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Financial problems and an insufficient number of qualified faculty have led the state of New York to order The King's College in Briarcliff Manor to close on December 30. The 58-year-old institution, whose first president was radio evangelist Percy B. Crawford and second president was The King's Hour radio personality Robert A. Cook, has no option but to comply.

"The New York State Board of Regents, as an accrediting body recognized by the federal Department of Education, has the authority to say, 'You can no longer call yourself a college,' " Friedhelm K. Radandt, the college's third and current president told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. "It's the only state where that's true."

The 172 students enrolled for the fall semester (down from a high of 862 in 1980) will transfer to other colleges. Those who are within 30 credit hours of graduation will still receive a King's degree, although there will be no official graduation ceremony.

"I feel like a close friend of mine has been on life support for years and has now died," says Dan Preston, who came as a student in 1961 and still lives in the area.

FINANCIAL AND PROPERTY WOES

Life-threatening problems for the institution came to a head in March when the state said it would not allow programs to continue because of financial difficulties. King's appealed the decision, but the state education commissioner upheld it in a September 23 ruling. The action "requires the college to cease all operations at the end of the fall semester and to refrain from enrolling students for the spring," says Gail L. K. Cashen, director of the state Division of College and University Evaluation.

College leadership had hoped the crisis could be averted by a relocation 32 miles west (CT, Dec. 12, 1993, p. 60). In 1992, King's signed a contract to sell the 83-acre hilltop campus overlooking the Hudson River to an Irish-American association that wanted to create an athletics and cultural center. The village's lengthy and ongoing review of the project delayed the sale and worsened the school's dire financial condition.

The contracted $14 million purchase price, along with restructuring the $22 million debt, could have kept the school alive, according to school officials. Students and faculty regularly prayed for and anticipated the relocation.

Most observers agree that financial difficulties are at the center of the school's demise. The sequence of events that led to the current crisis is more difficult to interpret. Friends and critics differ on the centrality or interpretation that should be given to each issue, and to the causes of the steady enrollment decline that began in the mid-1980s:

* FACILITIES. The current campus is a former resort hotel built in 1908. It demanded major, ongoing maintenance from the time The King's College moved to Briarcliff Manor from Delaware in 1955.

"King's never really got itself in shape with cost-effective facilities," says Ron Strumbeck, a former trustee and director of development. In 1989, financial circumstances prompted the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools to issue a "show cause" order as to why accreditation should not be removed.

* FACULTY. Westchester County, as a wealthy suburb, often makes the top-ten ranking in national cost-of-living surveys. "Typically 70 to 80 percent of a college's income, including that of King's, has to go to salaries and benefits," says Strumbeck. Thus King's faced an increasingly precarious job of recruiting and supporting an adequate number of qualified faculty.

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November 14 1994, Vol. 38, No. 13