Birmingham-Southern College: A Hundred and Sixty-Eight Years, Then Gone
Near Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham-Southern College closed in May of twenty twenty-four. After one hundred and sixty-eight years of continuous operation, the college held its final commencement, locked its buildings, and ceased to be. It was one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the Southeast, and its closure was a story about the financial pressures reshaping American higher education.
The college traces back to Southern University, founded in eighteen fifty-six in Greensboro, Alabama, by the Methodist Episcopal Church South. It consolidated with Birmingham College, settling in Birmingham in nineteen eighteen under the new name Birmingham-Southern College. The campus on the western edge of Birmingham, with its red brick buildings and oak-lined quadrangle, was one of the more architecturally coherent small college campuses in the state.
Birmingham-Southern had a genuine academic reputation. Its theater program was nationally recognized. Its Hilltop Literary Magazine was among the oldest student literary publications in the South. The college produced governors, judges, physicians, and artists. It was small, around thirteen hundred students at its peak, but it had the kind of institutional culture that small liberal arts colleges cultivate deliberately.
The financial difficulties had been building for years. Enrollment declined after the two thousand eight recession and never fully recovered. A financial crisis in twenty twenty-one, triggered in part by mismanagement of federal funds, produced a deficit that the college could not close. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey declined to provide emergency state funding. Appeals to wealthy alumni and regional philanthropists fell short. The college appealed to the state legislature and was turned down.
When the final class graduated in May of twenty twenty-four, the campus fell quiet. The buildings and grounds were eventually purchased. The alumni network remains, holding reunions on a campus that no longer belongs to the institution they attended.
