Rest in peace, Union Institute & University

After a 60-year run, my graduate alma mater abruptly closes its doors

After more than 60 years of operation, the university has faced significant challenges caused by the aftermath of the pandemic. The Board of Trustees of Union Institute & University has made the difficult decision to close the university on June 30, 2024. As a result, UNION has chosen to voluntarily withdraw its accreditation with the Higher Learning Commission. These actions ensure that all students who have attended our “university without walls” will retain their credits or degrees from an accredited institution. — Statement issued June 21, 2024

Chances are that very few of you have ever heard the name of Union Institute & University (UIU), a small but once highly-regarded private, nontraditional school in Cincinnati, Ohio. And unless you had a friend who went there, or were lucky enough to have stumbled upon it while searching for the “right” place to pursue a graduate degree—as I did in 2004—you might have glossed over this press release, or any mention of its recent demise in the mainstream media.

Like a small but growing number of older private, nonprofit schools with dwindling enrollments who have fallen into financial difficulties—like St. Augustine’s in Raleigh, North Carolina, an HBCU still struggling against the odds, and Wells College in Aurora, New York, which closed without warning, to name just two—the year 2024 was not a kind one for “the Union,” which had specialized for 60 years in offering low-residency, nontraditional degree programs for working adults. Even public colleges are not immune; the once-successful University of New Orleans, a desperate shadow of its once mighty self, cannot seem to regain its footing as its enrollment shrinks.

Most, like Union, point to the pandemic as the major beginning point for their predicament—and in truth, that once-in-a-lifetime disaster did hit many schools hard, especially those with flawed or ineffective management and poorly-conceived marketing strategies which made it it difficult to adapt to life without regular classrooms—even for a relatively short period. The shift to virtual learning should not, however, have decimated Union so quickly—a low-residency, Internet-friendly environment that almost exclusively served working adults, and had weathered similar crises, including a near-fatal bankruptcy in the early 1980s. It should have survived.

Once known to many as the “University without Walls,” it had long flourished as a free-thinking outlier in the academic community: born as a graduate consortium created by 10 small, largely northeastern colleges, including Goddard, Antioch, Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Nasson, and Stephens. Half in jest, supporters and critics alike once characterized Union as the “matchbook cover school” for its advertising budget—or more darkly, the “Harvard of the lunatic fringe,” for its willingness to tolerate “out there” doctoral dissertations that few “normal” residential schools would encourage.

The UIU headquarters at 440 E. McMillan Street, Cincinnati, from 1989 to 2021. Photo courtesy Greg Reese

Housed from 1989 to 2021 in the magnificent Procter and Collier-Beau Brummell building in Cincinnati’s Forest Hills neighborhood, UIU also operated a tiny campus in Montpelier, Vermont—the bucolic former home of Vermont College, which it had purchased in 2001 (and later sold, in 2008). I had the good fortune to work in both settings—and still proudly wear a dark-green Vermont College sweatshirt, with the Union logo in smaller letters. Union finally sold off the McMillan Street building in 2021, preferring to concentrate on its core mission: offering a “distance” education to working adults.

I will not dwell here upon the sordid details of that last, anguished year before Union closed its doors at the end of June, as duly remarked upon by Cincinnati news media. It is all too sad to remember now: the plummeting enrollment, the unpaid bills, the angry faculty and students, the embarrassing eviction from its last rented offices. I will dwell instead upon my own marvelous experience there from 2004 to 2009, when I earned my Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies, and beyond.

No, it was not Harvard—or even the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my undergraduate alma mater, where I had started my first doctoral program in the early 1980s. Nor was it cheap. I am still paying off the last of my student loans for the education I received there. But it suited me and my situation well in the early 2000s—and I would willingly stake my academic credentials from Union and my reputation against those of any of my equally well-educated colleagues.

* * * * * * *

I had never heard of it, frankly, before the spring of 2004, when I found myself suddenly unemployed but stubbornly determined to reinvent myself in another environment—if preferably not in either the U.S. government or another nonprofit organization, and as far away from Washington, D.C., as I could get. With plenty of free time on my hands, I started by self-publishing my second book—a collection of letters, speeches, and writings by the subject of my first historical biography, published in 2001 by LSU Press (George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life)—and thought I might build up from there.

But without academic credentials—just a lot of gratifying but unfinished graduate work in two separate disciplines, political science and journalism—it was an uphill climb. I knew my credibility as a serious historian would be viewed with a dismissive reaction of “so what” from reviewers and professional circles alike. I could not afford to stop working and go to school full-time, and did not (yet) to leave my home in Alexandria, Virginia.

That’s when I learned about UIU, a member of the American Council on Education, where I had recently worked, and decided to apply. It allowed me to enter its doctoral program directly, without first completing a master’s degree—I had the equivalent of two master’s degrees already, without completing either thesis—and like most of the students in my entering class, already college teachers who did not yet hold doctorates, I needed to support myself while I studied. My long-term aim, again, was to become a college lecturer or professor—a long shot, given my age (mid-50s, then), but still worth aiming at.

Years before, I had halted full-time doctoral studies in journalism at UNC to accept an officer’s commission in the U.S. Foreign Service, where I worked from 1983 until 1997 and served as a graduate teaching assistant. After leaving the State Department, I had begun working as an editor, mostly freelance but often as a long-term independent contractor for a local firm—and this seemed to be a good fit for a part-time doctoral program. I was duly accepted, and immediately began designing my initial Project Demonstrating Excellence (PDE).

In September 2004, I drove to Cincinnati from Alexandria to begin the 10-day entry colloquium—as Union’s seminars were called—and met the rest of my entering class. There were about two dozen of us, half in the interdisciplinary studies division (arts and sciences) which I had chosen, with the rest in the psychology program. We spent the next fortnight presenting and discussing our PDE’s with our colloquium leaders, faculty members who supervised our entry process and served as our initial mentors.

Dr. Cherie Lohr, one of the colloquium convenors, eventually became my academic advisor. An old hand at the Union process, Cherie gave me invaluable guidance for years until poor health forced her to retire; she passed away in 2020, and is sorely missed. A smart and savvy soul, she had once been chairman of the school of education at Texas Christian before joining the ranks at UIU—lucky for me she was still around!—and steered my program wisely through the somewhat quirky doctoral process.

Dr. Cherie Lohr Murphy, my first Union mentor. Photo courtesy Dallas Morning News

My initial plan was to write a biography of former President William McKinley, emphasizing his role in uplifting African Americans and pursuing racial justice. He had played a key behind-the-scenes role during the first term of George White, the nineteenth-century African American congressman I had written my first two books about. Often with White’s help, he had appointed more blacks to federal positions than all his predecessors combined—no mean feat in the late 1890s. I wanted to explore his reasons for doing so, while illuminating his little-known agenda for promoting equal rights for black Americans.

Gradually, however, I began to realize that this project might be far too broad, and take much longer than the four years I planned to be at Union to produce a publishable book. So I selected a somewhat more manageable topic: a chronology of the National African-American Council, the first nationwide civil rights organization. I drew upon advice from a favorite undergraduate history professor of mine at Chapel Hill—Elizabeth Studley Nathans, “Ibby” to her friends, who had long since gravitated northward to Harvard.

I decided to take a two-step approach. First, complete research for a book-length, publishable academic history of the NAAC, which existed for 10 years (1898-1908). Among its practical other roles, it had also served as an advisory board for McKinley during the second half of his first term. Part one of my dissertation would be the book itself: an exhaustive chronology—a more or less straight history—of both the NAAC’s annual meetings and day-to-day operations, and its leaders, such as George White and a diverse cross-section of the nation’s black leadership at the turn of the twentieth century, including both Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, journalist T. Thomas Fortune, and Rev. Alexander Walters, its first national president.

Such a project attempted to break new ground academically, and would allow me to combine both my long-running love of journalism and my more recent fascination with political biography. As with my 2001 biography of White, it required extensive analysis of black newspapers—the richest source for coverage of the NAAC, which was often overlooked by mainstream white media—and would allow me to make regular use of the National Archives and the Library of Congress, which were in my backyard.

Part two would be a more standardized dissertation, one critically examining and assessing the purpose, achievements, and legacy of the NAAC, which had been the first organization to encourage full membership by African American women and fought for many important causes, including the anti-lynching bill introduced by White during his second term in Congress. For example, the NAAC leadership opposed the disfranchisement efforts underway in most Southern states by 1900; launched lawsuits against discriminatory Jim Crow-era practices; and sought to end the practice of forced labor by convicts in Southern jails and prisons.

Its successor, the bi-racial NAACP, was far better known, of course. Using many of the former NAAC leaders as a nucleus, it had succeeded where the more fractious NAAC had failed—both in attracting long-range funding and achieving a degree of internal consensus that the NAAC could never really achieve before it was dissolved, and was still around, nearly a century later. But without the hard lessons offered by the NAAC, the NAACP might never have gotten off the ground. My job, as I saw it, was to illuminate the history of the NAAC as its obscure but invaluable predecessor.

* * * * * * *

The Vermont College campus in Montpelier, as it appeared in 2020. Photo courtesy Vermont College of Fine Arts

As attractive as the Union’s Cincinnati headquarters was, it was still an office building, not a college campus. Extensively renovated after its acquisition in 1989, the Procter and Collier-Beau Brummell building had originally been a factory, last manufacturing men’s ties. In 2004, it did feature modern classrooms, conference rooms, and a library, yes, and even a small cafeteria, but it sorely lacked the usual amenities—including dormitories, leafy trees, a nearby town square, and a sense of school spirit—and its location on a busy, noisy commercial street in Cincinnati did little to inspire new students. (At least I was not impressed—flooded as I was with memories of the beautifully-landscaped and far older Chapel Hill campus.)

After that mildly disappointing aspect of my visit to Cincinnati, I managed to register myself for my first academic symposium weeks later at Vermont College—a course emphasizing historiography and historical writing—and it was there that I first began to feel “at home” with the Union process. Montpelier, Vermont, a tiny New England city nearly 900 miles away from Cincinnati—so small and provincial it did not even contain a McDonald’s—was the perfect setting for a real campus, just blocks from downtown in the picturesque state capital. The school itself was nearly 150 years old; we stayed in rather spartan school dormitories left over from its days as a private residential college (Montpelier Seminary, later Vermont College for Women). The former New England Culinary Institute, then located nearby, offered a rare but welcome fast-food replacement experience for McDonald’s.

The symposium was managed by Dr. Susan D. Amussen, who later became my mentor and coordinator when Cherie dropped out. Over five intense days in early October, we students spent interacting with Susan, we studied the intricacies of excellent monographs and books, and produced short research papers incorporating our growing skills. Interaction with a dedicated group of college teachers was just what I needed.

I also fell in love with the tiny campus, much like the one I hoped one day to teach at; I even thought of moving to Vermont, until one local resident warned me to “spend a winter here before you do that.”

* * * * * *

A unique part of the Union doctoral program was the involvement of non-Union faculty in a student’s dissertation committee. We were encouraged to draw on professors we respected, and I chose two of the best: Edna Greene Medford from Howard University, an expert on nineteenth-century African American history, and Robert Chadwell Williams, a retired Davidson College professor who specialized in Russian history and now taught part-time at Bates College in Maine. They quickly agreed, and became my guiding lights and evaluators as I designed my own courses, and offered invaluable assistance as mentors over the next five years.

I also came to know the Union president, Roger H. Sublett, with whom I gradually became good friends. A former college professor himself, he had been in charge of the school for just two years, but clearly relished his role as an innovator and “custodian” of the Union process. He frequently traveled to Washington for meetings, and often arranged a breakfast, lunch or dinner with me during those visits, until his retirement in 2018. Our regular meals and stimulating conversations became a welcome distraction from busy workdays, long after I graduated in 2009.

Dr. Roger Sublett, president of Union when I was a PhD student there. Photo courtesy https://patch.com/ohio/cincinnati

In 2013, he asked me to consider writing a history of Union Institute & University, in honor of the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of its establishment in 2014. It did not take me long to jump at the chance—even though I was working almost fulltime as an editor at the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

In a follow-up posting in January, I will discuss the trials and tribulations of my research for that book, Union Institute & University at 50: Leaders Realizing a Dream (New Education Press, 2015).

Next time: Updates on foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world