fourcredits.net/brett/mt-a...center.html

opps sorry, forgot

When I was student executive, we only booted out "the Fool"

We were coasting on the value of the land that had been acquired, sold the upper part of it, and were continually running in the red. My understanding is that the land was originally "donated" to Friends World as a tax write-off, at a time (late '60s?) when a nuclear power plant was planned for Lloyd's Neck, right across the water from what became WHQ. Anyway, the plans changed and the value of the land soared.

The number of students was approximately 100 for a long time, and basically that wasn't enough to cover the overhead of having a college administration, plus the bureaucratic requirements of what you had to have in an administration (i.e., paperwork, etc.) kept increasing. So basically the project was unsustainable in the longer run.

FWC got into a deal with a Hassidic group to provide them with our 4-year degree. They'd had access to a 2-year program, and supposedly were looking for a way to expand on that, with a "cross-cultural" program they could basically run themselves (keeping kosher, restrict intervisitation between the sexes, etc.). That gave the college a better cash flow for a few years, until the State of New York discovered that "running it themselves" meant they were cutting corners and maybe tapping some of the funds (from scholarship assistance monies) into other projects. I don't know the whole story. I was out of there when the scheme fell apart. A lot of us were unsure about the whole operation, but it was peddled to us by the college president in idealistic terms.

Anyway, the NY State was going to shut down FWC, for being involved in this scheme, and as I understand it, the deal to join LIU was developed behind the scenes as a better alternative for all concerned. The idea was that the remaining land would be sold (at a fair price, we expected) and the proceeds would go into an endowment that would support the school by making realistic scholarships available.

Rumor is that the endowment was eaten away by administrative costs, along with legal costs of hiring expensive law firms to defend the way that FWC got sold down the river. On the one hand, I would say that LIU has held up their end of the deal pretty well. Under the circumstances, I wouldn't have expected them to continue to support FW as much as they have (but this is totally impressionistic). On the other hand, there are so many political and financial and academic factions involved on that sort of scene, I can understand and really hate the way that centers are being closed.

In my day, in the late 70s into the 80s, the centers all had a history that seemed to stretch back into the dawn of time -- old journals, pictures and maps, books people had left behind, stories about who had come and gone, former faculty and drop-out former students in the neighborhood, etc. When a center closes, all of that disappears into the ether.

But realistically, each of those centers had started not too many years before I got there -- a lot less time than the number of years since FWC became FW-LIU. A long time ago, a buddhist-inspired friend managed to pass along an insight -- breathing is not just inhaling; you have to exhale too in order to live.