institution. Urbana University was no longer an institution. It was a campus belonging to one.

That distinction is the quiet hinge of the whole story. An independent college fights for its own survival because its survival is the entire point of its board; a branch campus survives only so long as it serves the strategy of the parent, and the parent has other campuses and a different mission. Franklin's strength was online and adult programming delivered at scale, and that strength did not require Urbana's grounds in west-central Ohio. By the end, the numbers made the logic plain: of roughly 1,254 students attached to the Urbana campus, about three-quarters were in off-site or online programs — College Credit Plus, post-baccalaureate education, an MBA track, a corrections-education program — that Franklin could carry forward without the campus existing. Only about 350 were the residential and commuter students for whom Urbana, the place, was the college. The asset that justified the campus had quietly migrated off it.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Because most of Urbana's students were in distributed programs, the human disruption was narrower than the raw enrollment figure suggests, and most of those students continued their education inside Franklin with little interruption. The residential and commuter undergraduates — the few hundred for whom Urbana was a place and a community — bore the real loss, scattering to transfers in the middle of a pandemic that was upending every campus at once. The 111 employees who lost their jobs lost them in a small Ohio city that had counted the college among its anchors; the institution had been estimated to generate tens of millions of dollars a year in local economic impact, and a town of Urbana's size does not easily replace a 170-year-old college.

The campus and its records went to Columbus, and Urbana University took its place on the lengthening list of small American colleges that closed between 2018 and 2024. Its particular lesson is structural rather than scandalous: there was no fraud here, no looted endowment, no board that gambled and lost. There was only a college that lost its founding subsidy, sold itself into survival as a branch of a larger institution, and discovered that survival on those terms lasts exactly as long as the larger institution finds it useful. The New Church college that Johnny Appleseed helped to found endured for 170 years and ended as a strategic redundancy.

Lessons

References

• Urbana University Closing Campus After Spring Semester, Citing Pandemic Difficulties Ideastream Public Media
• Urbana University Closing, Transitioning Current Students To Franklin University Online Spectrum News 1
• Ohio's Urbana University to close due to low enrollment, challenges stemming from coronavirus pandemic WKYC
• Urbana University Wikipedia