Multnomah University — The Bible School That Gave Away Everything and Got Closed Anyway

Summary

Multnomah University, a non-denominational Christian university in Portland, Oregon, was founded in 1936 as the Multnomah School of the Bible and ceased to exist as an independent institution on May 1, 2024, when it folded into Jessup University, an evangelical school 600 miles south in Rocklin, California. For most of a decade Multnomah had run on fumes — enrollment sliding from roughly a thousand students to 608 by the fall before the merger, a thin $8.7 million endowment, and a business model its own president called fundamentally broken. The merger was sold as a rescue: Jessup would take Multnomah's campus, assets, and liabilities, keep the Portland site open as a satellite, and preserve the eighty-eight-year-old name. It was framed, in the language of the moment, as a "merger of mission" rather than a closure.

The rescue did not hold. Jessup itself was carrying more than $100 million in debt and, by its own filings, would have lost nearly $11 million in fiscal 2023–24 without the windfall of Multnomah's roughly $30 million in assets, acquired for about $7.7 million in transaction costs. Two months after the deal closed, in June 2024, Jessup took out a $15 million loan against the Portland campus; a $6 million lien followed. In May 2025, barely a year after promising to keep the lights on, Jessup announced it would close the Portland campus, move the seminary online, and send remaining undergraduates elsewhere. By August 2025 the 20-acre campus at 8435 NE Glisan Street was listed for sale.

What makes Multnomah a distinctive entry in the absorbed file is the sequence: this was not a college that merged into a healthy partner and quietly faded. It handed its entire physical and financial existence to an institution in worse shape than itself, and within a year the partner had monetized the campus and announced its closure. The Multnomah name survives only as a seminary brand inside Jessup; the school, the campus community, and the independent institution founded by a Portland Bible teacher in a former mortuary are gone.

By 2026, a group of alumni and former staff — including descendants of the founders, organized as the "Multnomah Family Team" — was publicly arguing that Jessup had been either deceptive or recklessly overconfident, and fighting to have the campus and assets returned. The dispute is the bitter coda to a closure that wore the costume of a partnership: the harshest version of the absorbed ending, a school that gave away everything to survive and lost it all anyway.

Timeline

A Bible School Built on Conviction and a Mortuary

Multnomah began in 1936 with the most modest possible footprint: forty-nine students, a half-dozen faculty, and a former mortuary in Portland. Its founder, John G. Mitchell, was a Bible teacher who imagined a school that would train pastors and missionaries for the Pacific Northwest, and for most of its life that is exactly what Multnomah was — a tuition-funded, donor-supported, non-denominational Bible institution with a clear and unembarrassed sense of purpose. In 1952 it bought the 17-acre former campus of the Oregon Blind Trades School on NE 82nd Avenue, the site it would occupy for the rest of its existence, and in 1986 it added a graduate seminary that became, by many accounts, its most respected academic asset.

The institution's golden era ran through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as it rebranded upward — Multnomah Bible College in 1993, Multnomah University in 2008 — and broadened from a Bible institute into a small liberal-arts-and-ministry university. At its height it enrolled close to a thousand students and carried a reputation, within evangelical circles, well out of proportion to its size. That was the trap. Multnomah's identity, like that of many small Christian colleges, was strong; its balance sheet never was. It depended almost entirely on tuition and the loyalty of a relatively small constituency of churches and donors, and it built nothing like the endowment that would let it survive a sustained downturn. As long as students kept enrolling, conviction was enough. When they stopped, conviction was all that was left.

The Decade of Band-Aids

The decline was not sudden, which is part of what made it fatal — it was slow enough to be managed, year after year, without ever being solved. Through the 2010s, enrollment eroded; by 2013 it had fallen to 777, and by fall 2021 to 595, against a model built for far more. The institution responded with the standard toolkit of a small college in trouble: budget cuts, program trims, outsourced services. President Jessica Taylor would later name these for what they were — "Band-Aids to the actual fundamental problem, the business model." The endowment, at $8.7 million in 2021, was too small to bridge even a single bad year, let alone a decade of them.

By 2023 the math no longer permitted independence. Multnomah's leadership concluded, correctly, that the school could not continue on its own, and began looking for a partner. The honest reading of that decision is that Multnomah was already, in substance, a closing college; the only open question was the form the ending would take. Taylor's framing was striking for its candor — she spoke of the "ego in higher education" that keeps struggling schools from asking for help until it is too late — and the institution presented the Jessup deal not as a surrender but as a way to preserve its mission and avoid "catastrophic university closure." That was the genuine hope. The flaw was in the choice of partner.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

No class was abruptly stranded at the moment of merger: continuing students were offered teach-out paths through Western Seminary, George Fox, Corban, Biola, and Pacific Universities, with covered students able to complete Multnomah degrees by April 30, 2027, and others able to continue, briefly, at the Jessup-run Portland campus. By the standards of a padlock-and-fire-sale closure, that was an orderly transition — for the students who caught it in time. But the second shock, Jessup's 2025 decision to close the Portland campus outright, scattered the remaining community a year after they had been promised continuity, and moved the seminary online.

The campus itself, the 17-to-20-acre site at NE 82nd and Glisan that Multnomah had held since 1952, is now for sale: sixteen buildings listed as a package, the dormitories partly repurposed by a residential treatment program for women and children. The institution's most durable legacy is the Multnomah Biblical Seminary, which persists as a distance-learning brand within Jessup — a name on a program rather than a place on a map. And the lasting mark is the dispute itself. The "Multnomah Family Team" has turned the closure into a public reckoning over whether a struggling school can ever safely entrust its entire existence to another, and over what an institution's name is worth once the campus is gone. Their fight will likely not return the campus. It has already made Multnomah a cautionary case: the merger that was supposed to be the gentle ending, and became the harshest one.

Lessons

References

• Two Christian universities, Multnomah and Jessup, to merge Inside Higher Ed
• Multnomah gave up its campus in a failed takeover. Alums want it back. Religion News Service
• A Failed College Merger MinistryWatch
• Multnomah Closure — teach-out and transition information Multnomah Campus of Jessup University
• Multnomah Campus For Sale Montavilla News