Tommie Zito and Raj Bhakta are flipping Poultney’s closed college into a Christendom academy.
The 3,000 residents of the western Vermont town did not get a vote. The pattern looks familiar from Adams County — the shape of a town that lost its anchor and is being asked to host someone else’s project.
Green Mountain College opened in 1834 as a Methodist seminary. It ran for a hundred and eighty-five years — through the Civil War, two world wars, the long decline of the small denominational college, and the enrollment cliff that has been visible in the data since 2010. The last class crossed the stage in 2019. The town kept being the town. The college stopped being the college. The buildings are still up. The membership is not.
The buildings are not the college. The college was the faculty who joined the library, the students who bought coffee at the diner, the games that filled the gym on Friday nights, the graduates who came back. When the membership leaves, the buildings stay. The buildings are what the membership paid for. The buildings are also what the membership left.
What the membership left is specific. The college payroll carried the diner, the laundromat, the apartment rents, and the rest of the Main Street economy that runs on student foot traffic nine months of the year. The volunteer fire department ran its roster partly on the students who lived in town. The property-tax base included academic buildings, residence halls, dining services — all of it on the grand list. The high school, when it competed with the college for the town’s eighteen-year-olds, had to keep its programs sharp. The high school has not had to compete for graduates since 2019. The high school’s graduates leave for college somewhere else, and most of them do not come back.
Friendship, Wisconsin, does not have a college. Friendship has a school district, a hospital, and a Dollar General where three hardware stores used to be. The Adams County Memorial Hospital was built in 1959 on land donated by George and Mary Polivka. The Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative — the largest rural electric co-op in Wisconsin — is headquartered in Friendship. The floor is the membership. The membership is what holds the floor up. A college is one kind of floor. The school district and the hospital and the cooperative are the floor Friendship has. The same arithmetic applies to whether the floor holds.
What comes next, when a small college closes, is whatever the highest bidder wants to build. Raj Bhakta, a former contestant on The Apprentice and the founder of WhistlePig whiskey, bought the Poultney campus at a 77 percent discount to its appraised value in 2020. His plan was condos, a restaurant, a spa, a microdistillery. The state twice said the application was incomplete. Bhakta pulled the application in September. The state subsequently alleged that Bhakta had stored spirits on the campus and renovated a house on the state historic register without needed approvals. Bhakta said the state’s regulatory regime had ground his project to a halt. Main Street Independent covered the Bhakta offer in June.
Bhakta’s pivot, earlier this year, was to give the campus away free to an institution “aligned with the vision of the revival of the United States, Western civilization and Christendom through faith-based education.” He settled on Tommie Zito, a Florida evangelist who has spent his career hosting evening services and daytime outreach programs. Zito plans to call the school Z University. He says he can house 850 students. He wants a college of evangelism, plus programs in business, government, and music. He says he does not know that much about building a university. He is hiring experts. He does not plan to move to Vermont right away.
The phrase “the revival of the United States, Western civilization and Christendom” names the country, the civilization, and the religion as three things that have to be revived. The diagnosis is that all three are in decline. The prescription is faith-based education. Towns like Poultney are in trouble. The trouble is the same trouble that closed the college in the first place — declining enrollment, an aging population, a regulatory environment that resists the highest-and-best-use of the asset, a federal higher-education financing system that has rewarded scale and abandoned the small. The shell game is treating the trouble as moral-spiritual decline and the prescription as more religion, when the actual trouble is structural.
The same week Bhakta was offering the campus free, the DeSantis administration in Florida was completing its takeover of New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college in Sarasota, and folding it into the University of South Florida system as a way to triple its enrollment. Main Street Independent covered the New College takeover in June. New College is a public college taken over by a state governor who wanted a different kind of institution in the building. Poultney is a private campus bought by a private buyer who wanted a different kind of institution in the building. The two buyers are not the same buyer. The thing they have in common is the conviction that a small college in a small town is a vehicle for someone else’s vision.
Methodists who read Berry can read the sentence Bhakta wrote and recognize it. There is a difference, in Berry’s writing, between a community and a vehicle, and the difference is whether the people who live in the place have a say in what the place is for. The town lost its college. The town is being offered, in exchange, a project. The offer is the campus — and the campus is what the town had before. The offer is also the diagnosis: that Poultney is a place where someone else’s revival can happen, and the revival is something someone else is running. Poultney did not vote for this. Poultney is being asked to wait.
The pattern is national. Since 2008, more than a hundred small nonprofit private colleges have closed or merged, hitting hardest in the Northeast and Midwest — small denominational colleges in New England, Catholic colleges in the Midwest, state-system campuses in the Plains. Most of them are in places exactly like Poultney, and many of them are in places exactly like Adams County. The closures have left hundreds of campuses and a hundred towns trying to figure out what to do with the quads and the lecture halls.
Devon Fowler, a neighbor who has been critical of the whiskey operation, said “If something materializes in five years, I’ll be surprised.” Fowler has been around. The town has been around longer. The town has seen the plan, and the permit denials, and the pivot, and the buyer. The town is being asked to wait. The town knows what the membership is and what the buildings are, and the difference between the two.
The question is no longer whether the quad will be filled. The question is whether the people who live beneath it will have a say in what fills it. The membership is not for sale. The membership is what Poultney, and Friendship, and a hundred towns like them, are still trying to hold.