JACKSONVILLE, Ill.  – The steeple stretches into the sky, towering above the trees just beginning to show fall colors. Around the chapel are other buildings fronted by columns that stretch two stories up, with ornamental arches and crests atop doorways. These are the halls where students once slept, ate and studied for decade upon decade.

But the steeple of Annie Merner Chapel, like leather seats in an old car parked in the sun, has cracks. The paint on the chapel is peeling. The woodwork needs repair. Students no longer cross the threshold to pray, worship or get married.

Instead, like the rest of MacMurray College’s buildings on this day last fall, the chapel awaits a new owner.

The school, about 30 miles west of Springfield and 90 miles north of St. Louis, no longer exists, done in a few months earlier by cratering enrollment. 

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Just over a mile west on College Avenue, past the HandleBar Pizza and Pub, past the Jacksonville Public Library and after blocks of tree-lined, small-town America homes, there’s another steeple, at another college. It resides on a campus where, on this same fall day, students’ voices are heard from the chapel practicing a musical number. From its porch, across the green grass of Illinois College’s North Quad, where a professor and a student sit in Adirondack chairs in the shade, 163-year-old Sturtevant Hall can be seen. The names of generations of students are carved into its bricks.

In the strangeness of 2020 and the new year, these two schools stand as potential outcomes for more than 90 small colleges in Michigan and the rest of the Midwest. Illinois College is one of the fastest growing, with enrollment having picked up 30% in the last decade. MacMurray College is closed and a land auction in mid-November broke up the campus.

The lessons offered by the schools seem simple, but are complex and hard to implement: A robust savings account lets storms be weathered and risks to be taken; skimping on campus maintenance not only will lead to bigger repair bills, but also make it hard to recruit; a defined vision for the entire operation from administration to faculty is key for survival.

"You have to have a clear long-term strategy," said former MacMurray Vice President for Academic Affairs David Fitz. "I'm not sure the college ever did that well. We moved from crisis to crisis and managed well, until we couldn't and then it had to close."

When Al Lewis stepped on MacMurray's campus in 1980 as a freshman, he found a small school with caring professors and a student body made up of young people just off the farm and others, like him, coming downstate from Chicago.

Students had a chance to try activities. Lewis was on the golf team for a bit, even though he wasn't really a golfer. Freshmen, as was tradition, were gently hazed by upper classmen, including having to wear a derby hat around campus. Lewis remembers being sent back to his dorm room to get his before being allowed into the dining hall. Students studied nursing, education, some business and the normal liberal arts classes like philosophy.

"You could know almost everyone on campus," he said. There were about 700 students attending school at MacMurray then. "It was a fun place to be. It was nice to go to someplace small and really find myself."

MacMurray was originally founded by the Illinois Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church as the Illinois Conference Female Academy in 1846. It stayed a female-only college for a huge chunk of its life. In 1955, the MacMurray College for Men was started, but the two sexes were in separate colleges and even ate separately until 1967 when the dining hall went coed. In 1969, the two colleges merged.

Even then, Mac, as students called it, was on shaky ground. The merger was done to add more students — and more revenue — to the college. This gave Mac a temporary boost, but like other changes tried over the years, the progress gradually petered out.

In 1987, for the first time in seven years, a balanced budget was passed and the school began working on paying down more than $7 million in debt, largely from construction in the 1960s. This was a pattern that was to bedevil MacMurray for the rest of its life — a need for renovation and modernization offset by the reality that it didn't have enough in its endowment to do those things without borrowing money. So the college either added debt or just held off. 

A decade or so after Lewis came to MacMurray, around 1990, Peter Watkins found himself on the same campus, but with a lot more students and what seemed to be a more stable future, thanks to those additional students and the increased tuition revenue they represented. 

There were more than 1,100 students then — including a young woman from whom he borrowed books and later married. 

That student, Laura Withey, came to MacMurray from St. Charles, Illinois, because she wanted to work in deaf education. She also liked the idea of a small campus after going to a large suburban high school.

Their time coincided with the height of the college's enrollment, which eventually climbed above 1,500 students.

But it was still small enough for students to know everyone on campus — from professors to the woman  who handled the mail.

"It was a private college that didn't come off as hoity-toity," Watkins said. 

The campus was hopping. On Saturday nights after football and soccer games, people would hang out on residence hall floors. Laura would open her dorm room window and hear the teams playing and students congregating on a massive green space in the middle of the campus. There were trips to Leo's Pizza and a local bar that had a great deal on tacos.

Students were blue-collar, more so than at Illinois College on the other side of town, said Peter, who took classes at IC while at Mac. Students at MacMurray studied teaching, nursing, sports management. Students at Illinois College tended to be studying business, premed and prelaw.

The split in occupations played out in donations to the schools after graduation, with many MacMurray alumni having great careers, but not necessarily the kind that left millions of dollars in income available to be donated back. That's reflected in each college's endowment — funds schools create for long-term financial protection that function much like savings accounts.

Shortly after being laid off from a different college, David Fitz landed at MacMurray in 1997 as a young assistant professor, four years after finishing his doctorate.

Right away, he knew he was walking into a struggling school where professors had a heavy teaching load.

"It was an old campus, with old buildings," he said. "Some of them were majestic, but they needed work."

He was happy. MacMurray was a good place for those who liked teaching and interacting with students. But MacMurray wasn't stable. 

"We were always in a struggle budgetarily," he said.

Enrollment drops hurt the bottom line. There also were retention issues. The campus, beyond the architecture, wasn't modern. When he retired in 2006, Lawrence Bryan, who had served as president for a decade, noted that in an interview.

"When I got here, the library was still using a card catalog. The faculty didn't have computers in their offices, and the residence hall rooms were not wired for computers," Bryan said at the time.

The endowment wasn't where it needed to be, at the time hovering around $13 million. The annual yearly budget was about $14 million. Meanwhile, Illinois College had around $100 million in its endowment. 

In 2003, Fitz was presented with a choice. Tight budgets meant cuts in his political science department. He could either get laid off or take a new job in the office of the registrar.

He chose the guaranteed job over the stress of trying to find another college to hire him.

After three years in the new position, he was named vice president of academic affairs, putting him near the top of the college's food chain. He was in that position for five years, until 2011, when he left for a different college.

MacMurray's budget struggles didn't go away during his tenure. Enrollment kept falling. Consultants came in, made studies and suggestions and yet  "nothing seemed to really change," Fitz said.

Some years during his time in the administration the college was able to balance the budget through cuts, but long-term the college was hamstrung by its finances and culture and unable to change.

"We needed to take some risks, even if they didn't work out," he said. "By the time I left, it was clear to me that (MacMurray) had maybe five years left. Unless there were changes — not just an infusion of money although that would have been nice — it was just going to get worse." 

Fitz's prediction on the life span of MacMurray was slightly off, but five years after he left in 2011 it was clear the college was well into the final death spiral.

MacMurray spent $11.9 million in the 2014-15 school year, and brought in $12.8 million in revenue, according to audited financial statements obtained by the Free Press. That left the school about $1 million in the black for the year.

In the 2015-16 school year, the college spent just over $12.4 million, but brought in only about $12.6 million, leaving the margin razor thin. 

The next year was worse.

The school spent $14 million, but took in only $12.3 million. That's a budget shortfall of $1.7 million.

MacMurray held spending increases down in the 2017-18 school year, spending $14.2 million, but revenues fell to only $11.9 million, a budget gap of $2.3 million.

The downturn accelerated in the 2018-19 school year. The school spent $14.9 million, but revenues dropped again, down to $11.1 million, creating a budget loss of $3.8 million.   

Beverly Rodgers came to MacMurray College in late February 2017 as its provost. She left in the fall of 2020 as its last employee, the president who had to shutter the place.

She arrived as MacMurray was battling being placed on probation by the Higher Learning Commission, its accreditor. The commission had raised concerns about the board not being engaged enough in honest discussion, about a lack of proper assessment of whether students were learning and of financial concerns.

In the summer of 2018, the commission lifted the probation, but warned the financial issues weren't permanently solved.

Those at the college knew that. Enrollment was dropping, from over 550 in 2016 to under 530 in 2019, the college's last year. Tuition discounts were rising. The college was giving students huge price breaks, which meant that the students who did come weren't paying as much money.

"Parents were concerned," Rodgers said. "They were afraid to send their students. There was an exodus of students from the state of Illinois. Our pool of students was shrinking."

The decades of pushing maintenance down the road were more noticeable. Parents and students would come to campus, meet with professors and be wowed, but worry about the physical condition of buildings.

"Students wanted more," Rodgers said. "They'd say, 'What do you mean there's no air conditioning?' "

There was high turnover among  staff, especially in the admissions and advancement departments. New plans were introduced by the new leadership, but none stuck.

Majors were eliminated — sometimes in seemingly random fashion. Elementary education was taken out, but special education was kept, despite overlap in classes needed for each.

In August 2019, Rodgers and the board met at a retreat and determined something radical needed to be done. They looked at a project-based learning program heavier on career training and rewrote the school's curriculum in a herculean effort, completing the work in three months.

The school even worked with a developer who would have bought the campus and then leased it back to the college. 

Then world events ended it all.

The week the deal went to the bankers, COVID-19 struck full force. The deal was off and the college was dead.

"Our alumni love this place," Rodgers said. "There's always alumni on campus. Shortly after we announced we were closing, I remember walking across campus and seeing a woman sitting on the chapel steps crying. She told me she had been married there. There's an emotional attachment to the buildings, to the campus. It's very sad we had to close it."

About the same time Peter Watkins was borrowing books from a pretty girl at MacMurray College, a young English professor was starting his academic career across town, at Illinois College.

When he walked out of his office in Sturtevant Hall in the mid-1990s, Jeff Abernathy, who would later become the president of Alma College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan, could look out onto the quad, around trees and expanses of grass to historic buildings.

He often thought then, and now looking back, that he saw exactly what people envisioned when the words small private college were uttered.

While enrollment at MacMurray climbed in the 1990s before it came crashing down, Illinois found itself stable, gaining a few students for a couple of years and losing a few students for a couple of years. The school wasn't flush, but was able to embark on a series of construction and renovation projects and not borrow money to complete them.

The renovation plan, announced in 1994, called for the addition of three new buildings and the reconfiguration of three existing ones. It also moved parking lots to create a bigger center green area for the campus. The cost was projected at $25 million in 1994 dollars — that's about $43 million today. The board said in an announcement the plan would take up to 20 years to put fully in place. They also agreed to finance it through fundraising, rather than borrowing money.

"In this plan, we have identified the physical facilities Illinois College needs to stand among the premier liberal arts colleges in the Middle West," then-President Richard Pfau said in a statement announcing the board's decision. "We are strong now — academically, physically and fiscally — but we can become stronger."

The Rev. John Ellis founded the college in 1829, making it one of the three earliest colleges in Illinois.

Its first president was Edward Beecher, who had left his position at the Park Street Church in Boston. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the influential anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," visited the campus. In its early years, the school was a center of the abolitionist movement.  Beecher was an outspoken opponent of slavery. A grand jury indicted a group of students for harboring runaway slaves, and two campus houses are believed to have been part of the Underground Railroad.

In the early 2000s, the college seemed to be at its zenith, with enrollment climbing and topping 1,000 students for five straight years.

Then the recession of 2008 hit and Illinois, like colleges across the country, cratered, losing nearly 200 students. While it stabilized around 800, there were serious questions about finances.

Barbara Farley admits she didn't know much about Illinois College when she arrived on campus in 2013 to take over as president.

Enrollment had been slanting up in recent years, but more needed to be done. The college, like all other small colleges, is heavily reliant on tuition dollars for survival. Growing enrollment means growing finances. Shrinking enrollment means it's time to get out the budget ax.

"We needed to build capacity, to shift the way we worked," Farley said. "Do we have the processes we need? I concluded we didn't. We had hard work to do that was going to take us years to accomplish."

One of the biggest questions facing Farley and the college seemed simple — what was the college's identity?

She began to take steps to answer that, including working on the curriculum. But more than just programs needed to change.

"The culture in higher education is to retain what we were doing," she said. "We had to change. We have to keep evolving."

The school looked for new programs to add — and, in some cases, what to kill. It meant thinking about reallocating resources. That's not always popular, especially with faculty and staff affected by those changes.

The effort was driven by hopes of getting new pipelines of students flowing in.

"We choose to find new markets (for students) in our programmatic offerings," said Evan Wilson, dean of admissions and student financial services and a 2001 Illinois College grad. 

The college isn't adding just anything.

"We're a liberal arts college, so there are some programs that don't make sense for us," Wilson said.

Additions to the program included agribusiness, which made sense because of the college's rural location. Launched in 2017, the program now has more than 50 students in it. The college also held off on adding a full-scale nursing program until MacMurray, which had a strong nursing program, closed. Illinois College swooped in, hiring faculty from the shuttered school to get the program up and running rapidly. IC saw 27 students transfer from Mac to either pursue or finish their nursing degree.

Farley said the board was willing to spend money quickly because of the potential return on investment.

"I think we've been successful because we've been nimble," she said. 

The college made recruiting a major point of emphasis.

"Admissions isn't siloed away from everyone else on campus," Farley said. "Everybody has a responsibility for admissions."

That means coaches and heads of various programs have recruitment goals and work hand-in-hand with the admissions office. Wilson said the goal is to develop relationships with students before they step on campus.

"We're asking (potential students), 'What is your fear about college?' " he said. "If they say, 'fitting in, making friends,' for example, we say here's the things we do to make it easy for you to make friends."

He knows the sticker price for the school — $34,000 per year for tuition — can scare recruits, even if hardly anyone on campus pays that, thanks to tuition discounts and scholarships. Instead of focusing on the price, the college is trying to talk about something else.

"We've gotten a lot better in talking about the value you get from coming here," he said.

On a bright sunny fall day, Layne Gregory, a senior, is leading a reporter on a tour of campus. She's talking about the history of the school, pointing out the study resources, the cool spots to hang out. It's the same spiel she gives potential students and their parents when they come to visit — with one exception. Normally, she'd also ask those in her group about what they wanted to study, what professors they were meeting with, what coach was talking to them.

As Wilson said, it's about those pipelines.

"Our yield on these students is better because they have built an affinity for the college through relationships. It's easy to just look at the admissions office and say go get more students, but it's much better if the whole college is involved," he said.

Enrollment was at 965 students in 2014. In 2020, it was 1,150. That's 19.1% growth, making Illinois College one of only a few small colleges in the Midwest to stand out in such a way.

"We are trying to be very nimble," Farley said. "We have to pay attention to leading indicators of where the market is, not lagging indicators. We're paying attention to the inquiries (potential students) are making — what are they asking us if we have?

"That doesn't mean everything works. You have to be willing to cut your losses."

Farley said the college is being market-driven while still recognizing its liberal arts tradition.

While Farley is detailing the changes that have been made and the growth of the college, she's sitting in a room where portraits of the college's previous presidents hang. She glances up and points them out.

"From the brink of collapse to the college's heyday, it's all in this room," she said. "Our mission hasn't changed. It's not any different than when Beecher was president. The question for us is regardless of what we are teaching, are we infusing that field with the broad study that is the key characteristic of a liberal arts education?"

By mid-November, MacMurray College was on the selling block.

As the auctioneer turned his attention to the heart of the former campus, he upped his sales pitch, telling those gathered around him on a tennis court in Jacksonville and watching online about a special 1952 Opus 1150 Aeolian-Skinner G. Donald Harrison signature model organ housed inside the former Annie Merner Chapel.

The organ itself, he told them, without the building or the dining hall and education center included in the same auction lot, was well worth the bidders' money.

He played up that day the best of what the campus still could offer.

"The brick and mortar is ready for the next chapter of its life," he said. "They have a lot of life and usefulness left."

An online video of the properties played for bidders showed inside photographs of peeling paint, old classroom chairs stacked alongside walls that had seen better days and bulletin boards with papers still held in place with thumbtacks and pins.

The buildings, the man reminded the bidders, came as is.

The first lot to go was the old Franklin Elementary School building, bought by the college in 2017 to turn into a fitness center. Of greatest interest seemed to be the parking lot that came with it — 75 spaces. It sold for $100,000.

The second grouping of lots, consisting of the heart of the campus, was all sold in 16 minutes. Jane Hall, a dorm built in 1930 with two wings added in 1939, went for $235,000. The 90-year-old science hall was snapped up for $17,500. 

In early December, the sales of everything were final, netting the college around $1.5 million, which will go toward debt.

In the end, the auctioneer's sales pitch on the chapel organ paid off.

The bids had rattled upward — first $100,000, then $150,000, then $200,000.

After a minute or two, it was over.

Seventy-two years of MacMurray history were no longer, sold along with an old dining hall for $600,000.

This story was supported by the Spencer Education Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School, where David Jesse is a 2020-21 fellow. Jesse was selected as the 2018 Education Writers Association's best education reporter. Contact David Jesse: 313-222-8851 or djesse@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @reporterdavidj. Subscribe to the Detroit Free Press.