The recent announcement that Trinity Christian College will close in May hit hard. For Chicago-area residents, this 66-year-old liberal arts college has been an anchoring institution, dedicated to cultivating thoughtful scholars and skilled practitioners. As a former Trinity faculty member, I mourn for colleagues now forced to seek new positions in a slack labor market and for students leaving the familiarities of a tight-knit learning community.
But I also feel a kind of survivor’s guilt. Now employed at Calvin University, I find myself witnessing my former college’s final months from one of three “teach-out” schools formally welcoming Trinity students to complete their degrees. My attempted condolences feel laced with opportunism.
This personal dissonance echoes a broader question: How should surviving institutions respond when a peer in their ecosystem begins to die? Part of the response, surely, entails compassionate and respectful messages to these college communities. But another, perhaps less obvious, response would be to simply ask these colleges what they have learned from the experience of being mortal.
Perhaps it is unfair to ask leaders and faculty, already tasked with the heavy work of institutional closure, to communicate further about the experience of shutting down their organizations. But these colleges can also speak simply through their way of being in the world. At Trinity, this way of being is embodied in a boulder on the east lawn of the campus.
The boulder commemorates a now-fallen structure, built in the late 1960s by professors and students. One night, they gathered an hour before midnight to hammer up a shelter for their after-class conversations. They christened their ramshackle student union “the Tab,” after the ancient tabernacle in the book of Exodus. I doubt this edifice would meet the requirements of current building codes. But I love to think about how it made room for good talk, guest lectures and not-bad hamburgers from 1967 to 1987.
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The Tab is a part for the whole of what Trinity might say to other precarious organizations in its institutional ecology. Those professors and students building the Tab till 2 a.m. one night in 1967 must have known they were building something temporary, but they also needed a place to talk collectively about what matters most in a learning community. Their plucky improvisation in the teeth of impermanence recalls a practice vital to Trinity’s religious tradition: “Memento mori,” or “remember your death.”
Usually, this practice is thought of in individual terms. But what if organizations, too, need this recollection? Institutions are often constructed to outlast the humans who built them. But when these institutions themselves pass away, their community members scatter with an important word to share: Remember that from dust your institution comes, and to dust it will return. The insight doesn’t have to produce sad resignation or morbid rumination or even survivor’s guilt. Reminders of institutional mortality can help the rest of us concentrate efforts on what matters most.
The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen suggested that death, far from being something simply to be endured, is a gift the dying give their communities. As Trinity prepares for its final commencement ceremony next spring — and as other colleges prepare for similar closures — might the rest of us make Tab-like spaces for hearing end-of-life wisdom from institutional peers?
Why not plan conferences featuring staff from these colleges addressing institutional mortality and renewal? How about seeking funding for lectureships that explore vocational wisdom for organizational change and cessation? Why not craft oral history projects to preserve stories of meaningfulness found in mortality?
Listening well to such testimonies might offer not just cautionary tales, but gifts that entail grief, yes, but guidance, too.
Craig Mattson is a professor of communication at Calvin University who taught at Trinity Christian College for 20 years.
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