Marlboro College officials announced Wednesday that they plan to give the school’s endowment and real estate holdings in southern Vermont over to Emerson College, a Boston-based private liberal arts college.
Marlboro will close its campus at the end of the 2019-20 academic year, according to the college.
The deal is tentative for now. Marlboro officials say they hope to confirm the merger by July 1, 2020.
Marlboro leaders say the school’s roughly $30 million endowment and $10 million in land and buildings will endow Emerson’s Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies program, where Marlboro students will be enrolled and where tenured and tenure-track Marlboro faculty will teach.
The program will be renamed the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.
“This remarkable opportunity to develop an alliance with Emerson ensures that the essential elements of Marlboro will endure,” Marlboro president Kevin Quigley said in a statement.
“It preserves our identity through renaming Emerson’s Institute as the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, continues our pedagogy and commitment to progressive education by bringing our faculty to the Emerson campus, and provides extraordinary educational opportunities for our students with an alliance partner where there is a clear alignment of values, culture and purpose.”
Like small colleges across the country, and particularly Vermont, where three schools have shuttered this year, Marlboro has been struggling to contend with steadily declining enrollments. The school has been actively searching for a partner for some time. This July, it announced its intentions to merge with the Connecticut-based University of Bridgeport. But that deal fell apart this September.