History is paved with confusing announcements. Elon University broke national news when it announced a merger with Queens University of Charlotte on Sept. 16. Both boards of trustees approved the motion unanimously, but the general alumni and student body had little time to digest before the announcement.
The Queens-Elon merger shows Elon’s overconfidence in its geographic fixation. Elon uses strange terms to define success. We build new buildings and acquire instead of focusing on the endowment.
Elon needs new buildings to point to. We swoop in and grab up land. We speak in the language of restless expansion. Welcome to the Elon Empire. The motherland of the bird is expanding.
It’s pretty easy to see how this is bad timing. Universities face an enrollment cliff and dwindling populations. In response to this, we go out of our way to merge with a financially failing university over a hundred miles away from us.
This is not logical. It is evidence of an Elon tradition that went too far.
Elon has a fixation on qualifying its success with physical growth. Go on a walk through campus. You’ll see why tours are a big deal here. They have a lot of buildings to point to, like a guide in Greece pointing to ruins.
Outside of Richard W. Sankey hall, tour guides lead groups around, while gesturing at buildings. The steel frame of the Health EU building hangs in the distance. The construction site used to be an open field. Distant sounds of steel come close to disorienting the guide’s extroversion. There is a legacy of physical growth as progress on campus.
This legacy can be traced with how much we spend. The Health EU Building will cost $60 million, the East Neighborhood Commons cost $19.7 million and Founders and Innovation Hall cost $31 Million. A rough estimation of $110.7 Million since 2022. For perspective, the most recent endowment statistic was $322 million.
So think about it.The endowment is our pool of money to shield a university from years of downturns. We’ve spent 34% of our 2023 endowment. The money didn’t come straight from the endowment, but it reveals a lot.
The growth is the result of the legacy of Leo Lambert. Elon University followed an arch of inextinguishable growth and renown from 1999 to 2018. Elon University reached new heights during the Lambert era. The campus gained 100 new buildings. This growth did great things for Elon. His growth is the reason why Elon is so known today, but the time for speedy growth is over.
We seem to still be stuck in the Lambert Era of growth. This shows monetarily. We paid him $354,116 in 2024, a little over half of what the president of Queens makes. The president of Queens makes $632,710, according to most recent public non-profit information. Lambert sounded the alarm on prioritizing the endowment himself in a 2005 column to the university, but we remain in an era of growth and spending.
The university withholds most of the information about the merger, leaving us in a vague, conversational limbo. I’ve heard the same conversation a dozen times.
“Hey, did you hear that we are merging with Queens in Charlotte?”
“Damn, that’s crazy”
“Yeah…”
“Do you know why that’s happening?”
“No”
That’s about where the average conversation stops. Alumni Jack Duval was so affected by the change that he started an organization called No Elon Merger. An ad from the organization appeared in the Sept. 17 edition of the Pendulum, calling the merger the, “Worst Idea in Elon’s History.” Then further down, the ad reads, “Long Live Elon!”
Duval previously was president of the Elon Alumni Association. He graduated in 93’ and manages a cryptocurrency hedge fund. His voice sounded warm and logical over the phone. Duval is against the merger because he wants to keep Elon special as a liberal arts school.
“It just doesn’t make sense from a business perspective,” Duval said.
In acquiring Queens University, Duval said that Elon is taking a step back to what it was in the 80’s. The merger is strange, Duval said, since Elon could have waited to buy the campus with “cents to the dollar, literally.”
The basic point Duval emphasized was that the merger reflects a trend that takes away from Elon’s central liberal arts focus, an environment he remembers fondly for its tight knit community. Duval played on the football team and got his master’s degree in economics at The New School.
“It balkanizes Elon further and it’s basically a big distraction,” Duval said.
The small community and liberal arts focus, Duval said, made the university great when he went there. Now the university’s impact is being diluted through professional schools and different campuses.
“Connie Book, God bless her, has many great qualities, she’s a great human being, but she knows nothing about this,” Duval said. “She doesn’t have a team.”
Elon hired New Boston Consulting Group in Durham. Duval estimated that Elon would need at least 15 full-time employees for the merger to go smoothly.
Duval stresses the importance of maintaining an endowment in case Elon strikes some years of bad enrollment. Duval said that Elon had already seen a drop in enrollment.
This is true. Elon’s enrollment numbers dropped 11.6% this year. There is some research to suggest that the next generation is less passionate about college. It seems that we could use a little money in the bank.
The official press release teased gradual communications for a “more developed vision.” As opposed to poking around at how unexpected this is, we should maintain attention with what we are worried about. I hope that by taking in a broke university, we are not going to cut any of our great faculty. Like Duval, I hope that we focus on the endowment so this great school can continue for generations.
History doesn’t strike at once, it rolls across the mind to form a gradually worrying realization.
The alumni, students and faculty have until summer to wait on the deal to finalize. We have until then to reckon with the details. I know Elon will reveal some details to sweeten the deal. We’ve got some great people working within administration.
I like a good metaphor. We selected the phoenix mascot in the Lambert era as a smart historical jab at our growth following the devastating 1923 fire. But in myth, the phoenix returns to ash. I hope they have a plan they aren’t telling us, a plan that would maintain the embers of growth, instead of returning to ash. It’s a part of the cycle tour guides like to focus on a little less.