Sheldon Jackson College — Alaska’s Oldest College, Boarded Up in a Single Week

Summary

Sheldon Jackson College, in Sitka, Alaska, the oldest institution of higher learning in the state, traced its lineage to an 1878 Presbyterian mission school for Alaska Native children and suspended operations in the summer of 2007 with several million dollars of debt and no cash to make payroll. On Friday, June 29, 2007, the administration told faculty and staff that their employment would end in thirty days; the roughly one hundred full-time students and two hundred part-timers learned in the same stroke that the only college in their town, on a campus their families had attended for four generations, was closing. The suspension was framed as temporary, a pause to "determine a financially viable future." It was, in fact, the end.

The institution that closed had carried two histories uneasily in one body. The first was a nineteenth-century mission boarding school — the Sitka Industrial and Training School — founded to educate, and to assimilate, Tlingit and other Alaska Native youth, an enterprise that for decades required Native parents to indenture their children for years and that taught English and Protestant American culture at the deliberate expense of their own. The second was a small twentieth-century liberal-arts college, accredited as a junior college in 1966, that drew students into environmental studies, outdoor leadership, and education, ran a working salmon hatchery, and counted roughly a third of its enrollment as Alaska Native into its final years. The campus on Baranof Island was the same ground throughout: a place of both wound and belonging for the Native community it had first sought to remake and later sought to serve.

What killed the college was ordinary and slow. Enrollment never recovered the level it had reached in the 1970s, when state tuition grants briefly made Sheldon Jackson competitive with the public university; a court ruling that ended that subsidy and a long erosion of students left the college chronically short of operating revenue. By 2006 it was borrowing to survive — five short-term loans of $2.5 million, then a $4.7 million consolidation loan secured against subdivided waterfront land. Its insured value was about $35 million, but nearly all of it was locked in century-old buildings and ground, not cash, with an estimated $10 million in deferred maintenance waiting behind the walls. When the college asked the City and Borough of Sitka for a $1 million emergency loan that June, the assembly voted no. Three days later the school shut its doors.

The ending was abrupt, but the afterlife was unexpectedly kind. The campus sat boarded up for four years — full sheets of plywood over every window of Alaska's oldest college — until, in 2011, the trustees deeded the core campus to Alaska Arts Southeast, the nonprofit behind the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, whose volunteers and campers restored the buildings and gave the National Historic Landmark a second life as a place of learning. The degree-granting college was gone; the ground, remarkably, was not.

Timeline

A Mission School on Native Ground

Sheldon Jackson's origin is inseparable from the larger nineteenth-century project of using schools to remake Indigenous people. The institution that became Alaska's oldest college began in 1878 as a Presbyterian mission school for Alaska Native children, and it grew under a logic shared with the federal Indian boarding schools of the era: Native parents who wished their children educated had to "indenture" them to the school for a term of years, during which the children learned English, trades, and Protestant American culture, and were steered away from their own languages and ways. For decades, because Alaska Native children were barred from Sitka's public schools, the mission was for many families the only path to formal schooling past the early grades — a coercion and a necessity bound together. By 1889 the campus held 186 pupils among its dormitories, workshops, and model cottages. This is the first weight the college carried, and it is the one to name plainly: a place built in part to erase the very heritage of the children it enrolled.

The institution outgrew that founding purpose without ever fully shedding it. Renamed for the missionary in 1910, it added a boarding high school in 1917 and, in 1944, a two-year junior college. By the late 1950s, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of its students were Alaska Native, and the school had become, for the Native community of Southeast Alaska, something more complicated than a colonial instrument: a place where generations of one family attended in turn, where alumni networks ran deep, and where the loss in 2007 would be felt as the loss of an institution that belonged, however painfully, to them.

The Golden Decade That Could Not Hold

The college's brief peak arrived with public money. Beginning in the 1971–72 academic year, Alaska's state tuition grants let students attend Sheldon Jackson at a cost competitive with the public University of Alaska, and enrollment climbed to about 300, with roughly 205 full-time students by 1975. For a small private college on an island, this was prosperity: a four-year curriculum took shape, students came for environmental science, marine studies, education, and outdoor leadership, and the salmon hatchery on campus became both a teaching laboratory and a small revenue stream. A $700,000 gift from benefactor Jane Newhall in 1980 helped the college survive an earlier cash crisis, evidence that the institution had patrons willing to keep it alive.

But the prosperity rested on a subsidy the college did not control. When the legal basis for the tuition-grant program was struck down, the artificial parity that had filled Sheldon Jackson's classrooms vanished, and a small, remote, tuition-dependent college with no meaningful endowment was left to compete on price against a public system it could not match. Enrollment receded and never returned to its high-water mark. The structural problem was now permanent: too few students, too little cash, and a vast inventory of aging buildings — a National Historic Landmark campus — whose upkeep the shrinking student body could never fund.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students scattered, helped by little more than the college's pledge to assist with transfers; for those studying marine science, outdoor leadership, or education in their home region, there was no equivalent program next door. About a hundred employees lost their jobs, and Sitka lost a roughly $6 million payroll and a fixture of its civic life. The college's lender, Alaska Growth Capital, sued over the loan it had made, and the institution that had stood since 1878 dissolved into litigation and a boarded campus.

The campus itself found the rescue the college never did. After four years of plywood and uncertainty, the trustees in 2011 deeded the historic core to Alaska Arts Southeast, the nonprofit behind the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, whose campers, volunteers, and staff restored the buildings room by room and brought a National Historic Landmark back into use as a place of teaching and music. The Sheldon Jackson Museum, the Sitka Sound Science Center, the Sitka Summer Music Festival, and later Outer Coast College took up residence in the buildings. The degree was gone, but the ground — for the Native community whose history is woven through it and for the town that nearly lost it to ruin — was saved.

Lessons

References

• Sheldon Jackson Suspends Operations Inside Higher Ed
• Sheldon Jackson: Abrupt closure sets stage for dramatic renewal KCAW Raven Radio
• Promises to keep: Sheldon Jackson College dissolves, but legacy continues The Presbyterian Outlook
• Sheldon Jackson College Wikipedia
• Historic Campus Sitka Fine Arts Camp