All photographs by Brendan O’Malley.
It was Thursday evening, and grades were due Friday at noon. My plan was to review my last batch in the morning, submit the grades from home, and then attend my son’s elementary school holiday concert. But then I received an email from the college president, Joseph Chillo, requesting all faculty and staff to attend a meeting on campus at noon the next day, December 14, 2018. I was nearly certain why.
Everyone knew Newbury was struggling with finances and enrollment. Administrators had been working frantically on potential mergers and alternate business models, and we all wanted to believe one of them might pan out. Longtime faculty assured us newer hires that the college had survived similar difficult periods in the past, and it would likely do so again. How could a college just disappear, when every day we saw the classrooms with our own eyes, every day the offices, the dorms, the dining hall all still there?
When Chillo came into the auditorium the next day, he told us, in a wavering voice, that Newbury College would be closing after the spring semester. The students, most of whom had already left campus for the winter break, were being given this news at the same time by email. One longtime faculty member remarked it was “one of the rare times it’s better to be old–at least I have Medicare!” Another suggested we head to a local bar.
I had to head back home in time to pick up our daughter from daycare. Then, over the weekend, came emails from students, not asking why they got a B+ instead of an A-, but rather: “Should I bother coming back next semester?” “Will you write me a recommendation?” And from the first-year students: “Why didn’t they tell me this could happen?” “Why is this happening to me?” One student even asked me how I was feeling and what my plans were.
I felt pretty gutted, but at least this was not like what had happened the previous spring at nearby Mount Ida College, where the president and trustees announced the school’s immediate closure just a few weeks before the end of the semester, leaving the whole community in the lurch. The Newbury administration, by contrast, had given itself enough time to set up transfer agreements for students, and the faculty and staff had several months to make some sort of transition (although the season for traditional tenure-track jobs at four-year schools was pretty much over).
Newbury joins a growing list of small private nonprofit colleges in the Northeast that have closed their doors, including Marion Court in 2015; Burlington and Dowling in 2016; and, this year alone, Green Mountain, Southern Vermont, the College of New Rochelle, and the College of St. Joseph. As it began to sink in that Newbury was now one of those colleges, it felt like a cruel joke—all the time and energy devoted to curriculum design, faculty governance, student advising, all this planning for a future that would not exist. And I was about to lose my job.
It was a job I was lucky to land, straight after a one-year postdoc in 2016. The school didn’t have a traditional tenure system and came with a teaching load of four courses a semester, but any full-time teaching gig was a small miracle in the current job market. In any case, I really wanted to be at a teaching-focused school with mostly lower-income, first-generation college students. That’s what it was like at Brooklyn College of CUNY, where I fell in love with teaching as an adjunct and lecturer. Despite being a small private school, Newbury had a student demographic similar to CUNY, the most racially diverse of its category in New England. The students mostly hailed from gritty post-industrial cities like Bridgeport, Fall River, Lowell, Pawtucket, and Springfield. Their median family income was less than $60,000, and 90 percent of them received some sort of financial aid.1
The Boston-area location also appealed to me because I grew up nearby and my sister and parents still lived around there—though, oddly enough, I had never heard of Newbury until I saw the job listing, having grown up in a well-to-do suburb, where nearly everyone had their eyes on Ivies or elite liberal arts colleges.
When I came to Newbury for my interview and teaching demo, I was struck by the smallness of the campus (just under eight acres) and its radical contrast with the surrounding affluent neighborhood. The buildings and classrooms had a shopworn feel to them. The faculty had real camaraderie and didn’t take themselves too seriously. The teaching demo went well, and the students, mostly from the culinary program, were engaged and eager.
I liked the place immediately: a little working-class island atop a hill otherwise studded by multi-million-dollar mansions. But how the hell did this place get here?
As a historian, I am always skeptical of narratives that assign so much to a single individual, but it’s hard to understate how important Edward Tassinari was to the creation of Newbury College. He was a working-class kid with immigrant parents, a father born in Italy and a mother born in Ireland (a not uncommon combination in Boston). He graduated from Boston College High School in 1952 and spent one year at Stone Hill College before he was drafted into the Army, where he was trained to be a munitions instructor and spent most of his teaching on a base in Texas. After mustering out, he attended Boston University on the GI Bill, where he earned a degree in educational administration and also became highly successful selling pots and pans. When Beverly, now his wife, met him in 1961, she was impressed by his gleaming 1959 Impala convertible, tailfins and all.2
By 1960, Tassinari had enough capital to take over and operate the Boston franchise of the American Training School. The corporation franchised small for-profit schools that offered courses in specific workforce skills. The Boston school specialized in secretarial skills like switchboard operation, shorthand, and typing.3 When the American Training School’s parent corporation went bankrupt, Tassinari bought the Boston location at 176 Newbury Street and, in 1962, re-opened it as the Newbury School of Business.
In the first few years Tassinari relocated the school twice, first to 534 Boylston Street and then to the former site of the Bentley School of Accounting and Finance at 921 Boylston (now a part of the Berklee College of Music campus). In 1967, Newbury gained accreditation from the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges, and the following year it was incorporated as a non-profit institution with an independent board of trustees. Within a couple years it became eligible to confer two-year associate’s degrees in applied science; in 1971 its name was changed to Newbury Junior College.
The 1970s were another tough decade for small colleges in New England; the Boston Globe blamed the “bottoming out of the baby boom” and the end of the draft. There was a decreasing demand for secretarial science degrees, which had been the bread and butter for many two-year schools.4 But Newbury bucked the trend and instead pursued an aggressive expansion. In 1973 it opened its Division of Continuing Education, which offered evening classes in accounting, management, marketing and sales, and secretarial sciences at numerous satellite sites across eastern Massachusetts, usually in high school buildings. In 1975, Newbury acquired the Boston location of the venerable Bryant & Stratton Commercial School, giving it property on Commonwealth Avenue. Four years later, it absorbed Holliston Junior College, roughly twenty-five miles southwest of the Back Bay.
Fatefully, in 1982 Tassinari acquired part of the campus of the former Cardinal Cushing College, a Catholic women’s school that had operated from 1952 to 1972.5 The site sits atop Fisher Hill, a neighborhood of late-nineteenth-century mansions and undulating, tree-lined roads in the wealthy suburb of Brookline. Frederick Law Olmstead, one of the principal designers of Manhattan’s Central Park, created the plan for the neighborhood in the 1880s, and its idyllic quality has attracted moneyed elites ever since. Tom Brady owns a mansion there now, as does New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Predictably the neighbors were displeased when the little school serving working-class students acquired the property. The town rejected Tassinari’s application for a lodging license, which would have meant the Brookline campus couldn’t have any dormitories. Tassinari sued and won the case as Cardinal Cushing College had already proven its right to lodge students despite legal challenges from the town.6
Once the Brookline campus opened, the school initiated the program for which Newbury would become best known: its College of Culinary Arts. Tassinari installed kitchens in the basement of the student center and hired top local practitioners as instructors. The new endeavor thrived as the only degree-granting culinary program in the Boston area.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the college began purchasing surrounding mansions and converting them into classroom and office space. Tassinari sold off both the Holliston campus and the 927 Boylston Street building, bringing most of the programs to Brookline. Newbury was allowed to drop “Junior” from its name in 1985, and in 1992 it began moving to a “two-plus-two” model, where students could choose to obtain a bachelor’s degree after completing coursework for two consecutive associate’s degrees.7
Newbury was part of a small boom in the Boston area of former for-profit vocational schools transitioning to traditional four-year schools, including Babson College, Bentley University, Berklee College of Music, Endicott College, Fisher College, and Mount Ida College. This mid-to-late-twentieth-century boom can be partly attributed to Massachusetts’s relative slowness in developing its public higher education system. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst had began as a public agricultural school in the 1860s, and there was a network of teaching-training schools; but no other public higher education institutions existed until the 1960s, when the state established the UMass Boston campus, the UMass Medical School in Worcester, and a community college system.8
Since Newbury and schools like it were run like family businesses, they did not adhere to standard conventions and practices of higher education. Perhaps the most extreme example of this was Mount Ida College, where a 1997 investigation revealed that its president Bryan Carlson had arranged for the school to buy his house for $250,000 more than its assessed value while he continued to live there rent-free; he also had Mount Ida pay the private-school tuition for his three children. At Newbury, most of the faculty lacked terminal degrees, had little administrative oversight, and were never eligible for tenure. There was “no pressure” on the faculty to publish, Tassinari explained to the Boston Globe in 1994: “we want them there for the students.” Some faculty complained they were not paid to work as hard they did.9
Edward Tassinari retired in 1998 and was succeeded by Roy J. Nirschel, who had been a vice-president for university advancement at the University of Miami. Nirschel’s tenure was a major turning point in the school’s history. He convinced regulators to allow the college to grant genuine four-year bachelor’s degrees instead of the jerry-rigged “two-plus-two” formula. He eliminated programs in respiratory therapy, ophthalmic dispensing, and fashion, and reduced funding for the culinary program.
Nirschel left abruptly in 2001 to become president of Roger Williams University. The next president, David Ellis, had a short tenure as well but was more of a caretaker than a disruptor; he in turn was followed by Hannah McCarthy, who pushed for the development of online courses and hired new faculty with terminal degrees. During the Ellis/McCarthy period, Newbury shut down its satellite campuses for adult education, which had been a consistent moneymaker in the past but faced increased competition from online programs.
Enrollment had been hovering at a sustainable number of 1,000 students when the financial crisis of the late 2000s hit. Since Newbury depended almost entirely on tuition for revenue, the recession began an era of austerity: fewer course offerings, cutbacks in student support services, not replacing certain faculty members who retired, and ceasing college contributions to employee retirement accounts.
The college got caught in a vicious cycle; it was increasingly admitting students who were less prepared academically, while at the same time it was cutting the resources that might help them. Most of these students dropped out before completing a degree, especially now that the school offered fewer associate’s degrees. The sophomore, junior, and senior cohorts shrank, many of the top academic performers transferring to other schools. It was in this environment that I was hired in 2016.
The last semester at Newbury College began on January 23, 2019. On the first day for each of my classes, after the standard introductions and syllabus discussion, I asked the students how they felt about the closure.
They responded honestly. Some were worried about transferring to a bigger and more impersonal school. Many first-year students were angry that admission counselors had not been more upfront about the financial situation before they enrolled. “Newbury is too expensive for what it is—where does all that tuition money go?” One student shared that in his hometown, more people were putting off college because of the cost. “Even with a degree you still might not get a good job anymore.”
We also discussed how Newbury’s shutdown was itself a case study in how various historical factors impinged on their lives: demographic changes, cuts to federal aid programs, rising operating costs and tuition, as well as cultural assumptions about who should have access to higher education and what role its should play in job training. I pointed out that, while at schools like the University of Akron or the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point they were eliminating history departments, at Ivy League schools the history major was thriving.
Why did they think that was? “Because those kids have rich parents.”
History and other liberal arts disciplines train you for leadership. They teach you to see the bigger picture, put things into broader contexts, collect evidence, and make a case for why things happen the way that they do. Ivy League students and their parents understand this. My students understood it too, and believed they were no less worthy of being exposed those modes of thinking, analyzing, and writing.
Early in the semester, my colleagues and I were too engaged in our daily routine to worry too much about the future. A few faculty members landed full-time jobs for the fall. Curiously, several of our athletic teams did really well; the women’s and men’s track-and-field teams both won their conference. But the mood changed palpably after spring break. The students were disengaged. Attendance became spottier. Finding a parking spot became much easier. A few students just ghosted, likely because their GPA was below 2.0 and they wouldn’t be able to transfer. When the end of the semester finally arrived, people felt relieved more than anything else.
A week after Newbury’s final commencement I went to lunch with a professor who had worked at the college for longer than I had. They still treasured Newbury’s “special sense of community,” especially getting to know and mentor so many students, and serving as a sounding board for them as they launched their professional careers. They saw the college’s demise as in part the result of Newbury abandoning its unique strengths, turning away from vocational programs like culinary and hotel management. When Newbury tried to transition to a traditional liberal arts college, it was joining an already crowded field; this was New England, after all. “We lost sight of who we were.”
I reached out to a couple of my former students, Hillary Cayetano and Venezia “Vini” Delgadillo, to learn how they were processing the closure. Hillary grew up in an East Boston housing project. Her strict religious family kept her off the streets, where drugs and gun violence were rampant. No one in her family had gone to college; she didn’t even know what college was until she started attending a charter school in nearby Winthrop.
Attending a private Catholic high school in Dorchester, she loved the internship programs and volunteer opportunities but found the academic preparation lacking. After graduation, she enrolled at Assumption College in Worcester, a Catholic school of about 1,900 students not known for its diversity. Hillary never felt she belonged there. She struggled academically and found most professors uninterested in helping her. She left after her first year.
Hillary enrolled at Newbury College because of its smallness, diversity, and generous financial aid. The environment worked well for her, and the professors proved approachable and eager to help. “I always felt like I was home; I never felt like an outsider.” Hillary earned a bachelor of science in legal studies along with numerous honors, all while she and her husband raise a now two-year-old son. In fact, she was selected to give the student address at Newbury’s fifty-sixth and final graduation ceremony.
Currently she works in a medical office and is applying to post-baccalaureate pre-med programs. She says she will always feel gratitude for Newbury because it’s where she discovered her academic strengths: “I felt seen at Newbury. I felt acknowledged.” She’s not sure how having a diploma from a nonexistent school will affect her in the future, but she does feel sad that there won’t be a physical place to which she can return. “I won’t be able to show my son where I got my degree.”
Vini Delgadillo, a sophomore, followed a very different path to Newbury. A self-described “upper-middle-class” kid, she grew up in Sharon, a well-to-do suburb twenty-five miles south of Boston. Vini attended the same vocational high school at which her mother, a special education teacher, taught. She thrived academically and was able to play two sports at the varsity level. She liked that the vocational school’s proximity to Brockton made it highly diverse.
Because of Vini’s strong academic record, Newbury offered her a trustees’ scholarship that covered her tuition and much of her room and board costs, as well as a spot in the honors program. She liked the school’s career-oriented focus and diversity, an environment akin to the one at her vocational high school. At times, however, she was frustrated by the school’s lack of resources in comparison to other colleges, and the close-knit residential situation seemed a bit too intimate for her. “Everyone was in each other’s space a bit too much for me.”
She had chalked these issues up to having chosen a small school and decided she could live with them to get a degree without debt, something her parents had greatly emphasized. But the Mount Ida shutdown had shaken her faith in Newbury, and the idea that the same could happen to her school suddenly became very real.
Vini’s feelings about Newbury’s closure are mixed. What upsets her the most is that her goal of graduating without debt is gone. She was recently accepted to Simmons, a private women’s university in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston; and while she is excited to be surrounded by female leadership, the university did not offer a comparable scholarship. Vini decided that the debt would be worth it to go to more of a “name” school with an excellent business program. Taking on the debt was a big change of course for her family, but her parents have been supportive. “I’ve decided to be happy about it.”
Debbie Mael—one of Vini’s favorite professors—summed up her forty years at Newbury as leveling “the playing field as best we could for some students who didn’t have access to good high school educations.” She added, “I could be kidding myself, and maybe I need to believe this at this time, but I do believe we made a difference in students’ lives who were not going to go to the kind of schools that privilege could have gotten them into.”
At the same time, Debbie shares my moral qualms about the exponential rise in tuition and increasing student debt that most students took on, especially when so many were being admitted who needed extensive support that the school’s reduced circumstances could no longer deliver. Nonetheless, Debbie feels strongly that we still need places like Newbury. “As the landscape continues to change and more and more schools like Newbury die, there will be fewer and fewer options. It’s not fair to say that they all can go to a community college instead. They deserve the leadership opportunities, the co-curricular events, the soft skills that a campus experience entails.”
Higher education faces many challenges—student debt, adjunct exploitation, rampant failures in equity and inclusion, to name just a few—but I still believe that colleges and universities are some of the most optimistic spaces in our society. They have to be. It may sound trite, but classrooms are places where we as faculty look to help students identify their potential and give them the tools to live up to it. We plan our classes and assignments in hopes that they will spark students’ curiosity and help them discover and articulate their intellectual passions. Despite Newbury’s shortcomings and failures, it gave countless students who struggled in high school a chance at a college education, and many of them were able to seize that opportunity.
We expect colleges to outlive us. It hurts to outlive this one. But I am grateful, at least, to be part of Newbury’s history.
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- Joshua Kim, “Newbury College, Brookline, and 30 Years of Wealth Concentration,” Inside Higher Ed, Dec. 18, 2018.
- Details of Tassinari’s biography in this and the following paragraphs come from a phone interview with Beverly Tassinari on May 21, 2019.
- In the postwar era, Boston had many similar post-secondary vocational schools, both for-profit and nonprofit, that aimed to get working-class kids into the white-collar workforce, including Bryant & Stratton Commercial School, Burdett School of Business, Chamberlayne Junior College, Fisher Junior College, the Katharine Gibbs School, Grahm Junior College, and Hickox Secretarial School (all closed now except for Fisher).
- Kay Longcope, “A College Dies, a Town Changes,” Boston Globe, December 2, 1979, p. 33; interview with Deborah Mael, May 3, 2019.
- In the interim, the campus had been occupied by the Montrose School, a small private 6-12 Catholic school for girls.
- Newbury Junior College v. Brookline, 19 Mass. App. Ct. 197 (1985). I learned of the tensions between Newbury and its neighbors from Peter Galeno.
- Gerald F. Russell, “Two-Year Colleges Offer Option to Obtain Bachelors,” Boston Globe, June 8, 1992, pp. 13, 21. I learned of the “two-plus-two” model from Deborah Mael.
- Muriel Cohen, “Mom-and-Pop Schools Flourishing,” Boston Globe, Sept. 18, 1994, pp. A21, A23.
- “College President Got Big Perks—Court Data,” South Coast Today, Aug. 4, 1997; interview with Deborah Mael, May 3, 2019; Cohen, “Mom-and-Pop Schools Flourishing,” A23.
