When Closing a Very Small Campus Is a Very Big Deal

The first day teaching as an adjunct professor at a new university can be daunting: finding your way around campus, struggling to get access to web servers, office space and copiers — to say nothing of the ghastly compensation you receive for your labor.

But on a bright spring day in April 2022, when I walked onto the Staten Island satellite campus of St. John’s University to prepare to teach a philosophy course that fall, I could tell something would be different about my experience there. The warm, tight-knit community on the tiny campus — whose main, much larger campus is in Queens — welcomed me with open arms, making me feel that I belonged.

My enthusiasm was cut short, however, by an email sent to the entire school in August of that year by the university president, the Rev. Brian Shanley, announcing “with a heavy heart” that “after careful deliberation” and in the face of a declining enrollment rate, the board of trustees had voted unanimously to close the Staten Island campus at the end of the academic year in 2024.

As planned, the campus will close after classes finish this spring. Students can move to the Queens campus if they choose.

This may feel like a small New York story. But St. John’s is hardly the only institution of higher learning to either merge campuses or close its doors as a result of low enrollment or economic challenges over the past few years. More than 91 colleges closed between 2016 and 2023, including 15 in 2023 alone; 44 percent of the schools were, like St. John’s, religiously affiliated. The closing of the Staten Island campus is a gloomy harbinger of what’s to come for other small campuses that offer students something increasingly rare in higher education: a truly communal and intimate learning experience.

St. John’s was founded in Brooklyn in 1870 by the Vincentian Fathers, who aimed to offer a socially minded Catholic education in the tradition of the priestly community’s founder, St. Vincent de Paul. Though the university originally drew mostly Catholic students from the metropolitan area, it went on to take in a wider array of students — socioeconomically, ethnically, religiously and geographically.