Four years ago, Mills College in Oakland California announced its financial crisis was so severe it would be closing. The news hit hard among students, staff, faculty, and alums. I had worked at the college twice, for a total of 17 years, and I shared a long post on Facebook. Many of my friends among students, staff, and faculty, or those who had left, shared a bit of their experiences. Many of their comments, from those who had been cast aside in earlier years, treated shabbily and tossed out like garbage, were heartbreaking. I am reminded today of these experiences as an entire federal government callously cuts jobs, tosses out long-time workers like garbage. Such treatment seems to be part of the DNA of overlords in our society, egged on by handmaidens who offer their services as consultants.

            Eventually Mills found a way out to keep the campus used for higher education. It got acquired by a larger institution with money, and it is today Mills College at Northeastern University. That was a controversial turn, but that’s another story. Here I wanted to put down, beyond Facebook, on my blog, my post from four years ago, so it will be be available wider and longer (thanks to the internet archive). I have slightly modified to add some more detail.Mills College campus

How do you process the news of the impending death of an institution where you worked for 17 years, where you were also a student for 5 years, all of which shaped you into who you are today? Even if you felt compelled to leave it just over a year ago? Mills College was such a large part of my life.

In 1997 I decided to leave Providence and drive west and relocate to Oakland. Online I had found two jobs to apply for, one at Mills. I didn’t know much about the college other than that a friend had done a graduate education program there. I knew it was a women’s college and searched the website to make sure that men could work there. That’s how much I knew about women’s colleges back then. On my road trip during a stop in Detroit, I learned that Mills was interested in me. At my next stop in Madison, I had a phone interview. Arriving in Wichita next I learned they wanted an in person interview to confirm their tentative choice. Cutting short a road trip through the west, I arrived in the Bay Area, visited Mills, found an apartment near Lake Merritt – one of the most beautiful neighborhoods I have lived in – and started my new job in the newly-created M Center (student administrative services, or the Money Center as students knew it).

 I would work there for nine years, moving on to the IT side of staff. A casual conversation with Mary Anne Mohanraj, then an MFA student at Mills, persuaded me to apply, and I got into the writing program, taking one course per semester, graduating in just over five years. Until then I doubt if I even knew much about MFA programs.

 As a staff member and student, I coalesced a whole community around me: some faculty, some staff, and many students both graduate and undergraduate. Most of the friends I made have been crucial to my well being, they have enriched me in so many ways, and I love them dearly. The person I am today owes a lot to this community. The MFA program itself, done over time, was very helpful to me improving my skills in narrative writing. I read books and writers I would not have found on my own, broke through boundaries, I started an aborted novel and wrote most of the stories that would go into my book Killing the Water. I had some awesome writing teachers there.

 The work itself, a day job to me, kept me engaged and I had wonderful colleagues. The school always had structural challenges and I saw many cuts take place over the years. As staff I was mostly not personally affected in those years. In 2006, I left Mills wanting to take time off to write a novel. In 2011, when the novel was complete, and I was running out of my savings, Mills had something like my old position open again and I decided to accept an offer.

 This time around I would work for seven years. I had some of the same colleagues, and some new ones. We worked well together. But on this second stint, I could feel the school struggling as cuts kept being made year after year: furloughs, layoffs, retirement benefit cuts, health insurance cuts, program cuts. Longstanding staff were let go in demeaning ways. Called to HR to be told they were being fired and computer accounts cut off while they were away from their desks.

And there was a lot of useless energy spent in Strategic Plans. I began to get as cynical about them and likened them to the infamous 5-year plans in the old Soviet Union. These plans mostly never saw completion but we had to justify our jobs and string together words to connect what we did to these grand plans. The annual performance evaluations: groan. As things became tougher, the spin continued and the gap between reality and the grandiose talk about social justice and equity grew larger. One time we even had a workshop for staff ostensibly about equity but where the rhetoric reached even higher to suggest equity wasn’t sufficient, we were striving for Liberation. What a load of crap that turned out to be.

 In 2017, Mills declared a financial emergency and cut some staff and fired several tenured faculty. When any cut was questioned, we were advised to have faith in the strategic plan. This time it was called MillsNext. I saw faculty who had progressive credentials turn into tyrants and masters of spin, slogans, and tightened control once they rose to administrative power. I still remember being asked to find ways to limit faculty from being able to communicate easily with each other across divisions. The saddest thing to me was to see faculty having to beg for their jobs before the board of trustees. I wanted the college to succeed but like many other staff, it became harder and harder to have faith in the grand slogans and gimmicks all spun as great breakthroughs. A crash seemed inevitable.

 My own job had continued to be reasonably okay. It was still a delight to come to work next to my colleagues and have some engagement with students and faculty. We had escaped the ‘reorganization’ through which other departments were decimated and remaining staff overworked. I no longer had the community I once had.

But then came some decisions that made work life intolerable. We were given a new boss of technology and a toxic new culture descended on our department. I lost sleep, I was unhappy, and it didn’t seem much would change. I felt the sadness of 2017 hard as I learned that one of the faculty fired then had taken his life. It just became hard to continue. Another, a friend, had a hard time making a landing. I looked elsewhere and was lucky to find a job at another college that fit my skills. I sleep better.

In my my exit interview, I wrote that I would not recommend the college as a place to work because “I am not confident this college will survive, and I have mostly lost confidence in the ways the college has been trying to save itself.”

 It is sad to see an institution that changed so many lives come to an end. It is sadder right now for students who have to get taught out to graduation. And for me, it is saddest for those colleagues among staff and faculty who will be forced, in an uncertain and difficult time, to find new positions. I wish everyone well.

 I knew Mills was caught against some huge structural challenges: declining enrollment, the limitations of gimmicks, unaffordable tuition for the kinds of students drawn to a college like Mills, limits of fund-raising, relatively high salaries for the leaders and consultants hired to run the college compared to the mass of staff and faculty, lack of vision among its leaders. There was no guarantee that a small institution like Mills would survive but I do think that a series of bad decisions over the last several decades only made it impossible to climb out of the crisis. Covid was only the death-knell.