The city of Birmingham has thrown a rope to Birmingham-Southern College, a forgivable loan that will provide enough bridging money to see out the current academic year and (possibly) make it to next August, which provides runway to get the current students graduated and buy six months to raise the rest of the money for next year. In the grand scheme of things, it resembles nothing so much as the Tom & Jerry cartoon with the cat frantically setting down one piece of track after another in front of his speeding train, and I honestly don\u2019t know what is going through the mind of students at this point. Although anyone who doesn\u2019t have a plan B in mind is an idiot, because this is a degree of instability that\u2019s going to be hard to overcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing I didn\u2019t know is that Kyle Whitmore – one of the two best reporters working in Alabama today, along with John Archibald – is an alum, and he has revealed some interesting information. One is that remarkably, BSC\u2019s tuition is actually lower than the University of Alabama\u2019s at the moment, and that with a higher minority percentage than they have at Tuscaloosa (truly shocking in my day, when a Black male student was either a basketball player or a theater major). The other is that apparently the biggest financial hit came from the makeover that was undertaken in the mid-2000s, and they burned a big chunk of the endowment for things like the bell tower dropped in the middle of the academic quad, or the new \u201cwelcome center\u201d or the new enormous pond on campus or, famously, a football stadium for a team that hadn\u2019t played football since 1939 and had never shown any particular interest in resuming it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BSC is down to around 700 undergrads, which is mighty cozy. That\u2019s half the size it was in my day, and I can only assume that with a depleted enrollment and a student body that size, capital improvement is a long long way off (then again, when you don\u2019t need half your dorm space any longer, I don\u2019t know what you do to monetize the physical plant. Not like you can cash that in) and you\u2019re going to have to win over students with what you have in front of you. Which, after a year and a half of circling the drain, is kind of a busted flush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It would be a fitting end for BSC to die as a result of suffocating itself by climbing up its own ass and never finding the way out. I have apparently done a good enough job burning my tracks that no one has come to me looking for a handout, and I don\u2019t intend to float a penny to remediate the mistakes of the institution that was itself the single greatest mistake of my life. I am sympathetic with the argument made by the Alabama state treasurer who glories in the government name of Young Boozer III, who asserts that the plans BSC has don\u2019t add up to financial viability, and I don\u2019t see how throwing another $30 million at the problem is going to raise the $100+ million they will need on top of that to return to viability. It\u2019s entirely possible that the institution has just plain run out of track at last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It rather begs the question of what is BSC for. We\u2019ve batted this around before, but the Methodists already have a perfectly cromulent liberal arts college with division-III athletics, and I know this because my nephew is a redshirt offensive lineman for them. Birmingham already has small colleges – there\u2019s Miles, which stood to inherit BSC\u2019s campus back in 1976, and there\u2019s Samford, which is\u2026a college (although if BSC is a conservative-arts college, what must a Baptist equivalent be like). And there\u2019s UAB, the state\u2019s largest employer and a cornerstone of the whole community in a way that BSC\u2026isn\u2019t. Or wasn\u2019t, anyway. The extent to which Mayor Woodford represents them is a remarkably generous gesture on his part, in my opinion, and as I have said before, a revitalized BSC that was a genuinely Birmingham<\/em> college would be a lot easier to look kindly on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I guess we\u2019ll see. Hugh Martin \u201830 wasn\u2019t wrong to write \u201cuntil then we\u2019ll have to muddle through somehow\u201d, though. Of which.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The city of Birmingham has thrown a rope to Birmingham-Southern College, a forgivable loan that will provide enough bridging money to see out the current academic year and (possibly) make it to next August, which provides runway to get the current students graduated and buy six months to raise the rest of the money for … <\/p>\n