Windham College — A Vietnam-Era Boomtown College That the Peace Killed

Summary

Windham College, a private liberal-arts college in Putney, Vermont, founded in 1951 and closed on December 16, 1978, lasted just twenty-seven years — long enough to build a striking modern campus and graduate roughly 2,500 students, not long enough to survive the end of the war that had filled its classrooms. It went bankrupt in the middle of a cold Vermont December, two weeks before the winter holidays, owing some $8 million. Its stranded students, including more than seventy-five who had been recruited from the Middle East to shore up the books, were ordered off the premises by the local sheriff; the dormitories were emptied and padlocked.

The college was, in its short life, a near-perfect specimen of a vanished economy: the Vietnam-era enrollment boom. Founded by Walter F. Hendricks in 1951 as the Vermont Institute of Special Studies — initially a place to teach foreign students enough English to enter American universities — it became Windham College in 1954, embraced a liberal-arts mission, and then, under President Eugene Winslow in the 1960s, rode the surge of young men seeking the draft deferments that enrollment conferred. Headcount climbed from about 160 to a peak near 935. The college built accordingly, commissioning the celebrated architect Edward Durell Stone to design a campus of academic buildings linked by a colonnade, financed with federal money and debt.

Then the surge that built Windham reversed. As the Vietnam War wound down and student deferments lost their urgency, the demand that had inflated the college deflated just as fast. By 1975 enrollment had fallen to roughly 450; by the end it was 254. A college that had borrowed against a boom could not service its debt on a fraction of the students, and accreditation that had come only in December 1967 could not conjure tuition that was no longer arriving. The collapse was swift and total.

What Windham left behind was its campus and a second act it did not live to see. The federal government proposed turning the property into a minimum-security prison; the town of Putney, led by a young select-board member and future Vermont governor, Peter Shumlin, rejected the prison and pitched the grounds instead as a school for students who learned differently. In 1985, Landmark College — the first college in the nation founded to serve students with dyslexia and learning disabilities — opened on Windham's campus. The Stone buildings still stand. The college that built them does not.

Timeline

The Institute That Became a College

Windham began life not as a college at all but as a service. In 1951 Walter F. Hendricks opened the Vermont Institute of Special Studies in Putney with the narrow, practical purpose of teaching foreign students enough English to gain admission to American universities — a finishing school for international matriculation, opening with only a few students. It was a modest, even improvisational beginning, the kind of small Vermont venture that might have stayed small forever. In 1954 it took a larger ambition and a new name, recasting itself as Windham College with a full liberal-arts and sciences curriculum and the aim of granting its own degrees.

For its first decade Windham was a fragile thing. By 1962 it had grown to roughly 250 students and about twenty-five faculty — a real college, but a tiny one, and one without the endowment or the regional accreditation that gave older institutions ballast. What it had instead was timing. The 1960s were about to deliver to small American colleges a surge of demand unlike any before or since, and Windham, perched in southern Vermont with room to build, was positioned to catch it.

The golden age, such as it was, arrived under President Eugene Winslow, who led the college from 1964 to 1974 — the decade that made and unmade it. Enrollment swelled from about 160 toward a peak near 935. The college committed to the future in concrete and steel, relocating to a purpose-built campus designed by Edward Durell Stone, one of the most prominent American architects of the era, who gave Windham a colonnaded set of academic buildings and a cluster of dormitories financed by federal higher-education money and loans. For a brief window Windham felt like an institution on its way up: it drew a faculty that included the young novelist John Irving, who taught English there while writing early fiction, and a board that counted the Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck among its trustees. In December 1967 it finally won accreditation. It had, at last, all the trappings of a permanent college — and almost none of the time it would have needed to become one.

The Boom Was the Bomb

The demand that built Windham was not, at bottom, demand for Windham. It was demand for a deferment. Through the Vietnam War, full-time college enrollment shielded young men from the draft, and small colleges across the country found their classrooms suddenly full of students for whom the alternative to a desk was a rifle. Windham, like its sister institutions, grew on that current. The college read the surge as success and borrowed against it, building a campus sized for a student body that the war, not the college, was supplying.

When the war wound down and conscription ended in 1973, the current reversed with the same speed it had risen. The deferment was worthless once there was no draft to defer, and the marginal students it had drawn — never committed to Windham as a place or a mission — simply stopped coming. The collapse was not gradual. Enrollment fell to roughly 450 by 1975 and kept sliding toward 254 at the end. A college that depends on tuition to service debt cannot lose half its students and survive; the fixed costs of the Stone campus and the loans that built it did not shrink to match the shrinking class.

The final years were a scramble against arithmetic. In 1978 the college reached overseas, inviting more than seventy-five international students, reportedly from Middle Eastern countries, to fill seats and bring in revenue — an echo, poignantly, of the language-school it had been founded as. It was not enough, and it was too late. The boom that had built Windham turned out to be the bomb planted under it, and the peace that the rest of the country celebrated was, for this one small Vermont college, a death sentence.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For Windham's students, the closure was a cold-weather catastrophe. Those mid-degree were cut off without a teach-out and had to transfer wherever they could on their own initiative; the international students recruited months earlier were left stranded farthest from home and from any contingency. Faculty and staff lost their jobs at the worst time of year, and the small Putney economy that had grown up around the college lost an employer and an anchor in a single winter. Roughly 2,500 alumni were left with degrees from an institution that no longer existed and records that scattered into bankruptcy.

The campus, by contrast, was saved — repurposed rather than razed. After Putney rejected the federal prison proposal, the property became the home of Landmark College in 1985, and the Edward Durell Stone buildings that Windham had over-borrowed to build found a durable purpose serving students with learning disabilities. It is a rare and almost gentle afterlife for a bankrupt college: the architecture outlived the institution and was put to a mission arguably more distinctive than Windham's own. The college's name survives chiefly through its alumni, the Putney Historical Society's archives, and a recovered marble sign — and as a tidy parable of a generation of small colleges that grew on the draft and died on the peace.

Lessons

References

• Windham College Wikipedia
• Windham College: How Landmark Came to Occupy the Former Windham Campus Landmark College Archives
• Windham College sign heads home, to Landmark Brattleboro Reformer
• How a college in Vermont built a home for students who learn differently GBH News