Nasson College — Closed in 1983, Ordered Reopened by a Court, Gone Anyway

Summary

Nasson College, a private liberal-arts college in the village of Springvale, in Sanford, Maine, founded in 1912 as the Nasson Institute, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 1982 and ceased operating as a degree-granting college in 1983, after seventy-one years. It had been one of southern Maine's distinctive small colleges — a two-year women's school that grew into a four-year college in 1935 and went coeducational in 1952, reaching roughly nine hundred students at its peak in the late 1960s before a long decline in enrollment and money brought it down. It was, in the words of one who remembered it, "a wonderful asset to our community," and its loss reshaped a Maine mill town's village center for decades.

The cause was the one that recurs across this family of stories — a tuition-dependent college with too few students and too little reserve — sharpened by Nasson's own choices. Like so many others, it had been buoyed by Vietnam-era and G.I. Bill enrollment, and the end of the war pulled students away. An ambitious 1960s experiment, the "New Division," a free-form college-within-a-college modeled on Goddard and Antioch, had ended in disorder and consolidation by 1970, leaving the institution risk-averse and slow to adapt to the pressures that followed. By the early 1980s, enrollment and finances had both collapsed.

What makes Nasson singular is what happened after it decided to die. In the spring of 1983 the college resolved to cease educational activities, and in May 1983 its accreditor, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, voted to terminate its accreditation precisely because Nasson had decided to stop teaching. Then the bankruptcy court intervened: in a reorganization, it ordered Nasson restored "with the full degree-granting authority, privileges, and accreditations it had on the day it filed for bankruptcy," and the college briefly resumed programs in September 1985. The litigation that followed — Nasson College v. NEASC — turned on whether accreditation is "property" a bankruptcy court can resurrect. But the original Nasson, the residential liberal-arts college that had served Maine since 1912, was effectively finished in 1983; the revivals that followed — including a venture by the businessman Edward Mattar III that dissolved into litigation and a 1996 state seizure — wore its name without being the institution that closed. The campus then sat largely vacant for nearly two decades before a slow, piecemeal redevelopment brought it back: the college is gone, but the buildings, finally, are full again.

Timeline

The Institute That Became a College

Nasson began in 1912 as the Nasson Institute, a two-year school for women in Springvale, one of the villages of the Maine mill town of Sanford. Its early decades were modest and particular: a small institution, bearing the Nasson family name, educating young women on a wooded campus in the village center at a time when most of American higher education was closed or indifferent to them. Over a generation it grew larger than its founding charter — in 1935 it became a four-year college, and in 1952 it admitted men for the first time, completing the transformation from a women's institute into a coeducational liberal-arts college.

The decades around midcentury were Nasson's golden age, and they deserve their weight. Coeducation and the postwar expansion of American higher education swelled the college; by the late 1960s it enrolled roughly nine hundred students, a substantial body for a small Maine college, drawn to majors across biology, English, environmental science, government, history, mathematics, and medical technology. The campus filled out with new buildings — a learning-resources center and library, a science center with a rooftop greenhouse, dormitories, a gymnasium, a little theatre, dining commons — several designed by Elenore Pettersen, one of New England's first female architects and a protégée of Frank Lloyd Wright. For a town built on textile mills, the college was an anchor of a different kind, "a wonderful asset to our community," as one Mainer later put it — exactly the small residential college that a region builds part of its self-image around.

That height also rested on foundations that would not hold. Like countless small colleges of the era, Nasson was tuition-dependent, with little endowment to cushion a downturn, and a meaningful share of its enrollment was tied to forces outside its control — the Vietnam-era draft and the G.I. Bill, which filled small-college dormitories nationwide. The peak of the late 1960s was, in part, a peak the war had helped build, and when that artificial demand receded the college would have to compete on its own merits in a harder market — just as it had grown rigid at precisely the moment it needed to be nimble.

The Experiment and the Slide

The rigidity had a specific origin. In the mid-1960s, under President Roger C. Gay, Nasson tried to leap to the front of educational reform with the "New Division," an experimental college-within-a-college that opened in the fall of 1966. Modeled on Goddard and Antioch, it offered extensive student participation in academic and disciplinary policy and emphasized independent study — the era's vanguard idea of undergraduate education, and for a small Maine college a bold, visible bet on relevance and distinction.

The bet failed, and it failed in a way that left scar tissue. The New Division set off tensions between traditional students and faculty and the more freewheeling students and liberal professors the experiment attracted; poor planning compounded the friction, and by 1970, on the advice of educational consultants, the program was consolidated out of existence. The episode taught a costly lesson — that ambition and experiment were dangerous — and Nasson turned risk-averse at exactly the wrong time, just as the post-war enrollment tide was about to go out and small colleges everywhere would need to adapt aggressively to survive the 1970s and early 1980s.

The slide that followed was steady rather than sudden. As the draft ended and G.I. Bill enrollment thinned, Nasson's numbers fell from their late-1960s peak, and a tuition-dependent college without reserves had no way to absorb the lost revenue. Declining enrollment, mounting costs, and the caution born of the New Division debacle combined into a long erosion of money and morale. By the start of the 1980s, the college that had counted nine hundred students a decade earlier was running out of both — the classic, unglamorous death of the small liberal-arts college, with no single villain, only an accumulation of shortfalls.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the students enrolled when Nasson ceased teaching in 1983, the closure meant transferring elsewhere to finish; the brief court-ordered revival in 1985 came too late to be the institution they had attended. Faculty and staff lost their positions, and the village of Springvale lost an employer and a cultural anchor that had been part of Sanford's life for seven decades — the practical and civic loss a mill town feels acutely when its college goes dark.

The campus itself became one of the longest redevelopment sagas of any closed American college. For nearly twenty years it sat largely vacant and deteriorating, passing through bankruptcy auctions and the failed Mattar venture, with the state seizing buildings in 1996. The turnaround was the work of people who loved the place: four alumni — Anna Ashley, Rick Schneider, Connie Witherby, and H. Pete Smith — formed the nonprofit Nasson Center Redevelopment and, with more than $500,000 in donations and thousands of volunteer hours, reopened the former gymnasium and Little Theatre as the Nasson Community Center in 2007. A former science building became a community health center in 2012. Through the 2010s and into the 2020s, developers converted the surviving dormitories and academic buildings — including Marland Hall, the last of the core campus to be redeveloped — into apartments and senior housing, the residence halls Elenore Pettersen had designed decades earlier finding new life as homes. The college that taught Maine for seventy-one years is gone; its buildings, after a long vacancy and a longer recovery, are inhabited again, and a community center keeps the name alive on Main Street.

Lessons

References

• Nasson College Wikipedia
• Nasson College v. New England Association of Schools and Colleges, 80 B.R. 600 (1988) Quimbee (case brief)
• Nasson College's turnaround nearly complete with conversion of Marland Hall into senior housing Mainebiz
• Nasson College Alumni Association: History Nasson College Alumni Association
• About — Nasson Community Center & Little Theatre Nasson Community Center