South Carolina State University will shut its doors for two years - the football program along with it - according to a plan approved by a South Carolina House budget panel on Tuesday.
The school has fallen on hard times, with enrollment down by a third since 2007, only one in seven students graduating in four years and more than $10 million owed to vendors. The state's plan to fix it would be to wipe the slate clean and start over. The 3,000 students would be sent elsewhere on state-funded scholarships, and the faculty and staff would be fired. The university would close its doors for two years - beginning in July - and then re-open in 2017.
“We are looking at a bankrupt institution,” Jim Merrill, the state representative leading the charge to suspend operations at South Carolina State, told the State. “No one takes any pleasure in recommending this.”
Though no one can deny the dire straits the school finds itself nor the need to find a workable solution out of its current situation, it is far from a guarantee the school will shut down. The State reported Tuesday the budget panel's plan is a "long shot" to pass state legislature, largely because Senate President Pro Tempore Hugh Leatherman is one of South Carolina State's largest advocates.
Still, the nuclear option is on the table.
"Hopefully, the school has a clean slate,” Merrill said. “It’s not the intention of the committee to wipe S.C. State off the planet.”
The odds of the school coming back at all, much less in the form it stands today, would seemingly fall between slim and none should the state close to shut S.C. State's doors. Especially athletics, where athletes and coaches across all sports would be forced to ply their respective crafts elsewhere.
For the sake of South Carolina State's students, faculty, staff, coaches and athletes, as well as universities going through similar hard times elsewhere, here's hoping that doesn't happen.