Fontbonne’s spring commencement was held May 10, 2025, in front of Ryan Hall, the first building constructed on campus. The author, Nancy H. Blattner, is at the podium.
Fontbonne University
A presidential colleague once told me that closing a university is genetically altering. I didn’t really comprehend the truth of that statement until after I made the announcement on March 11, 2024, that Fontbonne University would cease operations on Aug. 15, 2025.
The day of the announcement itself was filled with meetings—with a journalist who scored an embargoed story on our closing; with our bankers, who had been supportive partners through some very challenging times; with the faculty and staff who had held out hope for years that better days were ahead; with donors and alums who assumed the institution would continue into perpetuity; with members of the media who had been less than kind in recent months; and with our students, who broke down and wept, embracing each other as many realized they would never graduate from their university of choice. As difficult as that day was for the entire campus community and particularly for members of my leadership team, the weeks and months leading up to the announcement and those that came after were no less stressful or challenging.
The signs that a university is failing are obvious to executive leadership and to board members long before the trustees make the decision to close the institution. In the weeks and months leading up to the board’s vote to close Fontbonne, four members of the executive team worked for approximately 1,000 hours to develop multiple budget scenarios based on a variety of enrollment projections; created dozens of messages aimed at students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors and the broader community; reviewed every employee’s status to discuss projected last dates of employment and severance packages; and met discreetly with leaders of our sponsoring congregation and the local archbishop, with the liaison of the university’s regional accreditor and with the vice president of our National Collegiate Athletic Association division.
For two years prior, I had traveled throughout the Midwest to speak with leaders of a dozen institutions in an attempt to find a partner with whom to merge or one that would acquire Fontbonne. All of these covert tasks were completed while carrying on the day-to-day activities of the university. Walking the fine balance between planning the 100-year celebration of the signature building on the campus, for example, while at the same time crafting the text for a video announcing the institution’s potential demise, was arduous, exhausting and at times seemed slightly duplicitous as we explored every avenue for sustainability before ultimately rejecting each.
In the days immediately following the closure announcement, the focus was on Fontbonne’s people: the faculty, staff and students. Faculty received their annual contracts for the 2024–25 academic year several weeks ahead of schedule to assure them that they had positions if they were willing to stay for the final year, regardless of class sizes or of their teaching loads. Each staff member had an individual meeting with two members of the executive leadership team to learn of their projected last date of employment and the severance package offered.
Coaches were guaranteed employment through their teams’ seasons, even if the teams did not have enough student athletes to participate in our Division III conference. Members of the leadership team held forums for all faculty, staff and students, and we asked coaches and resident advisers to meet with student athletes and those living on campus to address specific questions for those populations of students. We created a dedicated email address for questions and posted a lengthy frequently asked questions list on our website. We brokered more than two dozen teach-out agreements with a variety of institutions of higher education so that students in every degree and certificate program had one or more option for continuing their education with the same out-of-pocket costs, with no residence requirement and with all credits transferring to their new institutions.
We invited colleges from several states to an on-campus fair so students could talk with recruiters and staff from other institutions. All of these activities took huge blocks of time to organize and implement and kept us busy during days that grew increasingly longer. In hindsight, this constant motion was a distraction from what lay ahead, as we left each night near the point of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion.
To our family and closest confidants, the burden of the decision to close was showing. People weren’t sleeping well. Tempers at meetings and at home occasionally flared as colleagues understandably became focused on finding their next position. Looking back on those months, perhaps the surprise is that there were only a few times when colleagues had to ask for grace from their peers or loved ones.
As the number of employees dwindled on campus, those who remained picked up the slack. One of the elderly retired members of our founding congregation came to campus weekly to pick up boxes of papers, from which she removed staples to make the scanning easier for an alum who volunteered two days a week to help with the monumental task of preserving dozens of yards of files, syllabi and archived materials. While continuing to perform their normal tasks, members of the executive leadership team also vacated offices, gathered branded swag to offer to students and their families, and visited with hundreds of alums who stopped by the campus for one last quick tour or photo opportunity.
Ultimately, the last day of classes came and we held the final commencement. A few short weeks later, we turned over the campus to Washington University in St. Louis, the entity that had purchased the property. Those last weeks were filled with long days organized around cleaning and clearing spaces, sorting through files, and salvaging items left behind that could benefit area nonprofits.
Although I am never able to shake the sense of loss, sadness and even failure I feel when I think about Fontbonne’s closing, there were also moments of incredible joy and life-giving grace. When the nonprofit Love Does arrived on campus the week before we closed to pack up almost 20,000 of our library volumes to start a university library in Uganda, and when donors stepped up to fund scholarships for our undergraduate students, allowing them to take classes in the summers of 2024 and 2025 without paying tuition, these were moments when the core value of Fontbonne—serving the dear neighbor in need without distinction—rang true and made me proud.
Personally, I was also often surprised by such grace-filled moments during the university’s final semesters, when students baked me cookies, dropped by my office to make sure I was “doing OK” and wrote me beautiful messages in cards that are now in my forever mementos box.
In Fontbonne’s final months, a tornado hit St. Louis, causing significant damage to the campus but completely devastating areas in the northern part of the city. As we cleared debris on our property, Fontbonne gathered significant amounts of food, furniture, school supplies and hundreds of other items from around campus to donate to those impacted by the storm. One agency that accepted dozens of our window air-conditioning units said that the donation was the best one that had been received all year. In that moment, there was satisfaction in knowing that Fontbonne’s legacy would live on in unexpected ways through these gifts.
For me, the transition of the campus property and of the presidential home to Washington University coincides with the retirement move my husband and I will make to Georgia to live near our son. Many people have asked about my next chapter. After 47 years in higher education, I tell myself that I am ready for a slower pace and a less complicated life. But at other times, I know that I’m really only kidding myself.
For the past 16 years, my identity has been first and foremost as a university president, beginning at Caldwell University in New Jersey and then for the past five years at Fontbonne. Until now, I haven’t had time to consider what will fill my days when I have unpacked the last of the boxes from our move. I do know that there will be time—perhaps too much time—to reflect on how difficult it was to close a university that has always been a community, a family. That is the loss that I feel my colleague was speaking about when he warned me that I would never be quite the same after living through this experience. Only time will tell, but I fear that he was right.
