Burlington, Vt.
“Free Books at Former Burlington College,” the Craigslist ad read. “Many psychology texts and health texts, gender identity, some art, some literature, history, etc. Please bring boxes and bags for carrying your new treasures home with you!”
So ended a 44-year experiment in liberal education, with angry students and alumni filling message boards with blame and a library of books for the taking.
Burlington College closed in 2016, crushed under the weight of debt it took on in a 2010 real estate deal. In its last five years, this tiny liberal arts school of fewer than 200 students occupied the former St. Joseph’s Orphanage (and its 33 acres, including the last virgin lakefront in town) overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. A $10 million acquisition from the cash-strapped Catholic diocese was made while Jane Sanders, the wife of Vermont’s most famous socialist, was president of the college.
The site offered just what Sanders needed to fulfill the promise she made in 2004 to be a “transformative president.” The college’s operating budget at the time was just $3.6 million, and it had no endowment. The deal was made with a mortgage from the diocese, tax-exempt bonds, and a bridge loan from a 99-year-old philanthropist. Twelve years and three administrations later, the last president penned a letter blaming Sanders, whom the board dismissed in 2011, for sealing the college’s fate with an “appallingly inappropriate business deal.”
The FBI is investigating—both the loan application, which listed donations that never materialized, and allegations of political pressure applied by Sanders’s husband. The senator calls it a “witch hunt,” but the last chairman of the college’s board of trustees, local real estate executive Yves Bradley, affirms the scandal has sullied the Sanders name. “She did significant damage in the public eye.” The couple recently retained counsel, signaling the seriousness of the charges.
But here in Burlington, “People are doing everything they can to protect Bernie,” one former professor told me. Even those who recognize Jane Sanders’s wrongdoing—trustees who witnessed weak leadership and faculty members she fired—remain wary of Brady Toensing, the lawyer and Vermont Republican party vice chairman who alerted the state’s U.S. attorney in early 2016 to the possible bank fraud underlying Sanders’s deal.
What ended in accusations began in idealism.
Steward LaCasce, an English professor, abandoned Boston University after discovering through a bout of instructional experimentation that students put too much stock in their grades. He set out north with a grand idea for a new sort of school, one acronymically named at a Boston dinner party: the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement (VICI, as in veni, vidi). This was 1972. LaCasce would lead the college for 22 years, from a frugal start in rented rooms to the boxy old frame building—what had been Colodny’s grocery store—it bought in the early 1980s. Returning Vietnam veterans and single mothers were the first students. (Surprisingly, this demographic formula did not double as a countercultural matchmaking agency so far as LaCasce recalls.)
There were no grades, and students chose courses of study based on their intellectual and professional leanings and the expertise of a small faculty and a growing constellation of adjuncts plucked from the Burlington community. LaCasce, now 82, paused to tell me twice when we talked, “You’ve got to remember: It was the 1970s.”
Isis Erb, 45, has fond memories of the college’s anachronistic radical chic in the 1990s. Her favorite professor was activist and lawyer Sandy Baird. “In one of her classes we got to go through reams and reams of redacted FBI files on the Black Panthers,” Erb gushes, remembering when Baird brought in Roz Payne, a Panther ally turned archivist, as a guest lecturer. Will Nottingham, 27, also mentions Baird fondly: When an employer folded without paying him, she wrote a letter delineating Nottingham’s legal rights against his boss and won him his lost pay. Nottingham, who never finished his film degree, credits the costs of college for his inspiration to pursue a career as a loan officer.
Baird—something of a celebrity in the Burlington College world—believes capitalism killed the college. The school LaCasce founded “was sustainable and cooperative,” she says. “The people who came after were convinced that you either had to grow or you died—that is a capitalist model. If it had stayed in the old building it probably could have sustained itself.”
It was Baird, though, who’d called Sanders and encouraged her to take the job, trusting her at the time to preserve the institution. Sanders had been her husband’s chief of staff in the House of Representatives and his closest political ally. “She allowed Bernie to implement some of his ideas,” says Baird. “He’s a dreamer, and she helped him put those dreams into policies. I don’t know where he’d be without her.” Trustees hired her to do a similar job: midwife to a scrappy sixties-radical school.
The two women only really got to know each other when they went to Cuba together in May 2007 to kick off a cultural exchange program between Burlington College and the University of Havana. “She’s ambitious,” Baird learned about her new boss, and she wanted to be more than Bernie Sanders’s wife: “She’s a woman who wants to be recognized for her own achievements, just like we all do.”
“The decision to borrow the money and to buy that land was a gutsy move,” says Burlington College board member Jane Knodell, who’s president of the city council and an economics professor at the University of Vermont. “She wanted a beautiful campus to attract students,” Baird says, remembering Sanders’s last months at the college.
“Jane believed, and we believed her, that if it looked like a regular college, more students would come. But it never did get beyond the 160 or so that remained,” says longtime trustee Carolyn Elliott, who left the board at the time of Sanders’s removal. (When the college closed in 2016, there were only 70 students enrolled.) In the months after the bold acquisition, Sanders’s target slipped further from reach as the trustees began to worry about her failure to raise money. They whispered amongst themselves that she hid in her office, avoiding subordinates. “It’s a failure of leadership, for sure. It sputtered along afterwards, but Jane was the big failure.” The board dismissed Sanders in October 2011, just eight months after the deal closed.
The investigation, sparked by Toensing’s January 2016 letter to the U.S. attorney, brings the college’s loan application to the fore: “The loan transaction involved the overstatement and misrepresentation of nearly $2 million in what were purported to be confirmed contributions and grants to the college,” he wrote. Subsequent reporting ties the discrepancy Toensing noted to a listed million-dollar bequest from a woman not yet dead and another donor’s pledge to match it. Neither of these gifts would come to the college in the timeline Sanders reported, “unless [the first donor] were assassinated,” Yves Bradley darkly jokes.
A second letter from Toensing, dated May 25, suggests the bank yielded to improper pressure from the senator in approving the college’s loan application: “Ms. Sanders’ loan application did not receive the sort of scrutiny and basic underwriting to which those of us who are not married to a powerful United States Senator would have been subjected.” Jane Sanders, for her part, dismissed this charge in an interview with Laura Krantz of the Boston Globe as a “sexist” assumption that she couldn’t have closed the deal without her husband’s help.
After Sanders’s dismissal, the debts piled up: The diocese declared the college in default on its loan, and yearly taxes on the new property clocked in at $250,000. Sanders’s successor, Christine Plunkett, resigned unexpectedly in 2014 when a mob of students confronted her over controversial staffing decisions. “Okay, I resign. Happy?” she announced from her car. Founder Steward LaCasce calls Burlington College students and faculty an “ungovernable” group. Although he cast it as a compliment: “Graduate school professors were afraid of our students, which made me quite proud.”
The president who followed Plunkett, Carol Moore, managed to sell 27.5 acres of the orphanage land to a local developer for just north of $7.5 million in 2014. It wasn’t enough to save Burlington College: The bank pulled its line of credit, and the accrediting agency LaCasce had won over more than 30 years before turned it down for reaccreditation. The day before the 2016 commencement, the board learned the college would close—but decided not to announce the decision until after the ceremony.
“I wrote the commencement address to welcome a new graduating class—or to be the final address to any class,” says LaCasce, who knew of the college’s struggles but not of the closure when he composed his remarks. “I said the legacy of the college was not in its buildings, nor in the history of its organization. Its legacy is in its students.” For now, the legacy of Burlington College remains clouded by scandal.
The old diocesan orphanage that the college bought has become an apartment building, a promising development for Burlington.
Larry Tatro, 44, a workman at the site, tells me it’s mostly couples and people with pets who are moving in. He’s lived in Burlington all his life and talks of a hotel slated to go in behind the building, too. It is down the slope toward the lakefront, where guests can enjoy the beach Sanders hoped to feature in Burlington College admissions materials. Now that the apartments are done, renovations have moved to the modern wing, which the school inhabited in its final years, and to the library: It’s going to be a rec room, Tatro tells me.
What’s the word on Jane Sanders? “Bernie’s wife?” he says. “She really put the screws to this place.”
Alice B. Lloyd is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
