Ten Questions to Answer Before Any Irreversible Vote

The duty of care requires a board to be informed of all material alternatives before a consequential decision. In the matter of institutional survival, the alternatives are not "close" and "continue." They include merger, teach-out, mission transformation, campus repurposing, and phased combinations of each. A board that votes on the institution’s future without having genuinely examined these alternatives has not met its duty — however painful the vote, and however good the intentions.

Score each question honestly: 2 = yes, documented; 1 = partially / informally; 0 = no.

1. Have we seen a runway model we believe?

A multi-year projection, on realistic (not aspirational) enrollment and discount assumptions, showing how many years of operations our reserves actually support — updated within the last two quarters.

Iowa Wesleyan’s enrollment was rising when it closed. Growth is not runway. Every closed college had a budget; few had an honest runway model early enough to act on it.

2. Do we know our real decision deadline?

The date by which a decision must be made for an orderly outcome to remain possible — accounting for accreditor timelines, debt covenants and call provisions, teach-out negotiation time, and enrollment cycles.

Options expire before institutions do. Boards that discover their deadline in the same meeting they discover their crisis have neither.

3. Have we examined transformation as rigorously as we examine budgets?

A board-level review of what the campus, staff, and mission could become — workforce education, community services, housing, partnerships — with the same analytical seriousness we give the annual audit.

If the answer is a shrug or a single conversation years ago, the alternative has not been examined; it has been dismissed.

4. Do we know what our campus is worth alive versus dead?

Two numbers, side by side: estimated liquidation value in a distressed sale (historically 20–40 cents on replacement value), and modeled value as an operating community asset with diversified revenue.

Boards routinely vote knowing only the first number — or neither.

5. Have we spoken with our bondholders’ representatives about a going-concern alternative?

A candid, early conversation — not a default negotiation — about restructuring against transformed cash flow.

Creditors consistently prefer a going concern to a liquidation. They cannot prefer a plan they have never been shown.

6. Does anyone besides us know the truth?

Faculty leadership, key staff, and (appropriately) students and alumni understand the institution’s real position — before they read it in the newspaper.

Every closure post-mortem contains the sentence “we learned from the press.” Trust destroyed in that sentence is the fuel transformation would have needed.

7. Have we protected current students on paper, not just in intent?

Teach-out and transfer frameworks identified — even provisionally — such that no student would be stranded by any strategic path we might choose.

Students-first is a plan, not a sentiment. It is also the single greatest determinant of how history judges a board.

8. Have we talked to our town?

The mayor, the county, economic development leadership, and major employers know the campus’s position and have been asked what the community needs that the campus could provide.

The community is not the audience for the decision. It is a party to it — and often a funder of the alternative.

9. Have we heard from a board that chose transformation — and one that chose to wait?

Direct testimony, not press coverage: at least one conversation with leaders who repurposed a campus early, and one with leaders who rode the model down.

No document substitutes for hearing a peer say “here is what I wish we had done two years sooner.”

10. If we do nothing new this year, what did we just decide?

The board has explicitly named the consequence of another year of status quo — which options expire, what runway is consumed, what the delay costs.

Deferral is a decision. The prudent board is not the one that never chooses closure; it is the one that never chooses by default.

Scoring

16–20: your board is governing its future — whatever you decide, you will decide it, and you can defend it.

10–15: you are informed but not yet positioned; the unexamined questions are where your options are quietly expiring.

Below 10: your board is at risk of inheriting a decision instead of making one — and the record now shows what was not examined. The good news: every point on this list can still be earned. The first three cost only candor.

All conversations are free and confidential — jeff@transformlearning.ai — campustransformation.org