College priorities
The former Ames mansion was the first building of the Stonehill College campus. The Ames family money came from its shovel factory.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Citizens in other “advanced” nations are astounded by how much money, energy and attention is expended at American colleges and universities on sports. Some of the bigger of these institutions are far more identified as sports-team businesses than as places for scholarship, with some “student athletes’’ paid for playing. More cultural corruption.
Consider tiny Stonehill College, in Easton, Mass. The largest gift in the nice little Catholic school’s history -- $15 million from alumni Thomas and Kathleen Bogan -- will go to helping to build new basketball and hockey arenas in a complex to be named for the Bogans, not to academics.
Stonehill seems to be in pretty good shape, financially and otherwise. But what’s going to happen to all those bucolic campuses around America as colleges close as the number of potential students continues to shrink with a declining birth rate and, sadly, as so many doubt the advantages of a liberal-arts education.
Christian Koulichkov is a managing director at Hilco Real Estate, where he helps closed colleges sell their campuses. He told Bloomberg News: “This is the next big land grab in the United States. There’s going to be thousands and thousands of acres with no plan. People never thought these things could disappear.”\