Great Barrington — It took the Bard College Board of Trustees and the Bard College at Simon’s Rock Board of Overseers “a few weeks” to decide to close the campus after the spring 2025 semester, according to Bard College at Simon’s Rock Provost and Vice President John Weinstein.
This was one of the many facts revealed during a virtual meeting on Friday, November 22, when the college held a meeting for alumni and friends to discuss the closure.
Simon’s Rock opened in 1966, originally as an all-girls school. It became a coeducational campus in 1974 and, in 1979, became part of Bard College, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
On Tuesday, November 19, the college announced that they would be closing their Great Barrington campus after the end of the 2025 spring semester. The school will subsequently be relocating its campus to Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., starting in fall 2025.
“Higher education has certainly been in a period of struggle, particularly small-scale higher education, for a long time,” Weinstein said toward the beginning of the meeting. “I’ve been talking to some of my predecessors in this role, and basically everyone was always worried about the permanence of the college. This goes back to [Simon’s Rock Founder] Elizabeth Blodgett Hall and that she felt she needed to merge with Bard College to make a go of it and to continue onward.”
Weinstein said that colleges with an enrollment of under 500 students “aren’t here anymore, and now the [colleges with under 1,000 students] are starting to have issues, as well as some large colleges.”
“I started in this leadership role [as provost] in July 2020, and we were pretty much flat at that point in terms of our endowment,” Weinstein said. “We had been using a lot of resources and we did start to grow things more. But then the pandemic came, and with that, we had a decline in enrollment of about 30 percent.”
Weinstein said that student enrollment numbers have been between 280 and 295 for the past three years. “This year we have 281 students, and that number was not working financially,” Weinstein said. “Community-wise, I think that the past several years have been really strong. Nothing is ever perfect, and certainly ‘Rockers’ always like to give us an interesting experience. But I think it’s been great from a school cultural standpoint and academic standpoint. There are still students who want and need what we do, but the financial piece is becoming very difficult. We’ve had a lot of generosity and support over the past years, starting from the pandemic time, with some record fundraising years. The challenge was that the structural deficit was just getting larger and larger and hitting the point where we were just not going to be able to maintain that.”
Weinstein added that it was hard for the college to compete with free community college programs offered throughout the country, including the program offered in Massachusetts. “There are now 30 states offering free community college in some way,” he said. “Massachusetts has a particularly generous program where students—where families that earn less than $131,000 not only get free community college, they also get a stipend. They can attend four-year [college] institutions for the next two years [at a tuition of] 50 percent to free [tuition], depending on the income. It’s a real challenge to get students, and it wasn’t going to look like it was getting stronger.”
During the meeting, an unidentified employee of the school posed questions submitted by alumni and friends of the college to Weinstein.
When asked about how long it took to decide to close the Great Barrington campus, Weinstein responded, “A few weeks.” “We were looking at how admissions numbers were going to come in,” Weinstein said. “For us, it’s always the end of August. That’s one of the challenges for Simon’s Rock is that students are admitted up until the end. We also had some China partnerships coming in, which led to some students coming. But we were looking to see what that number would be. And there were some future numbers in September, and those [student enrollment] numbers came in lower. It became pretty clear by that point that we were not going to be hitting enrollment targets now or in the near future. Then we had some work to do to decide, and also to work with some of the state entities that you need to talk to before you can make any sort of announcement. It’s been fairly rapid, but the thinking about it has been long.”
Weinstein was asked, “Why weren’t the public and the alumni notified about the kind of financial situation the college was dealing with?”
“There have been a lot of fundraising efforts going on, and a key piece of that work is with large supporters,” Weinstein responded. “In this time, we did generate between $25 and $30 million in endowment pledges. Some of that has come in. A lot of fundraising efforts were made in that regard, usually in terms of a public effort. The scale of what we were going to need [to continue the college] was going to be high. We were certainly trying to indicate in our advancement [requests] that we did need funds. I understand that it doesn’t always come through as really needing it, but we certainly tried to make that case. There was a real challenge with, for example, not saying, ‘Okay, if we don’t raise this money, the school is going to close.’ A challenge with that is, that once you make that kind of announcement, it has the potential of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy because students stop enrolling. In some sense, making that potential declaration was going to make it into a reality.”
Later on during the meeting, Weinstein said that college closures “are most often made in months like April or May, with the idea that you want to just get it done and kind of move on.” “We felt that this was not the right way to treat people,” Weinstein said. “It wasn’t the right way to treat students who should have the full range of college options if they want to transfer. We wanted to give employees as much time as possible [before the college closes]. I know that seven months still doesn’t feel long, but it’s certainly way different than what’s usually recommended. We wanted to serve the community as best we could, and once we knew that this was really where it was going to go, we didn’t want to kind of cling to any more hope, even though hope has always been a big part of this as an important thing to have, but we needed to make the decision.”
Previously, Weinstein said that more than 100 full-time and 100 part-time employees will be laid off as part of the campus closure. He said that the staffing size for the new campus when it opens in New York in fall 2025 will be around 40 full-time employees. He said that there will also be positions open for several adjunct and part-time employees, but he did not specify a number. “It’s a lot of loss, and there’s no way for that to not be difficult,” Weinstein said. “We’ve been trying to preserve jobs and education as much as possible, and [40 full-time employees] was as far as we could go in terms of something we felt was affordable in the long run. Certainly, there may be other opportunities within Annandale or other Bard network positions, but that is a very difficult piece.”
When asked about the future of the college’s Kilpatrick Athletic Center, Weinstein said that it is “hard to say.” “I will be doing some meetings with center members in the future,” he said. “There are certainly center members who expressed a lot of interest in it as a facility. These are people who live locally, so it will be a bit of a wait and see.”
Weinstein said the college plans to operate the center throughout the summer. “Hopefully those number of months gives us real time for a runway so that, whatever happens, it would be great if someone continued to operate it,” he said. “But we just don’t know at this time if that will be the case.”
As for what will happen to the Daniel Arts Center on campus, including the contents of the building, Weinstein said that “it will depend to what extent the nature of the purchase is.” “There are certainly some entities in the area that I know who are very interested in the center and would love an art space like that,” Weinstein said. “I would imagine if one of those organizations were to buy it, they would probably want it with a lot of the contents in terms of the technical materials and so forth. If someone doesn’t want that, then a lot of those materials we would want to bring with us [to the new campus]. We would love for that to stay as an art space that serves the community.”
During the meeting, Weinstein added that there have been no official purchase offers on the campus since the announcement of its closure was made.
Great Barrington Public Theater, which holds performances at the Daniel Arts Center, announced on November 22 that, for now, it intends to proceed with its summer 2025 theater season.
Meanwhile, a Change.org petition asking the college to renew its contracts with the faculty has, as of press time, obtained 1,054 signatures.
The petition states:
The proposal to not renew the faculty’s contracts with the impending relocation of Simon’s Rock at Bard College stands in stark contrast to the ideals we hold dear. It destabilizes the core structure of our learning environment and directly diminishes a quintessential part of the Simon’s Rock experience – the nurturing bond between the faculty and students.
We petition to renew the faculty’s contracts and offer them positions with terms at least as favorable as their current contracts as well as consideration for relocation expenses. We urge the decision-makers at Simon’s Rock at Bard College to uphold our core values and maintain the fabric of our community.
The Berkshire Edge has contacted Isabella Zeisset, who started the petition, for comment.
The Berkshire Edge would like to hear from professors, staff, and students who will be impacted by the closure of Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Contact Managing Editor Shaw Israel Izikson at sizikson@theberkshireedge.com.
