Alumni fighting to “save Mills.”
College will cease to grant degrees, but students, alumni, community are organizing
One big reason Lila Goehring decided to leave her Ohio home almost four years ago to attend Mills College was the school’s culture of activism.
When a friend talked about how students swayed college administrators to reverse a 1990 decision to make Mills coed and more recently organized to save programs threatened by budget cuts, Goehring, 22, said that kind of fighting spirit resonated with her.
And after last week’s announcement that the liberal arts college in East Oakland would stop granting degrees, Mills’ community of students, alumni and staff are prepping to wage another momentous fight — to save the college as they know it.
Calls to “save Mills” arose almost immediately last Wednesday after President Elizabeth Hillman and the school’s board of trustees revealed the college would stop admitting freshmen after this fall and stop conferring degrees in 2023 because it was losing too much money.
Students and staff received the news via email, but it wasn’t immediately clear to them what was happening to the school, Goehring said.
College officials said they will
be working to transform Mills into an “institute,” but didn’t elaborate.
“It will take some time for things to crystallize,” Hillman said Monday.
While Mills won’t grant degrees, “important aspects of its mission will endure,” reads part of the school’s website announcement of the “transition.” Hillman echoed that, noting that “Mills’ mission is more relevant than ever.”
But to student Erica MacKinnon, who recently resumed her education at Mills after first attending in 1999, the college’s mission is pretty clear.
“Mills was started as a school. The education of women — and now a gender-inclusive student body — has always been the primary mission,” MacKinnon said.
The announcement leaves many students wondering whether they’ll be finishing their formal education at Mills. Though the next few graduating classes are supposed to get their diplomas there, the classes of 2024 or 2025 would need to finish early or transfer to a different school.
Mills has promised to help students obtain Mills degrees or find appropriate transfer options, Hillman said.
That doesn’t cut it, say the students, alumni and faculty who want administrators to pause their decision until they get a seat at the table to help solve the financial crisis.
In an effort to make that happen, they’re hosting virtual meetings, making phone calls, planning rallies and circulating the social media hashtag #saveMills. A website has been created to provide news and updates about the fight.
“I think the future that’s been articulated by the administration doesn’t satisfy anyone outside the administration,” said Kalie Caetano, a member of the organizing committee and bargaining team for Mills’ staff union, which represents employees from maintenance workers to adjunct faculty and support staff.
What type of a workforce will a Mills Institute need, exactly, Caetano asked.
Hillman told this news organization that college leaders have engaged the Mills community in their decision making and tried hard to implement fundraising ideas.
Mills can’t afford to continue operating as it has, Hillman said, and the way to save the college is to figure out how to transition it into the future.
Indeed, news of Mills’ financial challenges isn’t a big surprise to some who have watched it over recent years.
In 2017, Mills declared a financial emergency in the face of a $9.1 million budget deficit that prompted the school to cut programs and lay off some faculty members. In the years before that, Moody’s had downgraded the college’s debt rating to just above junkbond status.
Mills even tried to attract more students by slashing tuition 36% — from $44,765 to $28,765 in the 2018-19 year.
It also discussed expanding its partnership with UC Berkeley to house students and offer concurrent classes. Hillman said such an expansion is still on the table, though there’s no deal or imminent announcement.
Mills isn’t the only small, private liberal arts school to find itself struggling financially, she added.
Some of those other schools have taken steps to stave off closure, including Notre Dame de Namur University across the bay in Belmont. Notre Dame announced in January it would stay open by shifting its focus from undergraduate work to more graduate and online programs.
And when all-women Sweet Briar College in Virginia announced in 2015 it would close, faculty and alumni raised millions of dollars to successfully block the move in court.
U.,S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, a Mills alum, announced she is calling on the Board of Trustees to “reconsider the decision to close the college, and to explore all available funding options to meet its financial challenges.”
Lee looks back fondly on her time at the school, saying she owes a “debt of gratitude” to it.
“Five decades ago, I was able to attend college and earn a degree as a young single mother on public assistance who often had to bring her sons to class — something that would have been impossible at many other colleges or universities,” Lee said.
Anita Gutierrez, 48, who attended Mills from 2007 to 2009 to obtain a master’s degree in early childhood and special education, also has warm memories.
“I went to Mills because I was a single mother looking to restart my career,” she said, adding that Mills “embraces everybody. It’s a school that is very inclusive, very supportive.”
Her daughters grew up at Mills College, learning to swim and ride a bike on the campus as she attended classes, she said, and they were embraced by the school community.
Mills has become known for its progressive education and focus on gender, race and social justice. It was the first independent college to offer an ethnic studies program in 1969 and launched the nation’s first transgender admission policy at a women’s college.
More than 58% of undergraduates identify as part of the LGBTQ community and 65% are students of color.
Its programs have trained numerous local and national leaders, as well as artists and thinkers.
Now a public school teacher in Oakland, Gutierrez said Oakland Unified’s schools are filled with teachers who graduated from a strong education program at Mills.
“When I think about those beautiful women not bringing it to OUSD, I get really sad,” she said.
That’s a concern shared by others across multiple industries who have welcomed Mills graduates into their workforce.
“There are amazing people who come to this school,” staff union organizer Caetano said. “That’s part of the reason I think it would be catastrophic to lose it. Right now as a country, we’re grappling with a lot of crises, so it would be hard to lose a place that develops those leaders.”
MacKinnon, 42, said she’s grateful that distance learning, prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, has allowed her to resume her Mills education 20 years after she left without obtaining a degree. She lives in Detroit and plans to finish her degree this year online — an option she thinks the school could continue to offer to increase enrollment.
She hopes this newest fight by the Mills community will prod the college’s board of trustees to reverse course.
“You can’t educate us and make us into independent, thoughtful, smart students and then expect us to not behave like Mills students and to be quiet and not make demands of this board,” she said. “Mills is too special.”