Sheldon Jackson: Abrupt closure sets stage for dramatic renewal

When the end finally came for Sheldon Jackson College four years ago, it was fast. In June of 2007, the Sitka assembly met on a Tuesday and voted down a request from the college for a $1-million emergency loan.

On Friday, the school shut its doors.

Reporter Diana Saverin lived on campus last summer, as Sheldon Jackson re-emerged as the permanent home of the Sitka Fine Arts Camp.

In part one of this story, Saverin looked at SJ’s history and tradition, and the college’s abrupt decline.

In part two Saverin examines how the sudden closure brought the school’s problems into sharp focus, and set the stage for its dramatic renewal.

Her story begins with former SJ professor Scott Harris, on the day he learned he was unemployed.

“We heard there was an all-staff, all-faculty meeting. There’s very few of those. We met on Friday at 3 o’clock or so, and were told that the college was going to close down. Everyone was laid off immediately. I got on the phone and started making calls. It’s interesting that my parents were in town. We were going to go on one of these cruises that Friday evening. So I walked up to my dad and said, Hey, guess what? I just got laid off. Within a couple of weeks everyone was out of there.”

John Holst – “Our population did take a little bit of a blip there, because there were quite a few employees here. Last summer when I came on, I walked into offices that looked like somebody had just been there. And no one had been there for three years. Coffee cups on desks, papers on desks – many people just left.”

The tension between the college and the town, which existed well before the denial of the loan, continued even after the campus emptied without warning.

Gary Paxton served on Sheldon Jackson’s board of trustees for years before its closure.

“The city, factually, has not been a help in this. Since we closed, we asked the city for a variety of help, and have not been helped – in my view – in any measure. They’ve made us pay property tax the whole time. They did not have to do that. It was a decision made by the assembly. The attorney told the assembly it was their decision whether or not to make us pay property tax, and they said we had to do it. Well, here we are trying prevent going through bankruptcy, so we can find an end game that’s good for the town, and the city’s making us pay property tax. $120,000 or $130,000 a year for five years. It was distasteful, it was unchristian, and it was wrong to do.”

So the campus stood there, as the Sheldon Jackson trustees searched for a solution. Plywood covered the windows of its twenty buildings as they braved Alaskan winters.

One institution, the University of Dubuque, expressed interest in a possible partnership, which never got off the ground. And there were persistent rumors that someone – maybe a cruise line – would buy the property.

But over time it became clear that no one actually wanted it. Even for the state senator Bert Stedman, who declined to speak for this story, the potential was hard to see.

Paxton – “He was really concerned that the Fine Arts Camp could do this. Because all he saw – and I don’t want to minimize Bert’s position – was all the deferred maintenance, and how they were going to do that. He’s a very practical man, and he just said, Boy, I don’t know how they’re going to do that. He looked at the Hames Center, but all he could see was $10-million in maintenance.”

Roger Schmidt, the executive director of the Sitka Fine Arts Camp (Alaska Arts Southeast), saw beyond the deserted buildings. Because of the organization’s educational mission – and the lack of other interest – the Sheldon Jackson trustees gave him the campus after four years.

“I got a call from John Holst, the executive manager, and he said, If you still want it, you can have it. It was a wild phone call – unexpected. It felt like it wasn’t going to happen at all, then all of the sudden it felt victorious one minute, and the next, daunting. When you step off the edge of something and you know you’re completely committed, and there isn’t any way to stop the momentum… It was like jumping into a really fast river, pushing off the bank in a little kayak knowing you weren’t going to get out until the end. So that was daunting. Everything about it has been daunting.”

As Roger experienced this mix of feelings at his step forward, those embedded in SJ’s history could not help but feel the loss of the advancement it once offered to so many Alaska Natives – a source of advancement many would like to see more of today.

Isabella Brady – “It’s been a long road to get where we are. I don’t know whether the road now is good or not. I feel that if we had kept SJ as a high school, where you could take the top-notch students. With the education that you could have, you would be that much further. To the people who really know the school this is heartbreaking. I know they’re doing things with it now, but it’s not our school anymore.”

Some continue to mourn the fact that the SJ that once offered so much opportunity to the Native community is irretrievably gone. Yet the fact remains that for the four years that the buildings sat above the harbor unused, SJ wasn’t extending the road Isabella spoke of.

When Roger jumped off that cliff, as he phrased it, by accepting the campus last February, he created a whole new road – one whose end remains far out of sight.

Reporter Diana Saverin is a Kingsley Trust Fellow at Yale University.