a few dozen of us could have pooled our SPARE CHANGE and snapped up this gorgeous acreage. if i had forked up the $100,000, i would have given the chapel — and some of the acreage — to the town of northfield and kept the remainder of the land to develop a 5-star resort/retreat/conference center.

what were y’all thinking?

As for making it a ‘works’ school, not ‘living by the Bible’ school, i’m not sure why you didn’t close it up when you ‘changed traditions’ as now the tradition doesn’t live on, but instead it’s the new 20th century peer pressured ways that are running the school.

As far as i’m concerned – it’s a ‘new school’ you might as well have changed the name when you changed the ways…..

But both campuses will be preserved and both institutions have guaranteed access to the alumni.

When I go to reunion I enjoy friends from many classes. I go to see the people. Since the Northfield Chapel closed the campus lost its charm for me.

The memories we have made in Memorial Chapel during the Hymn Sing, the Alumni meeting honoring the 50th reunion class and the awards are mine now. My Northfield memories are still mine and no one can take them away.

Northfield splashed a water conservation district over NMH’s non-core campus lands, which requires a non-appealable site plan review by the planning board. Placing anything in anyone’s view is grounds for denial. The school approach the town to transfer the core campus into a more advantageous zoning category, call 43D, which would open the property to being included in State economic development efforts and use of state money for infrastructure upgrades. The response from the infamous Northfield transition committee was that Northfield would decide which buyers would be considered for such a program. As desperate as NMH’s need was to sell the property, Northfield wanted to be in charge of buyer choice. Impossible zoning and an impossible town deflated the campus to value to near zero.

When I made my inquiries, I was told no prospectus for the timberlands was available. Having spoken with most of the contractors who did the NMH evaluation, I knew that the kind of information any buyer would need was available. I even put together an outline of a prospectus for NMH to use. After four months of phone calls, I was finally granted an audience. Again, looking for basic information (land, lot sizes, timber evaluations, state of the water equipment, etc) the trustees representatives suggested I hire a plane and fly over to get a sense of the place. NMH paid a lot to consultants to evaluate the properties. However potential buyers were never welcome or provided with basic information. Is it any surprise that most buyers walked away.

The water company, houses, and timberlands are all that are left to support the endowment. Rather then managing these assets as an endowment, the rather romantic team seems to have delegated its brains to Mount Grace Land Trust, and is giving the the timberlands away as well (with 15% off the top to Mount Grace). I dearly do hope that after the shocking bargain sale of the core campus, wiser heads on the board of trustees will step forward to begin to manage the endowment in a more business-like fashion, with an eye towards long-term survival of the school.

I always hoped that UMass or some other local college would purchase that lovely campus and breath new life into it. I find the C.S. Lewis deal to be really odd. At the very least, I hope they don’t try to California-ize the campus.

It may be of interest to note that C.S. Lewis was a late- comer to Christianity, at age 32, from an atheistic young adulthood fostered by the class-ridden English ‘public’ (read ‘prep’) school tradition, adulterated by ‘atheism’ and vivid class-hierarchies, just as our own times might be said to be all too often now.

Lewis came to his later-blooming religious convictions not through unquestioning “faith,” but rather through a dedicated intellectual rigor which directly considered the question of religion, and ultimately his very capable analytical insights into Christianity. THIS is the very kind of thing we all might hope for from an education grounded in the “Great Books,” not merely just Western, …as now promised by the C.S Lewis Foundation.

We also might consider not just the effect on the C.S. Lewis Foundation, perhaps, of the legacy of D.L Moody and his rather surprisingly non-dogmatic, diverse approach to education in late 19th century New England (especially as eventually embodied within the Northfield Mount Hermon which I knew in the 1960’s). But ALSO the effect on Northfield Mount Hermon’s legacy itself by a new awakening of Christian belief from the sort of intellectual experience that led C.S. Lewis back to Christianity. The effects of this new, neighborly influence on BOTH institutions may now be very salutary to the memory of both Northfield and Moody himself.
Time only will tell…

It must be that the paltry up-front sale price certainly reflects the desperation of NMH leaders to get any reasonable deal during a very terrible real estate market (particularly in dealing for a century old, deteriorating prep school camopus).