In an effort to understand college governance, I try to understand actions by boards of trustees. So an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the process that determined that Sweet Briar would close is intriguing.

The article isn’t all that revealing, though. The reader is left with the question of who actually engineered the recommendation. By the time the board met in February to make the final decision (they met in Washington, D.C., not Sweet Briar, Virginia), key players had decided that the school must close. We know that because a PowerPoint presentation was given about how to market the decision.

At the end of a two-day meeting, board members voted unanimously to close the school. But when did they know that was the plan, and how involved were they in its crafting? The article features two alumnae who loved the school but were persuaded to vote to close it. But you are left wondering how representative they were.

While I suspect that the decision was the right one, I still wonder about the impetus for it. Sweet Briar doesn’t seem much different from many other small, rural, somewhat elite colleges—its major difference is that it was a women’s college. Was that the major problem, or are many other colleges going to face the same decision?