When it came time to select a college, Leo Peaslee, a graduate of Concord High School, wanted to be in a city. He chose New England College’s satellite campus in Manchester, which the Henniker-based school acquired from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in late 2018.
“I kind of like more urban areas because I like the walkability,” said Peaslee. “I think Manchester gets a pretty bad rap but I didn’t have any problems living there.”
NHIA was facing financial collapse at the time of the merger. For NEC, taking over the Manchester campus meant enlarging its own student body, and expanding its academic offerings to include a bachelor of fine arts degree.
Peaslee, a fan of anime as well as classical oil painting, said his freshman year on the Manchester campus, formally dubbed the Institute of Art and Design at New England College following the merger, went well.
“I liked the content of the classes too. My art history class was global. It was not just Europe,” he said.
As Peaslee remembers it, there were a few red flags about life on NEC’s satellite campus. The cafeteria unexpectedly shuttered at the start of the academic year, meaning he and the other students had to order their meals.
Then, this spring, as finals were approaching, he heard a rumor through a group chat that NEC was shuttering the entire campus.
“Someone said, you know an all caps message with a lot of typos, ‘They're shutting down our school,’ and I was like 'okay,'” he remembers thinking. “'I know that a lot of stuff has been going awry, but it can't possibly be shutting down.'”
In mid-April, NEC announced it would no longer operate the Manchester campus. Students would instead be offered a spot at the school’s main campus in Henniker. NEC pointed to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the student body, which shrunk attendance down to just 126 students.
But for many of those students, as well as the broader arts community in Manchester, the announcement left a bruise. For more than 120 years, first as the Institute of Art, and then in the first years after the New England College merger, the campus provided community arts offerings at a reasonable price for both adults and college-age students, including certificates in areas including photography.
The campus revolved around French Hall, a building erected in 1916 just across the street from the Manchester public library. It was funded by Emma Blood French, an early benefactor of the school.
Last month, Elizabeth Hitchock, a former student and board member for the Institute, walked the building’s perimeter, bending down to pick up a piece of trash on the sidewalk.
“Beautiful classrooms, an amazing stage and performing arena,” she said of the building. “It's got gallery space. It's just beautiful.”
Hitchcock, who also owns a bookstore in downtown Manchester, said NEC’s decision to shutter the campus will impact the surrounding community. Though the school was never giant —at its peak, she estimated 500 students attended—they had a presence.
“The economic impact that 500 students wandering around our city has is gigantic,” she said, noting the employees and staff also contributed to the economy. “It's just such an important fabric of what we have in Manchester and what we have always had in Manchester.”
After learning that NEC was floating a sale of French Hall as part of a package of buildings acquired in the merger, Hitchcock as well as other arts patrons began organizing in opposition. In op-eds, the contingent argued that French Hall, as well as endowments previously given to NHIA, including a $24 million gift in the 1990s from local arts patron Mary Fuller Russell, could not simply be used by NEC for other purposes.
“The intent was for Manchester, not for Henniker,” said Hitchcock. “If someone gave money for Henniker to have that, I'd be all on board. But someone gave money for that to exist in Manchester.”
NEC views the legal strings attached to previous gifts differently. Wayne Lesperance, NEC’s president, said the school also never could have foresaw having to shutter the campus.
“I was part of the team that made the merger happen. I really came to have great affection for the campus in Manchester and especially the faculty and students that I got to work with,” Lesperance said recently. “It hurt to make this decision.”
According to Lesperance, the satellite campus broke even financially for NEC in its first year, and the school had plans to enlarge its class offerings and activities. But then Covid-19 arrived; online learning was hard for everyone, but perhaps hardest for art majors who missed out on the benefits of in-person studio time.
The student body shrunk from approximately 300 in 2019 to just 126.
Since the merger, the college has lost $4.5 million in Manchester, according to Lesperance. He characterized closing the campus this year as a “business decision” done to “protect the institution.”
Lesperance also said that NEC acquired slightly more than $11 million when it assumed NHIA’s assets and debts. Currently, he said, the endowment is worth about $15 million, but that’s not money, from his perspective, that can only be spent on serving the arts in Manchester.
“Does it have to be spent? That's part one, and it doesn't. And part two is, does it have to be spent in Manchester? And it's our position that there's nothing that says that that's the case,” he said.
Nevertheless, Lesperance said at the end of July that NEC has decided to retain French Hall. The school will use the building as a community arts space, though he wasn’t able to share firm plans. The building could serve as a hub for arts education for college-bound students, and may include a maker-space, he said. The details are still being sorted out, as are any potential partnerships with local arts institutions.
NEC made another announcement earlier this summer, though, that may have further damaged its relationships with some in the arts community in Manchester.
In June, the school announced it wasrelaunching its football program after a five-decade hiatus. Brad Cook, a Manchester attorney who represents the Currier Museum and wrote an op-ed critical of the campus closure, said the move was a “public relations snafu.”
“They can't do arts in Manchester, but they can do a football team in Henniker?” Cook asked.
Lesperance defended the football expansion, noting that it was years in the making, and wasn’t part of the calculus when deciding the fate of the Manchester campus.
“Football pays for itself,” he said. “We've been able to fundraise on football in a way that we've not been able to fundraise for anything else.”
About 80% of the students impacted by the Manchester campus closure have opted to take classes in Henniker. But for Leo Peaslee, attending art school in a small town doesn’t appeal. He’s going to take a gap year, and figure out his next steps.
“I kind of lost a lot of my identity through it, too, because like my whole life, I've been, like, I'm gonna be a college kid. I'm going to go to college,” he said.
“And then I am no longer in college. I'm like, what am I doing?”
That same question—what comes next—remains unanswered for a lot of people who care about the arts in Manchester.
