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This story was produced with the Border Belt Independent, which is part of The Assembly’s statewide network of local news outlets.
For decades, drivers turning from U.S. 401 onto the campus of St. Andrews University in Laurinburg saw crepe myrtles, pine trees, and flags adorned with azure shields.
Now, the welcoming greens and blues clash with yellow caution tape, orange “road closed” signs, and red warnings telling trespassers to stay away. Silver barbed wire surrounds the athletic fields.
St. Andrews, which opened in 1961, was once a home for free thinkers seeking a liberal arts education in rural southeastern North Carolina. But the blocked roadways across campus are symbolic of an institution that is gone and a local community that is struggling to cope.
The school announced on April 25 that it would shut its doors 10 days later amid a financial crisis that had been simmering for years. After long-standing fiscal challenges cost St. Andrews its accreditation in 2007, it merged with Florida-based Webber International University in 2011. In the end, the merger extended St. Andrews’ life but couldn’t save it.
St. Andrews had been a fixture in Laurinburg, home to 15,000 people in the heart of Scotland County. The school embraced the rich heritage of the Highland Scots, Presbyterians who settled in the region after fleeing religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cultural festivals marked by the sound of bagpipes brought people from far and wide.
“St. Andrews was our college,” said Laurinburg Mayor Jim Willis, a lifelong resident whose father owned a Firestone store on Main Street from 1946 to 2006. “It was Laurinburg, 100 percent. And there’s an undeniable hole here now that it’s gone.”
The Laurinburg community stood by the struggling campus for years—even as its culture changed. As The Assembly previously reported, Webber’s involvement and management decisions divided alumni in recent years. St. Andrews began to offer more career-focused majors and sports teams in an attempt to boost enrollment. When an alumni council raised red flags about the institution’s direction, Webber dismantled the group and installed less critical alumni on the council.
“This has been a difficult thing that happened to the community.”
Drew Williamson, Laurinburg city councilman
Locals are now anxiously watching to see what happens to the campus. Parts of it are controlled by Webber, which still faces financial challenges. Much of the land is owned by a small local nonprofit that hopes to replace the campus with something beneficial to the tiny Sandhills city—if they can raise enough money to fend off creditors who are also laying claims to the property.
More small college towns are likely to face the same challenges as Laurinburg soon. The number of college-going students is projected to shrink due to declining birthrates and growing skepticism about the value of a degree. In 2024, The Hechinger Report found colleges closed at a rate of about one per week. Limestone University, a private school in Gaffney, South Carolina, announced its closure days after St. Andrews. Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh and Guilford College in Greensboro, among others, are battling to survive.
“There’s even just this mental toll of what it means to just drive by an empty college campus every day,” said Andrew Koricich, a higher education professor at Appalachian State University and the director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges. “It’s not really a thing that makes it easy to recruit people into a community, to help a community grow. It can almost feel like this thing looming over a community once that college is empty.”
‘Part of my DNA’
In the 1950s, the North Carolina Presbyterian Church realized it had too many colleges. Church leaders obtained a grant to study Christian higher education in the state and ultimately voted to merge Peace College in Raleigh with Flora MacDonald College and Presbyterian Junior College 100 miles to the south in Robeson County. (Peace, which is now William Peace University, backed out of the merger.)
Laurinburg pledged more than $3 million for a consolidated campus of the Robeson County schools, an investment worth more than $32.6 million today. The church secured 853 acres for the new campus, and the two schools became St. Andrews Presbyterian College.
“The planners are building a college that is outstanding in every phase of campus life,” a 1959 course catalog for the school touted.
From then on, the identities of Laurinburg and St. Andrews became intertwined. Nationwide, about two-thirds of students attend college within 50 miles of their hometown. St. Andrews became an educational access point for some in the region.
That was the case for Lin Thompson, who grew up nearby and watched St. Andrews being built. His family already had ties to the school since his mother attended Flora MacDonald. Along with cousins who also lived in the Sandhills region, Thompson attended St. Andrews, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in politics in 1978. He went on to study at Oxford University in England and later earned a law degree from Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon.
“I always thought of St. Andrews as kind of part of my DNA,” Thompson said.
St. Andrews brought the community together. Professors served on town boards, and students volunteered at community events. The soccer team helped at the Laurinburg Chamber of Commerce oyster roast; the baseball team unloaded trees for the Optimist Club’s Christmas fundraiser; the women’s basketball team flipped pancakes for the Kiwanis Club; and the football team volunteered with Scotland County Special Olympics.
David Harling, a lifelong resident of Laurinburg and president of the local Rotary Club, didn’t attend St. Andrews but still felt connected to it. He lent his sheep, cows, donkey, and chickens to students in veterinary science courses for an annual laboratory assignment.
“We just wanted to give them a hands-on experience,” Harling said. “We made real connections with those students, and I’ll miss that relationship. Those students meant a lot to this community.”
For decades, the school was an economic driver. Since 1990, the earliest year data is available, St. Andrews was consistently among the top 15 employers in the county with around 400 staff and faculty, according to the North Carolina Department of Commerce. It contributed between $25 million and $30 million in economic impact in 2021, according to data from the school.
Those figures are significant in a struggling community like Scotland County. Several manufacturing facilities have closed since 2000, including Abbott Laboratories, WestPoint Stevens, Butler Manufacturing, a Purell hand sanitizer plant, Mohawk Industries, and BlueScope Buildings. From 2001 to 2014, more than 5,400 manufacturing jobs disappeared in the county—a 74 percent loss, according to the state department of commerce. The county has the highest poverty rate and the second-highest unemployment rate in the state.
“We can try to put a number on it, but I think we still don’t know the true, deep impact this will have in Scotland County,” Chris English, executive director of the Laurinburg Chamber of Commerce, said of St. Andrews’ closure.
‘Died a Long Time Ago’
While St. Andrews was integral to Laurinburg, the campus limped along for years. After the merger with Webber, St. Andrews’ traditional liberal arts focus faded as it turned to athletics to boost enrollment and bring in more tuition dollars.
But that pivot wasn’t enough. Stagnant enrollment, significant debt, and a series of lawsuits drained the school of resources until Webber decided to pull the plug.
A student who said she was raped by a member of the men’s soccer team sued St. Andrews in September 2022, alleging that the school further traumatized her by failing to properly handle the case. Police charged a student with second-degree forcible rape the day after the assault was reported. St. Andrews let the accused student remain on campus while it looked into the incident, but he returned to his home country of Italy before the school finished its investigation. The case never went to trial.
The civil case against St. Andrews was supposed to go before a jury in June but did not. “The matter is in the process of being resolved to the satisfaction of the parties,” said Emilia Beskind, a lawyer for the plaintiff identified as Jane Doe in the lawsuit.
Two former students sued Webber and St. Andrews after they were sexually assaulted by a member of the school’s wrestling team who was a registered sex offender in South Carolina. Mison Mickle pleaded guilty in 2024 to sexual assaults of three former St. Andrews students, including the two plaintiffs.
A jury trial in the civil case against Webber and St. Andrews is scheduled to start on January 20, 2026, according to court documents. In both cases, St. Andrews says it followed legal protocols when students reported assaults and took reasonable action by enforcing no-contact orders. Lawyers for the university say that the school and its administrators should not be blamed for the trauma caused by a student.
Each negative headline further fractured the relationship between the school and its community. After the news broke about the most recent sexual assault case, Thompson asked to be taken off the school’s mailing list. “I do not want to hear anything more,” he recalled thinking. “I’m just embarrassed to be a graduate.”
Meanwhile, the shift under Webber from a liberal arts emphasis to more workforce-centered programs didn’t help enrollment. As of February 2024, the school’s total enrollment was 843 students. The campus had been designed for 1,000 students, but it had often struggled to hit that number; in the late 1990s, enrollment fell below 700.
“Mentally, we’ve been waiting on this to happen at some point for some time now.”
Chris English, executive director of Laurinburg’s Chamber of Commerce
As the school floundered, so did its relationship with the community. Business owners in Laurinburg said that St. Andrews was increasingly disconnected from town life.
“Back in the day, three-quarters of my sales were from students and professors at St. Andrews,” said Eddie Monroe, owner of Uptown Fashions, a men’s clothing store in downtown Laurinburg. “I still think it closing is going to be a big loss for us, and for Laurinburg, but not nearly as bad as it would’ve been back then.”
Some owners of local restaurants say they have lost wait staff, and businesses have seen small dips in sales in the months since the closure. But the overwhelming feeling in town is that St. Andrews was no longer the pillar of Laurinburg it once had been.
“Don’t get me wrong–it’s a big loss,” said English, the chamber of commerce director. “But mentally, we’ve been waiting on this to happen at some point for some time now.”
Even with St. Andrews’ closure, Webber isn’t out of the woods. Its net income has plummeted by almost 30 percent since 2021, and its expenses have increased by nearly 60 percent since 2019, said Gary Stocker, a higher education finance expert who reviewed audited financial statements and other documents at The Assembly’s request. He said it is clear that St. Andrews was “a cost burden” for Webber. “They cut loose an expense anchor,” Stocker said.
Webber did not respond to requests for comment, but Joe Strickler, the chair of the school’s board of trustees, told The Assembly that Webber poured millions into St. Andrews over the years to the point that it “nearly bankrupted everything.”
“That’s the reason we had to close it,” he said. “Otherwise, it would take everything down.”
Chasing a Ghost
The ghost of St. Andrews will continue to haunt Laurinburg. What becomes of the campus property just outside downtown remains a giant question mark.
Just before St. Andrews merged with Webber in 2011, the school transferred much of its property to the Scotland Development Corporation, or SDC. The tiny nonprofit has been around for more than two decades, largely serving as a titleholder for vacant properties in the area. When SDC acquired St. Andrews’ property, keeping the school alive became its main function.
“Scotland Development Corporation has joined with St. Andrews University to help ensure that secondary education is available in Scotland County,” the nonprofit wrote as its mission statement in tax forms. “Having a university in this area is vital to economic development and educational advancement for the citizens of Southeastern North Carolina.”
SDC is run by Drew Williamson, a local lawyer and Laurinburg city councilman who was born and raised in town. Many of his babysitters were St. Andrews students, and he remembers going to the campus for all kinds of events growing up. His wife worked in St. Andrews’ admissions department in the 1980s, he said.
So when St. Andrews’ then-President Paul Baldasare approached him to ask if SDC would take ownership of the land, Williamson signed on. “Being an economic development group with a mission to assist our local economy, we agreed to become the owner,” he said.
For the next 14 years, SDC remained “very hands-off,” Williamson said. The group leased the property, including the main campus buildings and the equestrian center, back to the university for a monthly rent of $60,000. That money went to St. Andrews’ creditors; SDC did not financially benefit from the arrangement, Williamson said.
“I can promise you that,” Williamson said. “I spent a lot of time where I could’ve been practicing law dealing with this thing, too.”
Now that St. Andrews has closed, SDC is on the hook for some of St. Andrews’ debts.
Two creditors have claims to the land as collateral for loans. Argent Institutional Trust Company, a Florida-based trust that acquired a longtime St. Andrews lender in 2016, has the first mortgage on the main campus property. Foundation Capital Resources, a Missouri-based lender that typically finances churches, has a claim to the school’s state of the art equestrian center, which housed St. Andrews’ award-winning equestrian team. (None of the creditors responded to requests for comment on this story.)
While it is not clear how much debt is outstanding, the lender bought by Argent gave St. Andrews $12 million, and Foundation Capital has lent the university just under $4 million, according to The Assembly’s review of public deeds and other agreements over the last two decades. Williamson declined to say how much money SDC needed to avoid foreclosure on the property, though he said the amount was less than the initial loans and described it as “fairly significant” but “not outrageous.”
“They have been extremely patient. They want to get paid. We understand it,” Williamson said of the creditors. “But I think they also understand that we are working very hard on a plan that would work out for everybody. They just want to see it through, as we do, too.”
A ‘Very Vague’ Plan
There is a tentative—though seemingly precarious—effort in the works to pay off the debt.
SDC’s board, several community leaders, and state lawmakers are trying to raise enough money to pay the creditors and keep local control of much of the land, Williamson said. He declined to say who serves on SDC’s board, what other local entities were involved, or how much money the group hoped to receive in state funding. He acknowledged he was being “intentionally very vague” with the details since the deal is not finalized.
“We are going to need assistance from Raleigh, and our local partners have given us assurances,” he said.
The group has put the college’s 278-acre equestrian center on the market for $6 million. Pam Matthews, the real estate agent for the property, said there are several prospective buyers, but none of them is local. Williamson said the sale of the equestrian center would “go a long way” toward paying off the debt.
It’s not clear how much the main campus property is worth since many of the buildings have years of postponed repairs and millions of dollars in flood damage from Hurricane Florence. Following the 2018 storm, some residence halls and buildings never reopened.
Experts say it can be challenging to find a buyer for a shuttered college campus, particularly if the buildings fall into disrepair. It can be even tougher in rural communities that are already struggling to attract new residents and businesses. “It is really hard to figure out what is next for the physical plant once the college closes,” said Koricich, the Appalachian State professor.
Williamson declined to provide details of the most recent appraisal, noting it would be an overestimate because it was done while St. Andrews was a fully functioning college. “It’s still a valuable piece of property,” he said, pointing to the nearby lake and proximity to downtown, as well as local schools, Scotland Memorial Hospital, and the Scotia Village retirement community. “There’s a lot of potential there.”
“There’s even just this mental toll of what it means to just drive by an empty college campus every day.”
Andrew Koricich, Appalachian State University higher education professor
State Rep. Garland Pierce, a Scotland County Democrat who has served in the N.C. House for two decades, said he would advocate for SDC’s plans. But ultimately, he said, help from the Republican-controlled General Assembly comes down to allocating funding in the state budget, which has not passed. The House and Senate budget talks have stalled over a disagreement about tax cuts.
“The people in Raleigh want to know what you’re going to do with the land,” Pierce said. “What’s it going to be? What’s going to become of the property? We can’t just allocate money if there is no vision or plan of action for going forward.”
Sen. Danny Britt, a Republican who represents Scotland County, did not return requests for comment.
Williamson said the local partners do not have concrete plans for the land. But he said some neighboring property owners have an interest in the campus, and there is a possibility of retaining an “educational use” for the land. Pierce and county officials said Scotia Village and Scotland Memorial Hospital may be among the interested groups.
David Pope, Scotland Hospital CEO, told The Assembly he hopes to see a public-private partnership on the property. One educational possibility he sees for the campus is turning it into a training ground for healthcare professionals to address shortages in the area. “We think that there’s different ways that it could be developed for the benefit of the community,” he said. (Scotia Village did not return requests for comment.)
Williamson did not have an estimated timeline for when the property’s fate would be resolved. “Ask our legislators when they are going to pass the budget, honestly,” he said. “I think that is sort of the first step.”
If the plan falls through, the lenders would have the right to foreclose, which is the last thing Williamson said he and the other local partners want.
As chair of SDC, he’s seen firsthand the impact of other abandoned properties in Laurinburg. Abbott Labs donated its property, valued at $15.5 million, to SDC when it closed in 2001. GOJO Industries, which makes Purell hand sanitizer, bought the property in 2003 but left after just a few years, leaving the facilities to languish without upkeep ever since. To Williamson, it’s a clear cautionary tale. Not only do the buildings become eyesores; the episodes weigh on the town’s morale, like an omen of what could lie ahead for the rest of the community.
“I don’t want St. Andrews to look like that,” he said. “I don’t think anybody in the community does.”
But it’s not all up to SDC. Webber owns some pieces of property close to the lake surrounding St. Andrews’ main campus. In 2024, Webber collateralized that land to help with its debt to the Florida-based lender Citizens Bank and Trust, to which the university owed millions at the time. St. Andrews had also borrowed $2 million from Citizens Bank and Trust.
Steve Nickles, a law professor at Wake Forest University who reviewed the agreement, said that closing St. Andrews and leveraging the land could help clear some of Webber’s debt.
But Strickler, Webber’s board chair, told The Assembly that selling the properties or using them as collateral “won’t make any difference” in Webber’s overall financial outlook.
He added: “It shouldn’t have any impact at all on Webber’s overall loan other than the fact that we won’t have to be continuing to dump money into North Carolina.”
‘Day by Day’
Webber’s quick closure of St. Andrews left a bitter taste in the mouths of many community members and alumni.
In an ideal world, according to higher education experts and consultants, colleges would announce their closure six months to a year in advance. But many don’t out of fear that the announcement would hasten the institution’s demise. The result: Faculty, staff, students, and the community are often left in the lurch when a school closes.
Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, said closure decisions often come down to one thing: Can the institution make payroll? “It is that simple for a number of colleges,” he said.
That appeared to be the case at St. Andrews. Ahead of the closure announcement, employees received incomplete paychecks in April. After the closure announcement, school officials promised they would get the rest of their money.
“Damned if you do it, damned if you don’t. That’s the situation that we were in.”
Joe Strickler, Webber International University board chair
As of late July, faculty have not received their June paychecks, which were supposed to be issued on June 25. A memo obtained by The Assembly shows that Webber’s human resources department notified staff on June 23 that the St. Andrews payroll account didn’t have enough money to issue the paychecks.
In another memo sent at the end of July, Webber said payments are expected on or before August 25, the end date for faculty contracts. But the school also said the funds may not be available by then. “We fully understand the financial and personal strain this situation may cause and do not take this matter lightly,” the July memo said. “Our highest priority remains ensuring that all outstanding obligations are fulfilled, either on time or as soon as possible.”
Justin Kuhn, an English professor who taught at St. Andrews for four years, said the lack of warning forced him to tap into personal savings. Kuhn said St. Andrews owes him $14,000 for his final three months of work. He isn’t confident he’ll see that money.
Kuhn has since accepted a job teaching English at Missouri Southern State University this fall, but he said many of his former colleagues have not been as fortunate. Scrambling to handle the quick transition to his next stage of life has made processing the loss of St. Andrews even more difficult.
“Now I’m going to have to sign a lease, security deposit, moving expenses, and my partner needs to find a new job,” he said. “But we don’t have those extra savings. It’s just a much tighter position to be in.”
Some financial supporters are also still waiting for answers. One St. Andrews alumnus who gave the school a $900,000 personal loan told The Assembly that he has yet to receive $50,000 he is owed. He said that while the situation is “very disappointing,” he doesn’t expect he will get his money back.
The students who will not get to finish their degrees at St. Andrews face significant challenges, too. Research shows that students who attend colleges that close are more likely than students at other schools to never obtain a degree. While colleges are required by their accreditors to provide transfer options, one report found that less than half of the students involved in closures transfer. And fewer than half of those students end up completing their degrees.
“Those students don’t have any idea of where to go or what to do,” said Paula Langteau, a consultant who advises on ethical campus closures. “They’re kind of thrown out in the cold.”
In 2023, Strickler told The Assembly that Webber was focused on growth at St. Andrews. He said, without elaborating, that “the cost of closure is nearly as much as the cost of continuation.”
But in a recent phone call, he said the institution had to make a business decision in the end. He said Webber is in the process of filing bankruptcy paperwork for St. Andrews, after which assets will be distributed to pay back faculty, staff, and others owed money.
“I’ve talked to other people who said, ‘Well, you know, this needs to be done in an orderly manner,’” Stricker said. “I said, ‘How do you divide zero in an orderly manner?’”
Strickler also defended the quick closure, arguing that the school would have hemorrhaged students if it was announced earlier. “When you’ve got a very bad situation, I don’t think there’s anything you could do that would make it any better or any worse,” he said. “Damned if you do it, damned if you don’t. That’s the situation that we were in.”
Amid the frustration, sadness, and anger that have clouded St. Andrews’ closure, Williamson said he hopes the community will focus on what positives could come of the university’s remains and try to imagine Laurinburg’s future without St. Andrews in it.
“This has been a difficult thing that happened to the community, and now that we’re getting past the sadness of losing St. Andrews, we’re presented with an opportunity to do something special,” he said. “It doesn’t bring St. Andrews back, but we are trying to make something good out of something that’s not so good.”
Some pieces of the campus are already gone, either sold off or given away. Horses from the equestrian team have already found new homes. A scoreboard was loaned to the Highland Hooligans, a new collegiate summer league baseball team in town. Bleachers and some athletic equipment will soon be up for auction.
Many alumni have made a pilgrimage back to campus over the past few weeks. Some volunteers sorted through school artifacts to donate to the state archives. Community members have helped with maintenance, such as cutting the grass.
Closing a campus is not just a heartbreaking process—it’s an exhausting, expensive, and gut-wrenching one. Williamson said he tries to take it “day by day.”
“It’s not fun, it’s not easy. There are a lot of memories,” he said. “It’s tough, but I think most people have sort of come to grips with the fact that it happened.
“Now,” he added, “we have to move on.”
Matt Hartman contributed reporting.
Disclosure: Justin Kuhn is the spouse of a staff member in The Assembly’s reporting network.
Ben Rappaport is a reporter at the Border Belt Independent. A graduate of the Hussman School of Journalism & Media at UNC-Chapel Hill, he previously worked for the Chatham News + Record.
Erin Gretzinger is a higher education reporter at The Assembly. She was previously a reporting fellow at The Chronicle of Higher Education and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can reach her at erin@theassemblync.com.