Bethany University — The Assemblies of God’s oldest college, closed in a single sentence

Summary

Bethany University, in Scotts Valley, California, founded in 1919 as the Glad Tidings Bible Institute in San Francisco and grown into the oldest college of the Assemblies of God denomination, announced on June 13, 2011 that it would close — and not at the end of a final year, but at once. The board chairman's statement was almost surgically brief: "There will be an immediate cessation of all teaching activities June 13, 2011 and we will prepare for an orderly shutdown of the university." After ninety-two years of training Pentecostal pastors, missionaries, teachers, and musicians, the small hillside campus above Santa Cruz County stopped teaching the day it announced it would.

The cause was the ordinary arithmetic of a small tuition-dependent religious college that had run out of room. Enrollment, which had topped five hundred in the mid-2000s, had slipped to roughly four hundred by the 2010–11 academic year; donations had thinned in the aftermath of the 2008 recession; and the institution faced an annual budget shortfall estimated at $8.5 million it had no realistic way to close. Its accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, had already signaled distress. There was no large endowment, no deep-pocketed denominational rescue, and no enrollment recovery on the horizon — only a structural deficit that grew faster than a school of four hundred students could ever fill.

The human cost was concentrated and abrupt. Roughly four hundred students had to find new schools mid-degree; a faculty pared to twenty-two full-time and fifty adjunct members lost their positions; and because Bethany, as a private religious institution, had never paid into California's unemployment fund and offered no severance, its employees walked away with neither a job nor a safety net. A teach-out plan was filed with WASC in August and approved on the 16th, formalizing the wind-down the chairman had promised. The campus passed through one failed Christian-college tenant before being reborn, years later, as a secular wellness retreat. Bethany was an early entry in the long decade of small religious-college closures, and a clean illustration of how a school can be both beloved and unsustainable at the same time.

Timeline

A Pentecostal Institute on a Hillside

Bethany was born of a mission, not a market. In 1919 Robert and Mary Craig founded the Glad Tidings Bible Institute on Webster Street in San Francisco to supply workers for their inner-city Pentecostal ministry, and the school grew up alongside the Assemblies of God itself, becoming the denomination's oldest endorsed college. In 1950 it left the city for a wooded hillside in Scotts Valley, in the redwoods above Santa Cruz County, trading an urban storefront for a residential campus with a view. It became Bethany Bible College in 1955, broadening from a narrow ministerial institute into a four-year liberal-arts college with a Pentecostal core, and in 2005 it took the name Bethany University to match programs that by then reached well beyond the pulpit into education, music, psychology, and business.

For most of its life Bethany was a small, devoted, regional school — a few hundred students at a time, drawn largely from Assemblies of God congregations across the West, formed as much by chapel and community as by the catalog. Its golden age, such as it was, came in the decades when the denomination was confident and growing and a Pentecostal family in California could send a son or daughter to a college that shared its faith and its idiom. Enrollment crested around 534 in the mid-2000s, and the move to university status in 2005 was meant to signal arrival. But the scale that gave Bethany its intimacy also fixed its ceiling. A school of five hundred students has very little margin: it cannot easily cut its way to solvency without gutting the programs that justify it, and it cannot grow without capital it does not have. Bethany's identity was its strength and its constraint at once.

The Arithmetic of a Small College

The decline was not a scandal; it was a subtraction. The 2008 recession did to Bethany what it did to scores of small tuition-dependent religious colleges — it thinned both halves of the budget at the same time. Donations, the lifeblood of a denominational school without an endowment, fell as households and congregations retrenched; enrollment, the other lifeline, slid from its mid-2000s peak toward roughly four hundred by 2010–11. Fixed costs — the campus, the payroll, the debt — did not move with them. The result was a structural budget shortfall estimated at $8.5 million a year, a figure a college of four hundred students could not plausibly close through tuition or trimming. The school pared its faculty to twenty-two full-time and fifty adjuncts, but cuts at that scale only confirmed the spiral they were meant to arrest.

The accreditor saw it coming. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges had Bethany's accreditation running only through the summer of 2011, a short leash that reflected an institution under financial scrutiny rather than one operating from strength. There was no endowment to draw down and no rescue in prospect: the Assemblies of God endorsed Bethany but did not, in the end, write a check large enough to reverse an $8.5 million annual gap. By the spring of 2011 the board faced a choice between opening a fall semester it could not pay for and stopping while there was still time to do it in an orderly way. It chose to stop. The decision was sober and, by the standards of college closures, even responsible — but it was final, and it came down on four hundred students and seventy-some faculty all at once.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The roughly four hundred students dispersed under the approved teach-out, transferring to other schools and reassembling degrees that had been built around Bethany's distinctive Pentecostal community. The faculty of twenty-two full-time and fifty adjunct members, along with the rest of the staff, lost their jobs as the campus closed, and they did so without severance; because Bethany had never contributed to California's unemployment insurance fund, they were not even eligible for state assistance — a particularly bitter outcome for employees of a ninety-two-year-old institution. For the Assemblies of God, the closure of its oldest college was a symbolic as well as financial blow, an early sign that the small denominational college model was straining across the country.

The campus outlived the college. Olivet University's brief tenancy in 2011–2012 failed before it began in earnest, and the property sat for sale before its reinvention. In 2017 the hillside reopened as 1440 Multiversity, a thriving secular wellness and education retreat — a clean, even handsome second life for the real estate, and a complete erasure of the institution that had occupied it for sixty years. Bethany survives now as an alumni network and a memory: one of the first of the small Christian colleges to close in the 2010s, a school that did the responsible thing on the way out and still left its students mid-degree and its faculty empty-handed.

Lessons

References

• Bethany University Wikipedia
• 92-year-old Bethany University in Scotts Valley shutting down ABC7 News (KGO San Francisco)
• Bethany University Santa Cruz LocalWiki
• Closure from Bethany's last president Press Banner