Saint Paul’s College — A 125-Year-Old HBCU That Lost Its Accreditation and Its Life

Saint Paul’s College, a historically Black college in Lawrenceville, Virginia, founded in 1888 by an Episcopal priest, lost its regional accreditation in 2012 and closed on June 30, 2013, after 125 years. Its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, stripped its accreditation over financial instability and a cascade of institutional failures; a planned rescue by a fellow Episcopal HBCU collapsed; and with no accreditation and no merger partner, the board concluded it had no path forward. When it closed, enrollment had fallen to roughly 150 students — down from a peak near 1,000 — and the institution that James Solomon Russell had built into one of Virginia’s six historically Black colleges simply stopped.

Russell’s school began in September 1888 as the Saint Paul Normal and Industrial School, founded by Russell — a formerly enslaved man who became an Episcopal priest — to train African American teachers and prepare Black Virginians for agricultural and industrial work in a state that offered them almost nothing else. It grew across the twentieth century into a four-year liberal-arts and teacher-education college, the Saint Paul’s College of 1957, and a fixture of Black life in rural Southside Virginia. Like most HBCUs, it served a population denied the wealth that endows colleges, and it ran on thin margins for its entire existence.

In its final years those margins gave way. The college accumulated debt and deficits it could not close, cut its athletic programs in 2011 to save money, and fell into the kind of financial and governance turmoil that draws an accreditor’s scrutiny. In June 2012 SACS stripped its accreditation. The college sued and won a temporary injunction that briefly restored a probationary status, but accreditation is the precondition for federal student aid, and without it a college serving an overwhelmingly Pell-dependent student body cannot enroll. Supporters pinned their hopes on a merger with Saint Augustine’s University, a kindred Episcopal HBCU in Raleigh; when that deal was abandoned in May 2013, the end was a formality. The board announced the closure on June 3, 2013, and the college shut on June 30. The campus, taken over by the federal pension agency after the college defaulted on its obligations, was eventually sold for $2.5 million. A 125-year-old HBCU — one of only six in Virginia — was gone.

Atlantic Union College — A 136-Year Adventist College That Closed Twice

Atlantic Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in the village of South Lancaster, Massachusetts, founded in 1882, closed for good in February 2018 — the second time it had closed in seven years, and this time without the accreditation that had once made it a college at all. It was the oldest campus in the worldwide Adventist educational system, a small liberal-arts college that for most of its life trained teachers, nurses, and ministers for the church that owned it. By the end it enrolled a few dozen students in two unaccredited bachelor’s programs and a handful of certificates, and it was costing the regional church roughly $4.3 million a year to keep the lights on. On February 21, 2018, the Atlantic Union Conference voted to stop.

The decisive wound was accreditation, lost slowly and then permanently. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges placed the college on probation in 2008 over its finances, and in February 2011 announced that it would withdraw accreditation that July. The college laid off its staff and shut its doors. It reopened in 2015 with new leadership and a fervent hope of winning accreditation back — but a college without accreditation cannot offer federal financial aid, and a college that cannot offer federal aid cannot attract the students whose tuition would fund the climb back to accreditation. The trap closed on itself. After three years of running an unaccredited program on church subsidy, an independent feasibility study concluded the institution was not sustainable, and the conference’s executive committee voted to close it.

What was lost was less a student body — by 2018 there was barely one — than an institution and an idea. For 136 years the college had been the academic anchor of the Adventist community that had clustered around it in South Lancaster, and the symbolic flagship of a denomination that built its life around education. The closure stranded few students because few were left, which is its own kind of elegy: a college does not always die in a single shocking announcement to thousands. Sometimes it dies the way Atlantic Union did — slowly, in public, over a decade, with everyone watching and no one able to stop it.