Chapter Ten

Back to this world, these things, this now.

Hazel was more aware than most that Cyrus College was on its last legs. Options for moving in a new direction were few, and the momentum carrying them all forward, students, staff, the institution, was towards a very definite sort of cliff, or at least a drop-off like the edge of Auter Creek. The fall might not be too far, but once you were in the water, it was going to be the very devil to get out again.

Her predecessor had not managed the endowment well, to put it kindly. As student numbers had declined, rather than taking steps to either recruit more (or smarter) or to cut costs, he had simply increased the draw, pointing out to the trustees that investment income was up, and that this was a short term expedient.

The short term had been more like ten years of a nearly ten percent average draw, the student body got smaller, and while the last two faculty positions had been left unfilled, reducing costs, deferred maintenance on the aging collection of buildings that made up the campus was looming.

Then the economic collapse, the president's separation package, and Hazel's arrival combined to put her into a truly awkward position. Her predecessor, while a financial idiot, was a personable and generally well-intentioned nice guy. She had to be extremely careful with the trustees (whose behavior could fairly be described as idiotic as well) in sounding like she was blaming him for their current dire situation. This was a time when being right was no defense.

But it was also the case that she had to get the trustees to face facts. Her position here, at St. Fiacre's, just added to the blurring and distraction that probably both kept the previous president and the current board from looking directly at the situation of Cyrus College. There were two endowments, and very specific language about how they could be spent, which is to say the St. Fiacre's Residential Library funds couldn't be spent down on the college campus, and the Cyrus College endowment could not (were there any left) be spent up at the library.

Making the circumstances even odder, she had as chief librarian well-nigh dictatorial powers over policy, staff, and finances for St. Fiacre's, with the sole provision that investment decisions "should be made in consultation with the president of Cyrus College and the chairman of their board of trustees," the stipulation that led to the merging of the two positions some thirty years ago when the first flickers of the college's financial instability became in evidence.

As president of the college, she was largely under the direct authority of the board of trustees, a self-nominating body that had inbred itself into myopia and studied indifference . . . none of which mitigated their ability to block or stifle any new directions for Cyrus College. An elderly emerita of the faculty, now deceased, had shared with Hazel her understanding that this was because Mrs. Woodhull Martin's daughter Zula had planned, before her death, to return to America and settle in as chief librarian herself, keeping a weather eye on the project more her mother's passion in the valley below. But the deaths of both in relatively quick succession meant Zula Maud Woodhull never returned to this country, and her dreamt-of sinecure was now the island in the midst of floodwaters on which Hazel nervously, if securely stood.

So St. Fiacre's was stable and in fact fairly flush with money. The first merged chief librarian/president a few decades back had pushed for placing half the endowment into gold, which the Cyrus College trustees resisted and ultimately blocked, meaning that he then put more than two-thirds of the library endowment into precious metals. The staffing had never been excessive, perhaps even a bit too sparse to properly guide St. Fiacre's into the modern media era of library science, and the fees and scholarships had always been intelligently planned so that costs and budgets required no more than a three or even two and a half percent draw on the burgeoning endowment. It had grown to the point where her financial advisor, an external professional Hazel happily paid for four meetings a year over in Columbus, was warning that they had to spend some of their money soon or face consequences as a tax exempt institution.

Cyrus College's trustees were very proud, excessively and unreasonably so, of the fact that they paid no one and consulted nobody on their financial management. This was surely part of why they now had essentially no endowment to manage. The annual costs of running the college, including what tuition and fees were paid (when they were paid), and even without the maintenance some of the buildings so desperately needed, were going to run the endowment down to zero in less than three years. Other than to ask ritually of Hazel if she could use some of the library endowment to pay their bills, and to hear her equally formulaic "I'm sorry, my hands are tied," they took little or no account of the suggestions she made to them of how they might restructure the college, its mission, and the future of the school which was right now looking incredibly bleak.