There’s a lot going on. Very little of it actually good. A lot of holding breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This kind of anxiety is like asthma – you have medication, inhalers, you know what to do if you’re going to Tahoe or going on a plane or what have you; soon as the hills are all on fire and the air quality is 300, though, your regular coping mechanisms are not going to be sufficient and you can either shelter in place or go outside and get hit hard.
The flames aren’t all around us, but there are a lot of flammable goods between us and the fire, and there’s a lot of crossing fingers and hoping the winds don’t shift before we can get some hoses or dig some trenches or what have you. it’s both micro and macro, made worse by the kind of people who always told you “well that could never happen” and then, years after it did, have the gall to say “well that could never happen again.”
One place that apparently didn’t learn those lessons is a little conservative-arts school on the west side of Birmingham. Comes today the news that BSC has to come up with $200 million over the next three years in order to survive, of which they have only raised about $46 million – and want another $37 in state, federal and local money ASAP or they might go under next academic year. There is a very real chance they will commemorate my 30th anniversary by ceasing to exist.
This is hardly surprising. The fool who succeeded Neal Berte as President went frog-sticking without a light, demolishing the athletics program because it was too expensive but adding football and an on-campus stadium, while simultaneously kicking off a wave of building and eating the seed corn to do it – and then came the 2008 financial crisis, and then the revelation of accounting irregularities and the financial hit from that, and then a decade later, C-19. And now all of a sudden the bills have come due and the money isn’t there any longer.
Which is not surprising. In my day, BSC was mostly for people whose daddy owned half of some Lower Alabama county, so they could sit on the front porch of the frat house for four years before going back to take over the business. Most of those people just go to Bama now, I suspect. The balance of the student body was filled out with people who had one thing in common: a rejection letter from Vanderbilt. (Come on – black and gold colors, basketball first, stole the alma mater word for word, lots of red brick – you tell me.) The problem is, BSC was always only suitable for fitting you out for a life in Alabama, and ideally in Birmingham. And if you wanted to be a politician, you were at Bama anyway. If you wanted to be an engineer, you were at Auburn or UAB. If you wanted to be a doctor, you were at UAB or maybe South Alabama. If you were gonna make a preacher, you’d go to Samford. If you were a person of color, you were anywhere else at all. Even within the state, Montevallo (the hated rival) and Spring Hill College were on the come-up, and there wasn’t a huge delta with any number of other private schools that they would play in football – Millsaps, Rhodes, even Sewanee was a decided step up.
Ultimately, it begged the question: what is Birmingham-Southern College for? I don’t think there’s really an answer for that any more, or at least, not one that would compel people to throw cash in quantity. Might be better off as an adjunct of UAB, the way Peabody became for Vanderbilt or Oxford College is for Emory. Or maybe the plans from the mid-70s will finally come to fruition, and Miles College will finally get its new campus after all. That honestly might be the best solution: a new combined institution, more HBCU than not, fit for a modern 21st century Birmingham.
Something like that might actually get me to claim them again.