Tommie Zito bought a dead college to recruit students into Christendom.
The campus closed seven years ago. The town of 3,000 has been grieving since. You bought the grief for revival services. You didn’t move to Vermont. You sent a college of evangelism instead. The dead bones of a small Vermont town are about to be called beautiful.
Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Florida evangelist Tommie Zito has agreed to buy the defunct Green Mountain College campus in Poultney, Vermont, from whiskey entrepreneur and former Apprentice contestant Raj Bhakta. The purchase price was not disclosed. The deal has not been fully completed.
Green Mountain College closed in 2019 in the midst of declining enrollment. Bhakta bought the land at a 77 percent discount to its appraised value. He spent the next several years trying to push a luxury-resort development — condos, a restaurant, a spa, a microdistillery — through Vermont’s regulatory process. Twice, the state agency labeled his application incomplete. In September, Bhakta pulled the plug. More recently, Vermont alleged that Bhakta had stored spirits on campus and renovated a Register house without needed approvals. Bhakta has blamed the regulatory regime for grinding his project to a halt.
In June, Bhakta announced he wanted to give the campus to an institution “aligned with the vision of the revival of the United States, Western civilization and Christendom through faith-based education.” After a monthslong search with a few finalists, he agreed to sell it to Zito instead.
Zito is a Florida evangelist who has traveled the world hosting evening services and daytime outreach programs. In a written statement, he said he plans to create a “Christ-centered institution dedicated to educating, equipping, and sending leaders throughout America and the nations of the world.” He said the school could house 850 students and that he hoped to establish a college of evangelism as well as programs in business, government, and music. He does not plan to move to Vermont right away.
In Poultney, locals began googling the new proprietor. Devon Fowler, a neighbor of Bhakta’s, said: “If something materializes in five years, I’ll be surprised.” Fowler said he saw Bhakta and Zito as “a strange pairing.” “I don’t understand how the church is going to get wrapped up with a whiskey maker,” he said.
This is not the first time this year a defunct or flagging campus has been absorbed into a Christian-nationalist higher-education project. In June, DeSantis-backed New College announced it would triple in size with a USF campus takeover — the same architecture of state-sponsored ideological capture, scaled up.
Tommie, hear what you have bought.
You have bought a 3,000-person Vermont town whose college closed seven years ago and has not yet finished grieving. You have bought the lecture halls where the last Green Mountain professors held their last faculty meetings. You have bought the dormitory rooms where the last students slept before transferring to other schools. You have bought the chapel that hosted the last baccalaureate. You have bought the quads where the last graduation was held. You have bought the historic Register house that Bhakta renovated without state approval. You have bought the cellar where Bhakta stored his whiskey. You have bought the permit applications that twice came back incomplete. You have bought the abandoned project — and you are calling the abandonment a fresh thing.
The permits were drawn for a luxury resort. The blueprints were sized for spa-goers, not for the eight hundred and fifty students you imagine filling them. The drywall was sized for a flip. The dormitory mold is the same mold that grew when the pipes went unheated after the school died. When you open the doors to the lecture halls, the air will taste of the drywall dust and the black mold. The damp from the unheated pipes will settle into the joints of the students who sit in the rooms you designed for a whiskey distillery. You imagine them in the chairs, learning business from a developer who failed, learning government from a preacher who does not live there. Picture your own congregation in those chairs. Picture them breathing the air of a resort that never opened. The damp will get into their coats. The spores will get into their lungs. The fresh thing you promised is the breath of a dead building, and the students will choke on it.
The neighbor who has watched Raj drive his vintage cars in the Fourth of July parades sees what you are. He sees two men in borrowed clothes, honking at a town that is tired of you. You are not warriors of the faith. You are two men playing dress-up in the decay of a school that died because it could not afford the heat.
Tommie, the eight hundred and fifty students you are planning to house have not yet arrived. They are not yet eighteen. Some of them are twelve, in the same Poultney elementary school that has been losing enrollment every year since the college closed. Some of them are seven, in the same elementary school where their older siblings used to be because the college drew young faculty families. Some of them are four, in the same daycare that lost its college-subsidized slots. The college’s collapse is the architecture of their childhood. You are about to give that collapse a different name. You are about to give it the name of revival. You are about to give it the name of Christendom. You are about to give it the name of “sending leaders throughout America and the nations of the world.” You are about to give it the name of a college of evangelism.
Tommie, your throat will not close. Your breath will not catch on the town of 3,000 people whose college closed seven years ago. Your hand will not pause when you sign the purchase agreement. You will sign it from a desk in Florida, and the distance will be the moral measurement of the work. You are a small man with a large hand on a lever you did not build. The lever is a small Vermont town that already lost its college once. You are pulling the lever anyway. You are painting the wall of the abandoned project with the language of Christ. The wall was rotten before you got here. Ezekiel named the move. The false prophets, he said, “daubed it with untempered mortar.” The wall is rotten. Someone is being paid to paint it.
Tommie, you are a man who has traveled the world hosting evening services. You do not plan to move to Vermont. You are recruiting eight hundred and fifty students into a project you yourself will not inhabit. You are sending them to a campus you yourself will not live on. The leaders you are equipping will be led by someone who is not present. The evangelism you are teaching will be performed by students whose formation you will oversee from a distance your state will not be able to measure. You will be in Florida. You will be on a plane. You will be at the next evening service. You will not feel what you are doing to them. You will not feel it the way you feel a thing in your own body, because you will not be there. The not-feeling is the moral failure. The not-moving-to-Vermont is the indictment.
Tommie, the eight hundred and fifty students will arrive in two or three years. They will arrive from somewhere else. They will arrive with parents who are paying tuition. They will arrive with the hope that this college will be a place. They will sleep in the dormitories that Green Mountain students slept in. They will eat in the dining hall that Green Mountain students ate in. They will walk the quads that Green Mountain students walked. And the chapel will be louder than it ever was under Green Mountain’s charter. The chapel will be louder than the lectures ever were. The chapel will be the loudest building on the campus.
Tommie, the 3,000 residents of Poultney did not ask for this. They asked for a college. They got one, and they lost it. They asked for redevelopment. They got condominiums, and the condominiums failed. They asked for a future. They got a Florida evangelist who won’t move to Vermont and a college of evangelism. They got a recruitment pipeline dressed as revival.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” — Matthew 23:27 (KJV)
The sepulchre is whitewashed so the pilgrims do not contract the corpse-impurity. You have whitewashed the campus so the world does not see what is inside. The bones are there. The failure is there. The Christ you claim will not be found in the ruins of a developer’s abandoned spa.