Last week my alma mater, Elon University, announced that it was merging with Queens University over a hundred miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina. Which was a proclamation that had me - and many others it seems - scratching their heads. What exactly is Elon's angle here? The last time that Elon made any significant branching-out was the law school in Greensboro some years ago. But that's vastly different from wholesale engulfing another higher-learning institution.
Along with the seemingly unceasing construction that's been going on for as long as I can remember (I graduated in 1999), it's now coming inescapably apparent that Elon has a voracious appetite for real estate and that's not necessarily a good thing.
Current Elon student Alex Nettles has composed an extremely well-written, researched and articulated opinion piece that's been published on Elon's in-house news operation. "The Elon Empire: Why the Queens University merger shows deeper problems" is a nigh-on brutal intervention for the college's expansion ambitions. In it, Nettles argues that Elon is looking more toward its geographic footprint more than where it should really matter. Namely, increasing its endowment, which has become imperiled by current trends regarding enrollment at colleges nationwide. As Nettles describes it...
Elon has a fixation on qualifying its success with physical growth. Go on a walk through campus. You’ll see why tours are a big deal here. They have a lot of buildings to point to, like a guide in Greece pointing to ruins.
Outside of Richard W. Sankey hall, tour guides lead groups around, while gesturing at buildings. The steel frame of the Health EU building hangs in the distance. The construction site used to be an open field. Distant sounds of steel come close to disorienting the guide's extroversion. There is a legacy of physical growth as progress on campus.
This legacy can be traced with how much we spend. The Health EU Building will cost $60 million, the East Neighborhood Commons cost $19.7 million and Founders and Innovation Hall cost $31 Million. A rough estimation of $110.7 Million since 2022. For perspective, the most recent endowment statistic was $322 million.
So think about it.The endowment is our pool of money to shield a university from years of downturns. We’ve spent 34% of our 2023 endowment. The money didn’t come straight from the endowment, but it reveals a lot.
Well, it's just an enormously enlightening - and rather disturbing, if we are going to be honest - opinion piece. Mr. Nettles should be proud of himself for the work itself and much more so, having the courage to put the issue in the forefront of the administration's awareness. From one Elon columnist to another: bravo Alex Nettles!
1 comments:
I'm an Elon alum too. The college is trying to defeat essential physics. The more it tries to expand with fewer students the more cold it's going to get. Elon needs to stop growing and step back to reassess some stuff.
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