Lawmakers starved public higher education and are selling empty campuses to evangelists. Raj Bhakta, a former Apprentice contestant who bought the defunct Green Mountain College campus at a 77 percent discount in 2019, spent six years trying to turn it into a luxury resort. Vermont regulators ground his fantasy to a halt, twice labeling his application incomplete and alleging he illegally stored spirits and renovated a historic property without approval. So he pivoted, first attempting to donate it to a Christian institution, and has now agreed to sell it to Tommie Zito, a Florida evangelist building an evangelical indoctrination machine called Z University. The purchase price remains undisclosed, keeping the terms of this public asset’s liquidation entirely out of public view. The architects of this disinvestment are liquidating empty buildings for ideological real estate plays while the actual students remain on the hook for the debt.
Poultney has 3,000 residents. The campus has been there since the college closed in 2019. The students left. The faculty left. The registrar’s office closed. The campus did not leave. It is still there—quads, lecture halls, residence buildings—waiting, in the sense that a frozen asset waits, for whatever the next buyer wants it to be.
This is what Taylor Swift’s “right where you left me” sounds like when it is about a building instead of a person. The speaker in the song is still sitting at the table where she was left, frozen in a specific year. The campus is still standing on the hill in Poultney, frozen in the version of itself that the 2010 economy was hiring students for. The enrollment that funded it dried up. The credential economy that justified it collapsed. The campus waited. The campus is still waiting.
At my kitchen table, the math of higher education is a ledger of swapped deals, a public asset sold off from under me. I was told to take on six figures in student loans to buy access to a degree that would deliver the middle-class stability my parents got for free on my father’s single postal-worker income—a public investment my parents enjoyed, but whose physical ruins I am now being asked to watch sold to the highest private bidder. The empirical record, tracked by researchers like Sara Goldrick-Rab, says the deal was stripped out from under my generation. In the 1970s, a Federal Pell Grant covered roughly 80 percent of the cost of a public university; today, it covers roughly 25 percent. The difference between my parents’ generation and mine is encoded in that one statistic. State legislators and federal policymakers replaced public appropriations with tuition revenue, draining the pool on purpose, as Heather McGhee names it, and then told my cohort that taking on the debt was just the cost of being an adult.
The Higher Education Act has not been comprehensively reauthorized in eighteen years—the longest gap in its history. And the same defunding pattern is visible at the K-12 level: the federal IDEA shortfall now runs about $24 billion a year, more than the entire Title I appropriation for the country’s poorest school districts. The federal government has, for fifty years, paid roughly one-third of what it promised to pay for special education, and the difference comes out of every other line in the local school budget. The same is now true of college.
Zito says he plans to house 850 students. He says he will establish a college of evangelism. He says he will offer programs in business, government, and music. He says the institution will be “Christ-centered,” dedicated to “educating, equipping, and sending leaders throughout America and the nations of the world.” He says he doesn’t know much about building a university. He says he doesn’t plan to move to Vermont right away. Zito’s plan is not a college. It is a credential. Whether Z University will be accredited is, at this point, undetermined. Whether students will be able to take out federal loans to attend is, at this point, undetermined. What is determined is that an abandoned college campus, in a town of 3,000 people, will now bear a name and a mission, and the mission is what Bhakta called, when he was looking for a free buyer, “the revival of the United States, Western civilization and Christendom through faith-based education.”
This is the private-campus equivalent of the DeSantis-backed takeover of New College of Florida—the same ideological capture of higher education infrastructure, just funded by a different set of pockets. This is not just the political takeover of public colleges or the backdoor alternative enrollment schemes, but the literal liquidation of the infrastructure. Zito is buying a private campus the way the DeSantis administration is converting a public one. The pattern is the same. The money is different. The credential, when it comes out the other end, is the same. When a public institution fails under that exact designed pressure, the physical assets do not go back to the public. They go to the highest private bidder, or in this case, to a reality star who couldn’t get a spa permit, and then to a preacher who admits he doesn’t know much about building a university. The Green Mountain College campus is the architectural equivalent of a distressed asset stripped for parts, sitting on a vulture fund’s balance sheet long after the underlying business went under, waiting to be flipped to the next speculative buyer.
The kitchen-table math of this transaction is the same math my generation has been running on every other line of the family budget for fifteen years. The same state legislators who cut the Pell Grant from 80 percent of public-university cost to 25 percent are now presiding over the literal liquidation of the physical assets their defunding produced. The same federal policymakers who have let the IDEA shortfall reach $24 billion a year—more than the entire Title I appropriation for the country’s poorest school districts—are watching a 200-acre campus in Vermont get sold to a man who admits he doesn’t know much about building a university. The transaction is ideological real estate. The arithmetic underneath it is the arithmetic every millennial household runs on childcare and mortgage and student debt: a system that promised public goods as public goods, then turned them into private debt instruments, is now turning the empty buildings into private real estate, and the people holding the debt are still on the hook while the buildings get flipped to the next ideological buyer.
Poultney is about 270 miles from Fishtown. My children are four years old and one year old. The college decision is years away. But I am already doing the math, because I am the parent who does the math, because the math is the only thing I have to go on. The math says that the public universities my parents could afford on a single income are not the public universities my children will attend. The math says that the small private colleges that educated my parents’ generation are closing at a rate that turns their campuses into luxury-resort proposals and evangelical training pipelines. The math says that when my children ask me, in nine or fourteen years, where they are going to college, I am not going to have an answer that includes Z University, and I am not going to have an answer that includes the colleges Z University has replaced. A functioning public higher-education system requires restoring the Pell Grant’s purchasing power, forcing the lawmakers who starved the system to fund public universities as public goods, and forgiving the crushing student debt generated by this exact policy of starvation. The state legislators and policymakers who engineered this crisis owe my generation a refund, not a real estate transaction.