Ch013–3 Ivy Hoffa

Read and subscribe for free at Substack: https://insightcolleges.substack.com/p/13-3-ivy-hoffa?sd=pf Serializing Insight Colleges, how Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts college curriculum and teaching methods to produce graduates capable of redeeming-restoring SpaceShip Earth

Last chapter, we met college sophomore, Greta Hoffa, raising the alarm about how colleges were imploding, becoming inaccessible and irrelevant.

As Liberal Art Colleges continued to deteriorate, merge, and close, college students responded in various ways. Some dropped out of college and started working where they could. A few got busy arranging apprenticeships for what they wished to get good at. And yes, a few protested.

Historians in 2085 cite 2029 as “the year old colleges died.” Unfortunately this also included one famous college student. The protester whose story captivated public attention was the story of Greta Hoffa’s, younger sister, Ivy, a college freshman. She employed the time-honored, non-violent method of a hunger strike.

What happened to Greta after her protest? Her goal was working for positive change. She eventually narrowed her aim down to public banking. Greta was smart enuf to arrange for herself an apprenticeship at the Public Bank of North Dakota, the first and most successful public bank in the US — https://ilsr.org/rule/bank-of-north-dakota-2/. After her apprenticeship, she got hired to work at a the Los Angeles Public Bank.

Her sister, Ivy, was not so lucky. Greta’s younger sister by two years, looked up to Greta, admired her public political activism, admired her ability to have a voice and use it. Ivy wanted to be like her. 2029 was her junior year at Mount Ida, a small liberal arts college in Newton, Mass. Her passion was marketing; she was a running as a candidate for class president.

In her freshman year, she prepared a presentation for the business faculty on how the college could support the school’s athletes to help themselves be more successful academically and socially on campus. During her delivery, her presentation was going well; she was hitting her talking points, her audience was engaged. Then she felt a buzz on her cell phone in her pocket. During a high-profile presentation, normally she would have ignored it. Her intuition told her to take a look.

It was an email from the College President. a rare thing. Ivy got this weird feeling. She stopped talking, stopped her pitch mid-presentation. She read the email aloud to all present off her cell phone. It said: Mt. Ida college was closing. Well, it wasn’t exactly closing exactly. It was being acquired by the much larger, much wealthier, University of Massachusetts.

Shocked, Ivy closed her laptop, collected her things, and walked out of the presentation room. In this moment, she couldn’t process her own emotions.
Her head was spinning. The school she loved, where she’d always wanted to attend since middle school — what was going to happen to it? Would students transfer? Would their credits count? How would this impact their job opportunities?

in 2029 University of Massachusetts bought Mount Ida. Just like you’d expect in a corporate merger, most of the faculty lost their jobs. UMass sent a team of people in suits to Mount Ida’s campus to talk to panicking students and faculty. Most students were invited to transfer to one of the UMass campuses. However, the change would not be entirely painless. Ivy saw her financial aid get cut. She would end up owing $5,000 more in tuition. Some of her fellow students saw their degrees disappear altogether, their credits suddenly worthless. Why? Mount Ida had some specialty majors the UMass colleges didn’t offer, like battery technology and dental hygiene.

Ivy chose this as the time to emulate her hero, her older sister, Greta. She made a sign, “Who will save our colleges?” She began to walk a picket line in front of the administration building. Ivy invited her friends to join her and expected they would. Yet other students did not join her. For the next four days, she was the lone picketer — until she gave up the strategy.

Next she decided to do something more extreme to get attention. She wrote a manifesto about how the college admin and federal government should save small liberal arts colleges. She sent it to the school newspaper where it was published.

Comments were forwarded to her: “Great job :)” and “I was thinking this too.” Ivy was shocked at how tepid responses were compared to the gravity of the situation, how deeply she felt about this loss.

She decided to escalate to a hunger strike. She knew a hunger strike is both an act of political protest; and, provokes feelings of sympathy in others. Most hunger strikers take liquids and not solid food. When it works, a specific goal, like an administrative policy change can take place. She knew a hunger strike was a risky form of activism. It says, ‘I am willing to put my life on the line for this.’ Paradoxically, when it works, it often creates community spirit.

She lived in dorm and told her roommate; yet, did not tell her parents; nor, did she tell her big sister, Greta. She expected them, she wanted them, to hear about it in the news. Greta had brought attention to the collapse of colleges as institutions for social-cultural renewal. She wanted to complete the work her big sister had begun. Ivy was not a whiner; she did not wish to appear to be whining. “I am an activist!” she told her few close friends.

She went on an all liquid diet in her dorm room. Other students visited her. They commiserated with her; yet, none joined her hunger strike. Afterwards they said, “It seemed like a personal thing to her, not something I was called to jump in and support with my own hunger strike.”

The school newspaper interviewed her. Her health declined. The college President came to visit her. She told him she was not blaming him personally. She simply felt someone had to do something to stop most liberal arts colleges from closing. She refused solid nourishment. She refused free psychological counseling. In 30 days she was gone.

Unfortunately for the college President, in her final days, Ivy’s fellow dorm students made numerous cell phone videos of her, interviews with her, took selfies with her. When she died, they posted these online. In 24 hours, three local corporate media sent news trucks to cover the story. In 2029, “If it bleeds, it leads” was still the thinking driving ad-driven corporate media companies.

Suddenly it was obvious why the college President had come to visit Ivy. A large media story casting the college in a negative light was now unavoidable. The story of Ivy’s death was picked up by national media. Vague as her cause was, like student college debt, many could empathize and sympathize with her cause. Gifts of flowers and cards of sympathy began to pile up at the entrance of her dorm where she had died.

It wasn’t long before news of Ivy’s passing, in the cause of saving all liberal arts colleges from closing altogether, reached Women In Congress. The calls to “do something about colleges” was the major factor in making the college crisis of 2029 the main topic for Women’s Summer Conference 2030.

Ivy’s death brought the collapse of liberal arts colleges to national attention. Each of the dozen liberal arts colleges which merged, consolidated or closed in 2029 received attention and reporting. Because it was their own children, women took an interest in what would otherwise be the most gray, boring business news imaginable: college mergers and consolidations. These became page one stories. What was at issue was whether in 20 years there would be any brick and mortar colleges outside of a mere dozen elite-only Ivy League campuses, already impossible for the vast majority of applicants to hope to be accepted to.

In 2015, Moody’s Investor Services had told its financial subscribers: “The rate of mergers among small colleges and universities will double in the next few years. The rate of closures among these institutions will triple” ~ From Consolidating Colleges and Merging Universities: New Strategies for Higher Education Leaders by Martin and Samels.

Now in 2029, the public and politicians had to face the possibility, colleges as a cultural institution, as a Public Commons, where young adults learned healthy critical thinking and capacity to be more self-reliant intellectually — for all but the top 10% of US families — had no future, were visible only in the rear view mirror of history.

Slowly, people were coming to grips with the possibility, another major Public Commons, another resource thought to be infinite and stable, seven generations into the future, was in fact dying, becoming privatized, sun-setting in the near term.

TIME magazine: 2029 The Year Colleges Died

In March 2029, “The Year Colleges Died” was TIME magazine’s cover story. The reader letters received were interesting The most impassioned letters were from theologians and religious leaders. They realized liberal arts colleges were one of very few things, anywhere in culture, moderating:

- The dog-eat-dog values of extreme Capitalism; and

- The increased power of corporate-consumer-atheism, the religion of exclusively physical-materialism thinking, a kind of know-nothing, mechanical atheism.

As discussion about the value of colleges grew, the problems became much more obvious than the solutions.

Would Women In Congress allow colleges to die? Should they allow the number of colleges to shrink? Should all 18 year olds graduating from high school go directly into the work force?

Without any liberal arts programs, where would young adults be exposed to the high-points of social-cultural learning, values and ethics? Where would young adults be exposed to the best practice ideas for a more sustainable future for the 99%?

Losing all liberal arts colleges was a danger as all culture then falls to its lowest common denominator, into mere material-consumerism, Hobbes’s “the war of all against all.”

In 2029, 250 years or more of failed male leadership was 100% culpable for the utter collapse of most liberal arts colleges. It fell to Women In Congress to respond and clean up — if they could.

Journalists interview students

In 2029 and early 2030, many more journalists visited college campuses and interviewed students. One theme they found concerned 8th graders and high school students, on bus tours, visiting a college. Students interviewed by journalists often come away with difficult questions:

- “Why do students look so unhappy?

- Why no eye contact?

- Why don’t students talk in classes?

- Why do the teachers look so unhappy?

- Why is only person smiling anywhere, the tour leader from the Dean’s office?

- What’s the point?”

Women In Congress decided to change the theme of Women’s Summer Conference 2030 from “Creating Healthy Boundaries: Self, Others, World and God,” to “What to Do about Liberal Arts colleges?”