I first got the news that Eastern Nazarene College was closing when I was rushing to work—through a text message in my group chat, out of all places, then a mass email sent to the student body. While I couldn’t read the official email until almost 10:00pm that night, hearing the news from my friends gave me more comfort than a mass email would have anyway.
ENC’s closure was shocking to me. I was thrown into a whirlwind of questions about my future; I had a plan that seemed to me like it was written in stone. Having that shifted so quickly shook my beliefs about the permanence of planning…also making it a rough summer.
Several days after the news, I started thinking about the people who dedicated their lives to ENC because they believed in it as a school. The librarian who attended and worked at ENC her whole life, consistently helping me overcome technological issues. My coach, who had committed so much of his time and energy to rebuilding our team. The professors who lived, worked, and dedicated their stories to ENC. I was even thinking of all the students with stories like mine, yet we were all vastly different.
I think back to my first full day on campus as a freshman, which consisted of two soccer practices and three meals with a group of women I had met the day before. These were women who went from strangers to family so fast that I can’t quite put my finger on when the shift happened. Living doors away from each other in our temporary preseason dorms, we quickly bonded—they became my two closest friends throughout my three years at ENC.
We made that hall akin to our own house. The lounge became where we met every day before meals, then where we dropped after our last practice, typically not moving a muscle until dinner. This was our daily routine. The profile picture on my phone is one from that first week, a ridiculous photo of my friend Dee doing something I guess you could call a “dance move” as we settled in one night to watch Outer Banks.
There’s also a photo in my camera roll of my friend Mack, posing with the laptop we used to watch shows together at the time. My sophomore year, we were leaving one of our last morning practices of the spring season and reminiscing on the past two years. Mack and I agreed that soccer had been simultaneously one of the best and most challenging parts of our college careers, and a teammate told us, “There was no way it would be the same without the two of you.” Soccer, and my college experience, was made up of the people, specifically these two women, more than anything else.
The same year, I overheard a freshman on campus refer to me as “that coffee girl.” There was nowhere else quite like “Hebrews” at ENC; it was the hub of the campus. I had worked there since the second semester of my freshman year. No matter what time of day it was, there was always someone there to talk to. Students would often congregate there before chapel and walk over together. It was more than just a coffee shop; it was one of the main places that facilitated a community at ENC. I started working there because I had experience in coffee shops and needed an on-campus job. But by the end of my freshman year, it became less like work and more like a way to stay connected with the community that I felt privileged to be a part of.
The church was also a place of community, and a strong institution at ENC. Students would constantly talk about late night remixes and their own involvement in off campus churches. My favorite part of Sundays at ENC was a post-church lunch at a family’s house from the Weymouth church of the Nazarene.
While the woman who hosted luncheons was juggling a full-time job, children, and a husband, she still set aside time to make meals from scratch and talk about faith. She was intentional in her support, consistently attending soccer home games, holding posters and cheering—I deeply appreciated this since I didn’t typically have family that could get away to support me at these games. The couple was essentially our family away from home.
Academics at ENC posed both a large margin to succeed, and gain a lot, but also to succeed and gain next to nothing. The professors invested in you, but you also had to invest in them. My advisor my freshman and sophomore year was one of the most eccentric women I knew. She walked around with big hats that looked like they came directly from London, and held an investment in the arts that few other people could mirror. She knew just about every big name, and small names too, in the literary world.
My advisor would debate their literary achievements and their unique writing styles with passion and ease. She encouraged me and facilitated my own immersion into some beautiful writers throughout my freshman and sophomore year. She had what seemed like lifetimes of experiences working in correctional facilities and working as an advocate for women post-incarceration. Every class was a new astounding statistic of the state of the justice system within the United States, accompanied with a narrative about a woman or man that she knew who lived out that statistic.
Some of the beliefs that I had so ingrained in myself that I thought would never shake came crashing down throughout her classes. I also had a special spot in my heart for my classes with a history professor my sophomore and junior year. He started and taught an African American literature class, and a civil rights movement class which were some of my favorite classes of my semesters. He explored literature from all time periods throughout the development of the United States and had a deep infatuation with James Baldwin.
If there was one thing that I got out of his class it was to consistently attempt to complicate the narrative of history, and any story I hear throughout my own life. My literature professor held together a dying major at ENC for as long as she could just because she had a passion for literature. My crime law and justice professor put so many of her own stories into her classes that she humanized a sector of the justice system that has consistently been dehumanized. My history professor championed new classes at a school that was consistently resistant to change. These professors had passion at ENC—they weren’t just there to get a check.
There are a lot of things that people can say about the closure of ENC, from immensely negative to vastly positive, but it truly is a loss to so many people, and it is a loss that should be grieved. To properly grieve, time needs to be given to share stories about the people there, so this piece is a dedication to those who made Eastern Nazarene College what it was to me.
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