It begins, for me, with a simple walk across The Quad on a late-autumn afternoon. The air is cool, the sun is low, the shadows are long. Students are scattered on blankets; a professor gestures wildly in conversation with a senior conjecturing on some new hot take on Plato. 

The Bell Tower chimes, marking the hour. The memory dissolves into a hazy darkness as the bell rings across a fading campus, fading further and further into the gaps of time…

That was Birmingham–Southern, lost to us forever, forever relegated to the cloudy confines of memory. BSC was place where the world seemed to expand and contract at once – intimate yet infinite – grounded yet bursting with possibility. Now, it is a graveyard for the formational times of our soul.

We carry these mental moments the way one carries a childhood photograph: not because they are extraordinary, but because they captured the essence of an entire world.

That world is gone now.

A campus once alive with thought, laughter, love, and beautiful, brimming possibility now sits silent.

The death of Birmingham–Southern College is not just an institutional failure; it is a cultural catastrophe, one more piece of our shared inheritance surrendered to the logic of expediency. But to understand the meaning of that loss — and the warning it carries — we must look backward before we look forward.

BSC was never simply a place to earn a degree. It was a crucible for becoming. 

Students walked onto The Hilltop with the unshaped clay of themselves and walked off carrying a cultivated sense of curiosity, a capacity for nuance, and a brave willingness to tackle the issues that matter. In an age that worships certainty and speed, BSC taught the slow art of thinking. It extolled the righteousness of wrestling with an idea rather than declaring victory over it. It taught humility in the face of complexity. It taught courage and ethics, not just how to balance a checkbook.

But, over the course of decades, something began to rot beneath The College’s surface.

The litany of administrative missteps, board failures, and financial foolhardiness that wrought The College’s demise has – and will continue to be – documented. The responsible will not ride off into the sunset unscathed. What matters is this: the collapse of The College was not inevitable. This was avoidable.

It didn’t have to be this way. 

BSC’s death was the result of a prolonged inability — or unwillingness — to preserve the sacred trust of stewardship. When leadership ceases to guard meaning, meaning erodes. When stewardship fades into self-protection, institutions lose their soul long before they lose their solvency.

The tragedy of Birmingham–Southern is larger than the story of any individual failure. It is part of a broader collapse — a national surrender to the idea that education must justify itself primarily in economic terms. That a college’s worth lies not in the lives it shapes or the minds it forms, but in its material “ROI.” Like many small liberal-arts institutions across the country, BSC has become the victim of a world all-too narrow-minded to comprehend its vast value.

Consider what was lost. Consider what was stolen from us. Consider a wonderful past robbed of a vibrant future.

Consider the first-generation student who walked onto campus unsure whether they belonged and left knowing, with certainty, they had a place in the world… Consider the quiet freshman who discovered her voice in a philosophy seminar… Consider the friendships formed in the glow of library lamps at midnight as we crammed for exams, in passionate dorm-room debates that stretched until dawn, in long lunches in The Caf… Consider the professors who poured decades of their lives into cultivating not just scholars, but just citizens ready to take on a cruel world… Consider the choir performances that lifted the walls toward the heavens… Consider cheering for the sports teams and each other for success… Consider the millions of small, unremarkable moments that, when woven together, transformed every student who passed through The Hilltop. 

That is what died. Not the buildings. Not the brand. Not the balance sheet. The becoming – the soul – the forging of who we are in our common experience at a wonderfully uncommon place. 

A society that can lose such a place without profound self-examination is a society in decline — forgetting what education is for, forgetting the kind of people we hope to form, forgetting the difference between vocational training and existential enlightenment.

When I walked the empty campus after The College’s closure, it felt almost like trespassing into a hallowed memory. The breeze moved through the trees the same way it always had, the Bell Tower rang faithfully on the hour, but the laughter was gone. The windows reflected only sky. A place once filled with robust, raw life now felt like the aftermath of an evacuation — as if everything had vanished between one breath and the next. 

The emptiness had a physical weight to it, a physical potency which hung over you like an aching shroud. It pressed against the ribs uncomfortably. It took your breath away. It hurt your core. The surreal experience of seeing our beloved empty suffocated us in its eerie echoes. 

After dwelling on my own past here at The Hilltop, the realization came, sharp and unforgiving: the students who should be here but will never come.

We speak of alumni grief, of faculty displacement, of institutional collapse – of past icons condemned by the present. But we seldom speak of the unborn experiences — the future students who will never make friends, fall in love, make those crucial mistakes which make them better in the long run; never run across The Quad in the rain on the way to class, never sit in a professor’s office for an hour that becomes three… These are the silent casualties of our cultural neglect.

Passing our torch on to the next generation is no longer possible for us Hilltop faithful.

I think often of the classroom where I first understood what it meant to read a text not as a set of answers but as an invitation to be changed. Or the professor who, with a single question, overturned an assumption I had carried for years. Or the friendships made on hallowed ground which I will cherish forever.

These are not luxuries. They are foundations. These are what make a democracy resilient. These are what teach us to think for – and beyond –  ourselves.

The closure of Birmingham–Southern College should shake us. It should hurt. It should sting.

It should unsettle the easy narratives we tell ourselves about progress, efficiency, and “market realities.” It should force us to reckon with the uncomfortable truth that we allowed a place of profound cultural and moral value to die because it did not fit the economic script we have written for education.

And yet, amid the wreckage, I still believe in what BSC represented. I always will. I believe in the liberal-arts mission — not as an indulgence, but as a necessity. I believe in the power of small classrooms, of wandering discussions, of professors who treat students as minds worth cultivating rather than bottom-line butts filling chairs. I believe in the worth of people-first institutions that teach us how to be human.

The Hilltop may be quiet now, but its echo persists in those of us shaped by its light. The task before us is not to resurrect what is gone, but to guard what remains — and to insist, loudly and without apology – that education matters not because it produces workers, but because it produces people.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

— W.B. Yeats