St. Gregory's University closing in December

St. Gregory's University in Shawnee, Oklahoma, will be closing its doors at the end of the semester, officials announced yesterday.

The board made 'the difficult, but necessary,' decision following the denial of a loan application to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to the announcement. 'Without this component in the financial plan, the ability to sustain the university at this point is not possible. The Board of Directors continues to work actively to resolve financial difficulties and to explore possible partnerships in order to move forward.'

Nothing on the website or in news accounts explain why a college expected to get a loan from the USDA. The college must have already been in dire financial shape to have its existence beyond December hanging on this one loan. Inside Higher Ed's story links to a Shawnee News-Star article from January which links, without elaboration, the de-annexation of the 520-acre campus from the City of Shawnee, USDA-sponsored refinancing of debt, and assistance from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Originally established as the Catholic University of Oklahoma in 1915, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, St. Gregory's College granted associate's degrees as a junior college until it was accredited in 1997 to offer four-year degrees, when it was renamed St. Gregory's University. The university grew out of the Sacred Heart Mission, founded in 1875. A look at the college's website shows little to distinguish it from other small private colleges -- no core curriculum, the usual assortment of majors, sports, and activities. As a dad in the midst of my second go-round through the college application process, I've seen the piles of brochures from small colleges. Each brochure differs from the next only in the college name, the school colors, and the mascot that appears in a cover photo next to smiling students.

St. Gregory's had recently announced that it would accept the Classic Learning Test, a newly designed standardized college admissions test geared toward classically educated students. St. Gregory's is listed on Wikipedia as one of about three-dozen Ex corde Ecclesiae Catholic universities and colleges, constituted and explicitly governed under Roman Catholic church authority. Many of the other schools on the list are explicit in their aim to be faithful to Catholic doctrine and traditional in their curriculum and teaching methods, like Ave Maria University, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, and Christendom College. For whatever reason, St. Gregory's leadership didn't effectively communicate its apparent countercultural shift to the conservative Catholics in Oklahoma and the region who might have appreciated it.

The higher-ed bubble is starting to burst, and small, non-selective private colleges with few distinctives may be the first to suffer from the drop in demand. (Similarly situated state colleges won't suffer because taxpayers can always be squeezed for more money.) Small private colleges can't keep up with deeper-pocketed schools in the arms race in student amenities. That arms race and the accompanying ad blitz means that local students, once the core of a small college's student body, will be lured away to bigger cities and bigger schools. To compete for out-of-area students to make up for the loss of commuters, a small college has to offer apartment-style housing, food-court-style dining, and on-campus distractions to compensate for the lack of entertainment options in town.

The only way to survive may be to run the other direction -- offer a strong core curriculum, adopt low-tech teaching methods, and make a virtue out of austerity. I'm thinking here of the New College Franklin, where the church library serves as the classroom for Great Books seminars, students board with parishoners, and community organizations serve in lieu of extracurricular activities. Why shouldn't Oklahoma's Benedictine-run college offer a focused but deep curriculum and intentional Catholic spiritual formation and become the school of choice for Catholic students interested in the Benedict Option?

UPDATE 2017/12/08: Bobby Ross, Jr., writing for Religion News Service / Reuters, provides a much clearer explanation about St. Gregory's USDA loan application and why it was denied:

Here in Oklahoma, St. Gregory's had hoped a $12.5 million rural development loan from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation - made possible thanks to federal money dispersed to the tribe - would keep it alive.

To qualify for the loan, the Sooner State's only Catholic university even de-annexed from Shawnee, a city of 31,000, to meet the requirement of being located in a rural area. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture denied the loan, saying St. Gregory's wasn't in a rural area at the time of the last U.S. Census.

"Once the loan was denied, we were basically out of cash, and we needed to let our students find new homes quickly," the university president said. "We couldn't delay. There was really no time to appeal the decision of the USDA," [St. Gregory's President Michael A.] Scaperlanda said.

This may be the program involved: Community Facilities Guaranteed Loan Program. The definition of "rural" requires that the place have a population no greater than 20,000; Shawnee had a population of 29,857 at the last census.

So the loan denial was a simple matter of ineligibility, but the question remains: How did finances get so bad so fast that a (pardon me) "Hail Mary" pass -- hoping for approval of a loan from funds that really weren't intended for the purpose of keeping a small-city private college open -- was the only hope of staying in business for the entire academic year? It strikes me as the sort of situation that occurs when someone had been hiding the true state of the college's finances, perhaps to hide his or her own misuse of college funds.

A quick web search turned up a few other small colleges that had benefited from USDA Rural Development programs -- direct grants, direct loans, loan guarantees, or some combination thereof:

• Hiwasse College, Madisonville, TN: $ 7.7 million in direct loans and loan guarantees to renovate a dorm and the college library.
• Ripon College, Ripon, WI: $14.3 million in direct loans to renovate athletics, health, and wellness facilities.
• Newberry College, Newberry, SC: 2015 refinancing of money borrowed in 1981 and 1982 for construction projects.
• East Central College, Union, MO: $1 million loan to renovate a newly acquired building for advanced manufacturing programs, with the local electric cooperative as intermediary.

Note that all of these loans involve capital improvements. In contrast, St. Gregory's seems to have been hoping for a USDA-guaranteed loan to fund operating expenses.

UPDATE 2026/08/30: Discussion today on X about the demise of small liberal-arts colleges brought this article to mind. I replaced the now-dead link to the St. Gregory's website and fixed a puzzling sentence fragment. Here are some additional links that provide helpful context.

Crisis magazine, December 20, 2017: Why St. Gregory's University Is Closing Its Doors by Anthony P. Stine. Stine was a staffer at St. Gregory's, and he writes that new leadership at the college was trying to move in the direction of being a traditional and faithful Roman Catholic college, but the change came too late:

The administration of St. Gregory's, under the leadership of President Michael Scaperlanda, issued a new Strategic Plan in February 2016 designed to give the university direction towards a secure and sustainable future. Critical to this was the focus on an authentic Catholic identity. To this end, members of the planning team removed language from institutional guiding documents that invoked the Land O'Lakes declaration and instead explicitly cited Pope St. John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiae as a key guiding document. The implementation of the Strategic Plan was part of a larger effort at re-establishing Catholic orthodoxy at the university, since the institution had for many years embraced the pedagogical model of more well-known and increasingly secular Catholic institutions around the US.

...The situation the university faces now is very heavily influenced by financial mismanagement going back decades. The present administration enacted much needed changes that turned fundraising and student enrollment numbers around, but not soon enough to make a difference; had these changes been enacted two or three years earlier, St. Gregory's might still be operating today.

Behind the scenes, a war for the identity of the university was being waged. The battle was being fought between the faculty, staff, and administrators who favored a pedagogy that was characterized by orthodoxy and fidelity to the faith, and those who favored a more secular approach (either explicitly or implicitly). This internal battle for the heart and soul of SGU was fought away from the eyes of students in committee meetings that would determine the future of the university, had it survived its financial situation. One such battleground was over the revision of the Institutional Core, which sought to update the core curriculum that students would be required to study as they pursued the various majors offered by the university. The revision of the core curriculum sought to re-establish a classical liberal arts education that was fully in line with the Catholic and Benedictine identity of the university.

Dr. Jason Fugikawa, chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theology at St. Gregory's, oversaw the revision process. "We at the center of the core curriculum revision were committed to putting together something truly grand. Very few institutions in Catholic higher education are doing that these days," Fugikawa said recently. "Everyone is calculating, marketing, and appealing to student-customers. We desired instead to ask ourselves what was best in the tradition that we had received and how best could we present this to the students entrusted to our care." Essential to this process was the re-establishing of the fundamentally Christian value that the university had a responsibility to be a good steward of the education of students. In a Catholic university, the formation of students is of primary importance.

The process of revising the institutional core was part of a larger restoration of fidelity at St. Gregory's. "In the core revision, there was a certain jubilee restoration of each discipline's ancestral territory with the fresh energy of Easter morning in the garden beside the empty tomb," Fugikawa said. "While the Integrated Humanity Sequence we were developing dealt with what was perennial and old, we sought to give it life and renewal through the classical Trivium and Quadrivium presented in versatile, team taught courses." Spiritual renewal was a core theme at St. Gregory's, with Daily Mass attendance of students and staff being higher in the final year of operation than at any time in recent history, and Eucharistic processions being institutionalized as important practices on the university campus.

The Land O'Lakes Declaration was a 1967, post-Vatican II statement that emerged from a gathering of leaders of major Catholic universities in the USA (Notre Dame, Georgetown, Seton Hall, Boston College, Fordham, St. Louis University). Robert J. Henle, S.J., (that's Henle as in Latin) wrote the final draft. The document emphasized the importance of academic freedom and institutional independence over Catholic identity and distinctives, rejecting any authority external to the academic community. (Theodore McCarrick, then president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, now a disgraced and defrocked former cardinal, was one of the participants and signatories.) The Land O'Lakes Declaration begins:

To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.

Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Out of the Heart of the Church) was an "Apostolic Constitution" promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1990. It was meant to be a new set of rules governing Catholic colleges and universities, but it was Dead On Arrival and most Catholic universities ignored it, with some college presidents condemning even the provision that required theology professors to be under Roman church authority. (This 2001 article complaining about the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' long-delayed implementation plan for Ex Corde Ecclesiae is a healthy corrective for the idea that the Church of Rome is united and obedient or even shares a common, fundamental set of beliefs. On the one hand, there are the true believers, and on the other there are closet atheists who like the vestments, the pageantry, and the sodomy.)

This edition of Ex Corde Ecclesiae published by Ave Maria University features a forward by AMU Provost Roger W. Nutt, who compares and contrasts it with the Land O'Lakes Declaration and sets both into historical and theological context.

MORE:

Michael Scaperlanda was a former University of Oklahoma law professor who had served on the St. Gregory's board since 2009 and became president in the spring of 2016.

In 2016, The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College had St. Gregory's on its list of 29 recommended colleges.

April 1, 2016, press release on SGU's new strategic plan. (I wasn't able to find the actual strategic plan.)

Data summary of the final years of St. Gregory's University. The retention rate was terrible.

The St. Gregory's campus was purchased by the Green family of Hobby Lobby and Mardel's fame then donated to Oklahoma Baptist University. In 2024, OBU returned the campus to the Benedictine monks as part of a land swap, in exchange for open land that the monks use to graze cattle.