Nathaniel Hawthorne College — A Fly-In College Grounded by $4 Million in Debt

Summary

Nathaniel Hawthorne College, a small private college on the old Flint Estate in North Branch, Antrim, New Hampshire, founded in 1962, graduated its last class in April 1988 and was dissolved into bankruptcy that same year, after twenty-six years. It was an unusual institution even by the standards of the small private colleges that dot rural New England: a liberal-arts school that had bolted on a full-scale flight academy, with its own 485-acre campus, a 3,500-foot grass-and-gravel runway in West Deering, and a fleet of nineteen aircraft serving more than three hundred aviation students at its height. When it died, it left behind not a quad but an airfield, and the airfield outlived the college.

The mechanism was the familiar one — a tuition-dependent college with no endowment cushion, carrying long-term debt that climbed past $4 million while annual operating losses ran around $400,000 — but Hawthorne's particular tragedy was a rescue that the law would not allow. In 1982, seeking to modernize around computer science and aeronautics, the college affiliated with the Florida Institute of Technology and shortened its name to Hawthorne College. The arrangement promised a deep-pocketed academic partner. But New Hampshire law restricted an out-of-state institution from buying up a New Hampshire college, and the statute choked off the very cash infusion the merger was supposed to deliver. The lifeline was attached to a hand the college was forbidden to take.

By 1988 the options were exhausted. A bailout plan involving another aviation college collapsed, and the trustees declared bankruptcy and moved to liquidate. They put the 50-acre airfield and more than twenty campus buildings on the block; a Concord auction broker solicited bids for the whole 485-acre property. The last students finished in the spring, and the institution that had taught New Englanders to fly for a generation simply stopped existing — a closure with little ceremony and less warning.

What followed was a strange afterlife. In 1990 the campus was bought by Maruzen Construction Company of Japan, which in 1992 opened a short-lived aviation college on the site; then a Maharishi meditation school held the property from the mid-1990s to 2014; and in 2017 a new preparatory school, Hawthorne Academy, opened in the old buildings. The runway, meanwhile, never closed at all. It became the Hawthorne–Feather Airpark, a privately owned, public-use airport still on the sectional charts today — the rare case of a college that vanished but whose most distinctive asset kept doing the one thing the college had built it to do.

Timeline

The College with a Runway

Nathaniel Hawthorne College was the product of an early-1960s confidence that there was always room for one more small private college. In 1962, three founders — Kenneth McLaughlin, John Berrigan, and Joseph Whelton — established it on the former Flint Estate in North Branch, a hamlet of Antrim in the rolling country of southwestern New Hampshire. They named it for the novelist of "The Scarlet Letter," gave it a sprawling 485-acre campus, and set it up as a coeducational liberal-arts college of the conventional kind, betting that the postwar tide of students would lift even a brand-new, unendowed institution in a town few outside the Monadnock region could place on a map.

For a while the bet paid, and the golden age arrived faster than anyone could have planned for. The 1960s were boom years for small private colleges, and the Vietnam-era draft was a peculiar accelerant: a male undergraduate enjoyed a student deferment, which meant that enrollment at a place like Hawthorne was buoyed not only by the baby boom but by the war. By the early 1970s the college counted roughly 700 to 800 students on its rural campus — a respectable size for an institution barely a decade old — and it had begun to develop the feature that would define it. McLaughlin's own interest in flying, nurtured at the Nashua airport, pointed the college toward the sky, and in 1971 it added a formal aviation curriculum.

That curriculum was no token. Hawthorne built and operated its own airfield in West Deering, with a 3,500-foot runway, and by 1979 it owned a fleet of nineteen aircraft serving about 315 aviation students — a flight academy embedded in a liberal-arts college, an unusual and genuinely distinctive offering. A student could earn a bachelor's degree and a pilot's rating on the same campus, walking from a literature seminar to a Cessna. For a small New Hampshire college searching for a reason to exist alongside the state's older and better-funded institutions, the runway was the answer: a niche, a brand, and a tangible asset all at once. It was also expensive, and it tethered the college's fortunes to an enrollment that would not stay high forever.

The Lifeline the Law Forbade

The structural weakness was the one that kills most small colleges: Hawthorne lived on tuition and had built no endowment to fall back on. While the draft-era surge lasted, this year's students paid for this year's bills, and the model held. But the end of the Vietnam War removed the artificial floor under male enrollment, and the broader market for traditional-age students grew more competitive just as the college's borrowing — for the aircraft, the airfield, the buildings — came due. A college that depends entirely on enrollment cannot survive a sustained enrollment decline, and Hawthorne's was sustained.

The trustees did the rational thing: they sought a stronger partner. In 1982 the college affiliated with the Florida Institute of Technology, a well-regarded technological university, and recast itself around computer science and aeronautics, shortening its name to Hawthorne College to signal the new era. On paper it was a sound rescue — an academically credible institution with resources, attaching itself to a small college whose aviation program fit its own aerospace identity. The merger was supposed to bring capital and stability to a campus that was running short of both.

It brought neither, and the reason was a quirk of state law. New Hampshire restricted out-of-state institutions from buying up the state's small colleges, and that statute stood squarely in the path of the very financial infusion the FIT affiliation was meant to deliver. The deep pockets were across a legal line the cash-strapped college could not reach across. So Hawthorne entered the mid-1980s with a new name, a modernized catalog, and the same fatal problem it had started with — except now its losses were compounding. Long-term debt climbed past $4 million; annual operating deficits ran near $400,000. The lifeline had been thrown, then legislated out of reach, and the college was left treading water with a stone tied to its ankle.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the students, the spring of 1988 was the end of the line on that campus; the last class graduated, and those not yet finished held credits from a bankrupt college and had to seek their futures elsewhere, with no teach-out arrangement to carry them through. Faculty and staff lost their jobs in the liquidation. The tight community that a 485-acre residential college in a small town sustains — the largest thing for miles, in many respects — simply dissolved, and Antrim lost an institution that had been part of its identity for a quarter century.

The campus, unusually, did not sit empty for long, though it never again became the college it had been. Maruzen Construction Company of Japan bought the property in 1990 and in 1992 opened an aviation college on the site — a brief echo of Hawthorne's flight-school years that did not last. From the mid-1990s until 2014 a Maharishi meditation school occupied the grounds. Then, in 2017, the nonprofit behind Hawthorne Academy opened a preparatory school in the old buildings, putting students back in the classrooms after a long hiatus. The most durable legacy, though, is the runway: the West Deering airfield became the Hawthorne–Feather Airpark, a privately owned, public-use airport that remains active. A college can disappear and still leave the sky a little busier than it found it; Hawthorne's lasting mark is an airstrip that never stopped flying.

Lessons

References

• Nathaniel Hawthorne College Wikipedia
• For sale: one college UPI Archives (1988)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne College (NH) College History Garden
• Hawthorne College New England Lost Ski Areas Project