HOMECOMING
Friday through Sunday is Homecoming at Warren Wilson College. Homecoming is that once a year invitation for graduates of the college to visit the college and to meet with their classmates and to feel at home. Every fifth and tenth year after graduation there is a special effort made to get together. Tomorrow I and a number of other retired teachers, who were at Warren Wilson 50 years ago, are invited to get together with the class of 1973, all of them now retired as well.
During these fifty years the fortunes of the college have gone up and down. For years the college tried but couldn‘t get above an enrollment of 500. In 1989, with low enrollment, a state of financial exigency was declared, faculty were let go and faculty salaries were cut. It was a traumatic period. But the class of 1993 had no idea of the pain the college was going through in their days here and when they celebrate tomorrow it will be their friends that matter not the state of the college.
In the early 2000‘s, after a baby boom twenty years earlier, enrollment went up at colleges across the country, including Warren Wilson. Those were boom years with faculty and staff being hired and salaries raised and tuition going up. But for the last ten years enrollment has dropped across the country, partly because there were fewer college age students and partly because the recession of 2008 showed that large student debt, which was how students could afford the high tuition during the boom years, was no longer sustainable. Enrollment plunged everywhere. Many colleges closed and Warren Wilson began to fight for survival.
This year with a new President, the rumors are that Warren Wilson will have to make drastic cuts in staff in order to survive, and the new President will oversee a process that is as humane as possible to make this happen. At the same time the College is counting on their alumni of the last fifty years and more to continue to support the college financially so the college has to project optimism.
So this will be a bittersweet Homecoming, a time of celebration of Warren Wilson‘s past and a bringing together of people whose four years where were a high point in their life while at the same time the College is trying as humanely as possible to make the cuts that will let the college survive.
In a way Homecoming is a way of escaping time and for each graduating class that returns it will be a different Warren Wilson at a different time that matters, without the state of things currently not mattering to most returnees. What will matter is the deep emotional ties they have to some point in the past. But at the same time there will be hope that the college, even though it is very different now from the way it was in 1973, can continue to exist as a center for those memories. Tomorrow maybe I will hear about these feelings.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 