Dive Brief:
- Missouri's Westminster College announced Tuesday that it will shutter its Mesa, Ariz., satellite campus at the end of the current spring semester.
- The campus came about as a result of a 2012 partnership with the City of Mesa, which wanted to attract liberal arts colleges, and the first class enrolled in fall 2013. Unfortunately, numbers were lower than expected and projections for next fall's enrollment didn't satisfy trustees.
- The college will work with its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, to find a solution that doesn't leave existing students hanging.
Dive Insight:
The Mesa campus marked the first time Westminster had ever expanded its campus beyond Fulton, Mo. Though the campus was open for less than a year, Westminster President Dr. George B. Forsythe said the college had "learned from the experience," while a statement released by Board of Trustees Chairman Wallace Head reiterated that the college would continue with its Strategic Plan 2020, developing new ventures "consistent with the College's Mission and Vision."
Based on the comments sections for each post, some in the campus community clearly weren't satisfied with the closure or administrators' statements, one of which read:
"Is it more consistent with the college’s values of responsibility, fairness, and integrity to renege on a list of promises made to students, faculty, applicants, the city of Mesa, and the entire college? Or to leave faculty members who sacrificed years of their lives to this project out to dry with less than a week’s worth of warning? Are you being responsible, fair, or honest to the applicants who gave up scholarship money to ASU or U of A to go to a school you decided no longer had the right to exist? Because actually that is what is not consistent with the values of the college."