Westmar University — Rescued by Japan, Bought by Its Town, Closed in Six Weeks

Summary

Westmar University, in Le Mars, Iowa — a Methodist-rooted liberal-arts college that dated itself from 1890 — announced on October 9, 1997 that, barring a last-minute merger, it would close on November 21. No merger came. Final classes met on the 21st, a last commencement was held on November 22, and by that evening an institution that had taught the farm towns of northwest Iowa for 107 years no longer existed. Several hundred students were left in the middle of an academic year to find new colleges, and Le Mars — a town of fewer than nine thousand people that had, in a final act of civic devotion, bought the college outright the year before — was left holding a 22-building campus with no one to teach in it.

The college that died in 1997 was the fourth name on one continuous institution. It began as a normal school for prairie schoolteachers — the college counted its founding from 1890, though Wikipedia and county historians trace a predecessor, the Northwestern Normal School and Business College, to 1887 — and became Western Union College when the United Evangelical Church took ownership in 1900. Renamed Westmar College in 1948 and merged with York College of Nebraska in 1954, it grew into the only college west of the Mississippi River affiliated with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, and in its mid-1960s golden age it enrolled more than a thousand students on a campus that doubled as the civic pride of its town.

The decline was demographic before it was desperate. By 1982 enrollment had fallen to 319, and debt accumulated through the decade. Then came the era's strangest rescue: a March 1990 merger with Japan's Teikyo University, which promised to send 500 Japanese students at $15,000 apiece and add $4 million for debt reduction. The United Methodist Church — successor to the founding denomination — severed its century-old ties within two months. The Japanese students arrived, but almost none were proficient in English, and the academic integration largely failed. The North Central Association put the school on probation in 1994; Teikyo sold out to a California investor in 1995; the investor gave way to the city of Le Mars itself in 1996, first with a $40,000 loan and then with an outright purchase. Each rescue was briefer than the last, and none produced the only thing that mattered: students.

What was lost does not register on national ledgers — a small church college that for a century carried a town's identity, supplied its teachers, and filled its pews and ballfields. A community campaign to revive Westmar, chronicled by The Chronicle of Higher Education that December, came to nothing. The campus was sold and razed piecemeal over the following quarter century; the YMCA moved into the gymnasium, apartments into the cafeteria, and in 2025 the wreckers were still at work.

Timeline

A Prairie College, Four Names Deep

Westmar's history is a study in how a college on the plains survives: by renaming, remarrying, and merging. The school began as a normal school, because the trade of Plymouth County was farming and the crop it most reliably exported was schoolteachers. A first attempt — the Northwestern Normal School and Business College, founded by county school superintendent Jacob Wernli in 1887 — faltered within two years; the effort was reorganized in 1890, the year the institution would ever after claim as its birth, and local businessmen of the Le Mars Normal School association carried it through the 1890s. In 1900 they handed the school to the United Evangelical Church, which renamed it Western Union College and gave it the two things a small college needs most: a mission, and a denomination to pay for it.

For the next half century the college rode the consolidations of its church. It became Westmar College in 1948, and in 1954, when York College of Nebraska folded into it, Westmar emerged as the lone college west of the Mississippi River affiliated with the Evangelical United Brethren Church — a denominational franchise that functioned as a recruiting territory stretching across the plains. This was the institution's golden age. Enrollment climbed past one thousand by the mid-1960s; the campus added buildings, including the Centennial Hall dormitory that opened in 1968 and would house students until the last day; and in May 1965 the college celebrated a Diamond Jubilee commencement, seventy-five years young and apparently permanent. In a town the size of Le Mars — the self-proclaimed Ice Cream Capital of the World — the college was not an amenity but an organ: employer, stage, gymnasium, and the reason a farm family's children might stay in the county.

The same year the EUB vanished, so did Westmar's protected niche. The 1968 merger that created the United Methodist Church dissolved the small denomination into a vast one, and a college that had been the EUB college west of the Mississippi became one Methodist-affiliated school among more than a hundred. The loyalty that had filled its dormitories thinned with each entering class.

The Rescue From Tokyo

The 1970s and 1980s hollowed the college out quietly. By 1982 enrollment had fallen to 319 — a third of the golden-age figure — and the institution was borrowing to live. In the late 1980s, president Art Richardson went looking for a partner with capital and found one across the Pacific: Teikyo University of Tokyo, then assembling a small constellation of American campuses. In March 1990 Westmar merged into the venture and became Teikyo Westmar University. The terms, as reported, were straightforwardly transactional: Teikyo would send 500 Japanese students to Le Mars at a cost of $15,000 each and contribute $4 million toward debt reduction. Marycrest College in Davenport, on the other side of the state, struck a parallel bargain with the same network that same year.

The deal saved the balance sheet and unsettled everything else. Within two months, the United Methodist Church severed its ties to the college — ending, in one motion, ninety years of denominational sponsorship that reached back to the United Evangelical Church of 1900. The Japanese students came, but almost none arrived with English proficient enough for American coursework; the school had to improvise a large English-as-a-second-language operation, and the academic integration of the two student bodies largely failed. Iowa freshmen and Tokyo transplants shared a campus but not, in any working sense, a college. By 1994 the North Central Association had seen enough: after threatening outright revocation of accreditation, it placed Teikyo Westmar on a two-year probation that August — the kind of public sanction that tells every guidance counselor in the region to steer families elsewhere. Teikyo, retrenching as Japan's long recession wore on, began shedding its American experiment. In 1995 it sold the Le Mars campus to Robert Driscoll, a private investor from California whose Advanced Worldwide Education restored the old name with a small promotion: Westmar University.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students scattered mid-year to Siouxland's surviving colleges and beyond, carrying credits that transferred imperfectly and freshman autumns that counted for little; the faculty and staff — neighbors, in a town that size — were dismissed on the same six weeks' notice. The city of Le Mars, now owner of a dead campus, spent the next quarter century un-building it: 22 buildings demolished, sold, or rented one by one. The YMCA took the gymnasium. The cafeteria became the Royal Park Apartments. Dubs Memorial Hall and two other buildings were razed in 2002; the Charles A. Mock library, the last building in the city's hands, was sold to private owners; and Centennial Hall — the dormitory that had housed students from 1968 to the final day — was sold in 2012, repurchased by the city in 2024, and demolished in 2025, the campus still being dismantled twenty-eight years after the last class.

What endures is memory, institutionalized: a Westmar Alumni and Friends Association that stages reunions at a college that no longer exists, newsletters that read like letters home, and a permanent entry in the cautionary literature of the Teikyo era — the moment when a handful of struggling American colleges looked across the Pacific for salvation. Westmar's sister experiment, Teikyo Marycrest in Davenport, outlived it by five years before closing in 2002. In Le Mars the lasting mark is architectural and absent at once: a town that keeps finding pieces of its college in its buildings, and keeps having to decide, decade after decade, which ones to keep.

Lessons

References

• Westmar University Wikipedia
• Iowa Community Seeks to Revive Recently Closed Westmar U. The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Westmar: 10 years after the doors closed Sioux City Journal
• An old school gets a new life in Le Mars, Iowa Sioux City Journal
• Westmar College Lost Colleges