Upsala College — The Lutheran College That Stayed Until the Money Ran Out

Summary

Upsala College, in East Orange, New Jersey — founded in Brooklyn in 1893 by the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod — closed on May 31, 1995, the day its accreditation expired, and filed for bankruptcy the following month. The college that had averaged some 1,300 students for seven decades and crested near 2,000 in the 1950s ended with 435 students, $12.5 million in debt, and roughly 200 faculty and staff jobs extinguished. Its final commencement fell on Mother's Day, May 14, 1995, and an East Orange councilwoman who attended described it as being "like a funeral." The motto on the seal read Vincit Omnia Veritas — truth conquers all. The truth, in the end, was arithmetic.

It was a quintessentially American immigrant institution. Sixteen students gathered in the basement of the Swedish Evangelical Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Brooklyn on October 3, 1893; their president, Lars Herman Beck, was a Swedish immigrant with a Yale doctorate who had turned down a Yale teaching post to take the job. The college was named for Uppsala, seat of Swedish Lutheranism — the 1593 synod held there had fixed the faith exactly three centuries before the founding. Upsala moved to Kenilworth, New Jersey, in 1897 and then, in 1924, to a 45-acre campus assembled from three estates in what was then affluent, leafy East Orange. There it became a proper liberal-arts college: roughly 2,000 students at the postwar peak, 30 majors, 70 full-time faculty, a 150,000-volume library, and Vikings on the scoreboard.

Its fate was braided to its city's. After the 1967 Newark riots accelerated East Orange's economic decline, the college's applicant pool, donor base, and surroundings deteriorated together; enrollment slid from about 1,600 in 1969 to 475 by 1990. Offered an exit — a donated 240-acre second campus in rural Wantage Township — Upsala debated leaving and chose, deliberately, to remain in East Orange as a Christian witness to its community, enrolling hundreds of Black students through the Timothy J. Still scholarship program and becoming the only Lutheran college in America with a majority of minority students. The mission was kept; the financing never followed it. Debt passed $12 million, an internal 1990 projection put insolvency at mid-1992, and a genuine turnaround — enrollment rebuilt to 882 by 1992 — arrived years too late to outrun the interest.

In June 1994 the college warned employees it could no longer guarantee their pay; the Middle States Association moved to withdraw accreditation, and enrollment collapsed by two-thirds; in March 1995 the trustees voted to close on May 31, when the accreditation lapsed. The wind-down was supervised by Upsala's ninth and last president, a Price Waterhouse partner hired explicitly to dissolve the college. What remains today: a public high school on the East Campus, housing on the West — and, improbably, WFMU, the college radio station that bought its own license on the eve of the collapse and outlived its parent.

Timeline

Sixteen Students in a Church Basement

Upsala was the Augustana Synod's eastern outpost — the fourth college of the Swedish-American Lutheran church — and for its first three decades it lived the precarious life of an immigrant school. Classes in Brooklyn were taught in Swedish, in rented church basements. The move to Kenilworth in 1897 brought fourteen acres and, by 1899, a first Old Main; it did not bring solvency. The second president, Peter Froeberg, spent his tenure borrowing money in his own name to pay the college's debts before securing the mortgage that ended foreclosure proceedings — a sentence that could have been written, with different names, in 1994.

The 1924 move to East Orange was the great bet of Upsala's life, and for fifty years it paid. Three estates on 45 acres in a prosperous commuter suburb put the college twelve miles from Manhattan; enrollment quintupled under President Carl Erickson, from 300 toward 1,500, and the school settled into its long middle age: about 1,300 students in an average year, 30 majors, 70 full-time faculty, teams called the Vikings. The golden age came under Evald B. Lawson, president from 1938 to 1965 — the era alumni meant when they said Upsala. GI Bill veterans pushed enrollment to its peak near 2,000; the campus added residences, a chapel, a gymnasium, a 550-bed dormitory complex, and finally a new library; the college that had once counted 86 students owned 150,000 books. It was coeducational from its earliest years — by its alumni's telling, the first college in New Jersey to admit women — and it had begun graduating the children of its immigrant church into the American professional class, among them Carl Degler '42, the historian whose Neither Black nor White won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

The College That Chose to Stay

The 1967 Newark riots did not wound Upsala directly; what they did was accelerate the transformation of its setting. East Orange's middle class and tax base eroded; crime rose; the leafy suburb that had been the whole premise of the 1924 relocation became, in the language of admissions, a hard sell. Enrollment drifted down from about 1,600 in 1969, and the college faced the question that stalks every urban campus in a declining market: stay or go. It had somewhere to go. In 1978 Wallace Wirths, a former Westinghouse executive, donated 240 acres of Sussex County farmland, and by 1981 the satellite Wirths Campus enrolled more than 300 students at the edge of rural New Jersey. The trustees debated relocation seriously — and decided to remain in East Orange, in the words of the college's own historians, "to serve as a Christian witness to the community and its people."

That decision was not a blunder by inattentive men; it was a covenant, consciously made, by a church college that took its gospel seriously. Upsala opened itself to the city around it: the Timothy J. Still scholarship program enrolled hundreds of African-American students, and the college became the only Lutheran institution in the country where minority students were the majority. But the covenant was never capitalized. Lower-income students needed more financial aid, not less; the suburban Swedish-American alumni and donors who had built the endowment-less college drifted — the college's own chroniclers note the estrangement — and admissions standards bent under the pressure to fill seats. President Rodney Felder, who arrived in 1977 having presided over the closing of Manhattan's Finch College, hoped marketing could outrun demography; it could not. By the time Robert Karsten took office in 1988, the question was not growth but survival: an August 1990 internal projection concluded that the money would be gone by June 1992.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students dispersed to whatever colleges would take their credits; with the accreditation itself expiring, there was no continuing institution to teach them out. Roughly 200 faculty and staff lost their jobs, and the bankruptcy court took custody of what a century had built. The pieces found homes of varying dignity. The East Orange school district bought the eastern half of the campus, and Beck Hall, Puder Hall, the Viking Memorial gymnasium, and the Wahlstrom College Center were folded into East Orange Campus High School — which today enrolls about as many students as Upsala did in 1969. Old Main, the administration building, was razed in 1999. The western half fared worse: looted, vandalized, and partly burned while the city could not afford its upkeep, it was demolished in 2006 and redeveloped as the Woodlands at Upsala — 48 single-family homes and 16 townhouses where the West Campus stood.

The college's memory was dispersed with unusual care. About 60 percent of the library went to the brand-new Florida Gulf Coast University; the institutional records — more than two hundred linear feet — went to the Swenson Center at Augustana College in Illinois, the founding church's own archive; transcripts went to the custody of Felician University. And one piece of Upsala refused to die: WFMU, the campus radio station that had grown into the New York area's freeform institution, whose staff and supporters formed Auricle Communications and bought the license from the failing college in 1994. The station that outlived its college is now among the most storied independent broadcasters in America — the most audible thing Upsala ever built.

Lessons

References

• A Brief History of Upsala College Augustana Heritage Association
• Upsala College Wikipedia
• Upsala College (East Orange, N.J.) records, 1893–1995 Swenson Center, Augustana College
• Upsala College Upsala.org
• Upsala: Another defunct college campus, cleft in two Dirt Americana