Elizabethtown College was founded in 1899 by a German religious sect, the Anabaptists. It survived quite nicely until leftist politics began to take over in the 1990s. When a hard-nosed president retired in 1996, the floodgates were opened wide and the college has since been overrun by Social Justice Warriors. Most recently, students were proudly wearing white puzzle pieces to announce their hated of “white priviege” and all the oppression it brings to people of color.
Professor Paul Gottfried taught at Elizabethtown for more than 30 years and in this Martin Center article, he laments the way the school (located in Lancaster County, Pa.) has fallen under the spell of progressive politics. He writes about the school following the retirement of that hard-nosed president:
During the next two administrations, the troublemakers got the “hope of change” they thought they wanted. It came in the form of lavishly salaried administrators (certainly by comparison to those who preceded them), rapidly escalating tuition, and a shifting emphasis at the college from a strict Pietist environment to the PC fad du jour, lately “white privilege.” I’ve never seen an institution change so fundamentally within just a few years.
Elizabethtown College has strayed far from its beginnings and is moving further away every year. While it still has some solid liberal-arts education to offer, the P.C. forces are steadily replacing education with indoctrination.
Costs has gone up dramatically (in part to pay for more administrators who fill essentially useless jobs) while educational quality has fallen. Summing up, Gottfried writes, “In a nutshell, the college has become too expensive for what it offers its average student; an erosion of the customer base has started. Since 2009, the student body has declined from 1,866 to 1,707 and the school is encountering increasing difficulty meeting its annual goal of 450 entering freshmen. This year it trimmed $3 million from its budget. Justified fear has set in among the faculty that further savings will be extracted from their salaries and benefits. It’s hard to imagine why one would go to Elizabethtown to partake of a uniqueness that no longer exists.”
American students and their parents are starting to realize that high-priced college degrees that don’t deliver palpable value in terms of knowledge and skill just aren’t worth it. Merely having a degree in something from somewhere is becoming increasingly pointless. For that reason, many small colleges like Elizabethtown are facing serious trouble.