Mackinac College — An Idealists’ College on an Island That Graduated One Class and Closed

Summary

Mackinac College, on Mackinac Island, Michigan, opened to its first students in September 1966 and held its first and only commencement on June 20, 1970 — four years almost to the season, a college that began and ended with a single class. It was the creation of Moral Re-Armament, the international moral-and-spiritual movement founded by the American minister Frank Buchman, which had built a conference center on the island in the 1950s and, after Buchman's death in 1961 and his successor Peter Howard's in 1965, decided to convert that center into a liberal-arts college. The plan was earnest, well-funded at the start, and academically serious. It was also, in retrospect, almost perfectly designed to run out of money.

The college opened with about 114 students drawn from roughly thirty states and Canada, an inaugural class admitted in the fall of 1966 and meant to graduate in 1970. Its president was a figure of real standing: Dr. Samuel Douglas Cornell, a physicist who had served twelve years as executive officer of the National Academy of Sciences. A $1.5 million gift funded a modern arts-and-sciences building, and the faculty was unusually credentialed for so small a school, with a large share holding doctorates and many drawn from abroad. Enrollment grew quickly, reaching roughly 350 by the 1968–69 year. For two or three years the experiment looked like it might work.

It did not, and the reasons were structural and unforgiving. The college sat on an isolated island where everything cost more to build and operate; it had spent heavily to convert and upgrade facilities; it had no endowment to speak of and — being brand new — no alumni to build one. By the 1968–69 year the board recognized that current and future finances were untenable, and enrollment, which had climbed, now reversed: by the summer of 1969 most students had already left, and the final academic year limped along with about thirty-four students and fifteen faculty. The school chose to finish what it had started rather than strand its founding class.

On June 20, 1970, Mackinac College conferred bachelor's degrees on its sole graduating class — about thirty seniors — and closed. It was an honorable ending to a venture the arithmetic had doomed from early on: a tiny, isolated, brand-new college without an endowment is one of the most fragile structures in higher education, and idealism, however genuine, does not pay an island's heating bills. The campus did not stay empty — the television evangelist Rex Humbard bought it in 1972 for a Bible college that failed within a year, and after a 1977 sale the buildings became a hotel, eventually today's Mission Point Resort. Mackinac College survives as a four-year footnote and a clean illustration of a hard rule: a college needs a financial base that outlasts its founders' enthusiasm, and this one never had time to build one.

Timeline

The Movement That Built a Campus

To understand the college you have to understand the campus, because the college inherited both. Moral Re-Armament was an international movement of moral and spiritual renewal founded by Frank Buchman, an American Lutheran minister, in the 1930s; by the 1950s it had made Mackinac Island a summer gathering place and, beginning in 1954, bought land at Mission Point. Between 1955 and 1965 MRA raised an extraordinary complex for a small Great Lakes island: an 800-seat theater, the Great Hall with dormitories, a brick lodge, and a steel-framed film studio said to be the largest structure on the island. It was a conference center for a cause, built to host the movement's worldwide assemblies, not to run on tuition.

Then the cause lost its leaders. Buchman died in 1961; Peter Howard, the British journalist who succeeded him and who had proposed the college idea, died suddenly in 1965. With its founders gone and its great island plant underused outside the summer season, MRA's leadership reached for a way to give the campus a permanent purpose, and a permanent purpose, in 1960s America, meant a college. Two Oxford-educated movement figures, Basil Entwistle and Morris Martin, led the founding; Michigan granted a charter in 1965; and MRA deeded the buildings to the new Mackinac College. The conversion was the original sin and the founding gift at once: the college began life with a magnificent physical plant it had not paid for and could not afford to maintain.

This was the college's brief golden age, and it was real while it lasted. Mackinac opened in the fall of 1966 with about 114 students from some thirty states and Canada, a genuinely national draw for a first class on a remote island. Its president, Dr. S. Douglas Cornell, brought the prestige of twelve years running the National Academy of Sciences; a $1.5 million gift built a modern arts-and-sciences center in 1967; and the faculty was strikingly credentialed, a large share holding doctorates, many recruited from overseas, teaching a full liberal-arts curriculum from the sciences through theater and journalism. For two years a serious small college operated in one of the most beautiful settings in America, and the students remembered the teaching as the equal of anywhere. The problem was never the quality. It was the balance sheet.

The Arithmetic of an Island

A college's survival is a cash-flow problem, and Mackinac's cash flow was structured to fail. The campus sat on a roughly twenty-one-acre site on an island reachable only by boat, where every gallon of fuel and every shipment of supplies carried a transport premium and a winter penalty; an island that empties of tourists in the cold months is an expensive place to keep a college warm and staffed. The buildings, magnificent as they were, had been built for summer conferences and needed upgrading and year-round maintenance the movement's gift did not endow. And the institution had — being four years old — no endowment to throw off income, and no graduates yet to give. Tuition from a few hundred students was carrying all of it.

By the 1968–69 academic year the people responsible for the books saw clearly what the brochures had obscured: the finances were not merely tight but structurally untenable, present and future. Enrollment had grown to roughly 350, but growth on a thin per-student margin only deepens the hole when the per-student margin is negative, and the costs of the island and the upkeep outran what the students could pay. Confidence, once it goes, goes fast at a young college; by July 1969 — the summer the country watched men land on the moon — most of Mackinac's students had already left. The college that had drawn a national first class three years earlier was emptying out, and there was no reservoir of wealth or loyal alumni to refill it.

What distinguishes Mackinac from a sordid collapse is what it did with the end. The administration could have shut the doors and scattered the founding class, the students who had come in 1966 on the promise of a 1970 degree. It chose instead to run one final, skeletal year — roughly thirty-four students and fifteen faculty — so that the class that had started could finish. It was a small, decent act of institutional honor, the opposite of the abrupt closures that strand students mid-degree: a dying college spending its last resources to keep a promise to the people who had trusted it first.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Because Mackinac chose to teach out its founding class, the human damage was unusually contained for a college closure: the students who had enrolled in 1966 graduated in 1970 as promised, and the dozens still on campus in the final year finished or transferred with a degree in hand rather than a half-finished transcript from a defunct school. The faculty — heavily credentialed, internationally drawn — dispersed into a tightening academic market, and the movement that had built the campus, Moral Re-Armament, formally wound down its activity on the island the following year, closing a chapter that had defined Mission Point for two decades.

The lasting mark of Mackinac College is not a campus — the campus belongs to a hotel — but a lesson and a small, far-flung alumni diaspora. As a case study it is almost diagrammatically clean: take a genuinely good faculty, a serious president, a stunning setting, and an earnest mission, place them on an isolated island in inherited buildings with no endowment and no alumni, and watch a well-meaning college die in four years of nobody's malice and everybody's arithmetic. It is the gentlest kind of cautionary tale, and for that reason one of the clearest.

Lessons

References

• Mackinac College Wikipedia
• 50th anniversary nears for sole Mackinac College graduating class The Alpena News
• Mission Point Began as Conference Center and College Mackinac State Historic Parks
• The Short-lived College of Mackinac Island, Michigan: 1966-1970 99.1 WFMK