(03-11-2015 04:15 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  My daughter attends SweetBriar who recently (to the shock of almost all) decided to close after 115 years... I wonder how the donors to the library that was just finished last year and the student center that was finished just a few years ago feel about things.

Wow! A shock, indeed!

There are couple of connections to Rice (sort of):

1) Many of Sweet Briar's early buildings were designed by Rice's architect, Ralph Adams Cram.

2) Unlike Rice's BOT, which in the early 1960s went to court to break WMRice's will to permit the charging of tuition and admission of non-white students, Sweet Briar's trustees have apparently chosen not to try to break the will of their founding donor in an attempt to grow by admitting men.

Donations that led to the expanded library and student commons complex are indeed issues, about which the college administration is saying little.

Here are some links to some interesting articles (most with long chains of passionate comments) about Sweet Briar's financial predicament and closing decision:

• Inside Higher Ed
• The Atlantic
• WDBJ-TV
• Washington Post
• Inside HigherEd (marketing perspective)
• Not-for-profit firm created to fight Sweet Briar's closing: Saving Sweet Briar. (BTW, the traffic between the SBC community and this site was so great that it looked like a hacking attack, and access from campus was temporarily suspended.)