An Ohio college was in crisis. Then presidential politics made things worse.

On a warm Tuesday in early September, Lori Askeland was shifting gears.

Her Native American literature and film class just ended, her English 101 students were expecting her soon, and for the first time in nearly three decades, she wondered what life without teaching would look like.

It was the third week of the semester, and she had assigned her students a TED Talk featuring the acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in which the Nigerian author reflects on the misconceptions she encountered upon moving to the United States for college. Adichie's American roommate was shocked to learn that she even spoke English.

That evening after class, former President Donald Trump took to the debate stage in Philadelphia. From 500 miles away, the small Midwestern city where Askeland works was on the Republican presidential candidate’s mind.

“They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said, spreading inflammatory, debunked claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Over the next week, threats peppered the community. They grew so severe that Wittenberg University, where Askeland has taught since the 1990s, transitioned to remote instruction for a week and professors offered to house international students who feared for their safety amid the swirling anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Before that onslaught, the liberal arts college was facing another crisis: After years of plummeting enrollments, two dozen faculty positions – including Askeland’s – were cut last month. The music and language departments were scrapped completely. Some students, whose majors will disappear by next fall, will have to look for courses elsewhere or graduate early. Forty-five staff jobs were eliminated, too.

The situation at Wittenberg offers a unique window into the challenges confronting higher education in 2024. The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to peak this decade and then taper off, which means colleges like Wittenberg will continue to make controversial budgetary decisions to contend with a shrinking pool of students. Meanwhile, keeping college students and staff free from danger is only becoming more complicated as political divisions deepen, school shootings persist and campus bomb threats become more prevalent.

Over the last month, financial uncertainty, political strife and student safety concerns have descended on Wittenberg's campus. While other schools are navigating those trends at different times to varying degrees, Wittenberg is dealing with all of them at once.

As Mark La Branche, a former college president and the chancellor emeritus of the University of Tennessee Southern put it: “In Springfield, you’ve got a perfect storm.”

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A ‘new normal’

Two Mondays ago, Askeland stood in her office in Hollenbeck Hall. The brick academic building sits on Bill Edwards Drive, a street bearing the name of the grandfather of the chair of Wittenberg’s board of directors – a group whose decision this fall would upend her life.

A typical English professor hideaway, Askeland’s office is littered with books. Stuck to the wall is a 4-year-old poster from when a Chicago dance troupe visited the school – a joyous event that sharply contrasted with the campus’s abrupt closure weeks later as the pandemic began. Next to the flyer is an award the school’s LGBTQ+ club bestowed on her in 2012 for “building a more diverse campus.”

Facing the window, she stretched out her arm and pointed at a red building across the grounds.

“The board has been a mess for years,” she said. But the building she was gesturing toward was where “a lot of the problems started.”

The athletic complex is known around the university as “The Steemer," a reference to its main indoor facility. The name honors Wes Bates, a Wittenberg alum and the CEO of the floor-cleaning company Stanley Steemer International (the one with the catchy TV jingle). When the complex opened in October 2019, the university's president, Michael Frandsen, called it “an investment in Wittenberg’s future.”

That vision of the future placed a big bet on luring potential student-athletes. And it came with a hefty price tag: $50 million.

It was finished just months before the pandemic hit. Between 2019 and 2021, the tuition-dependent school hemorrhaged hundreds of students. By fall 2024, Wittenberg was staring down “the most difficult financial situation we have faced in recent history due in part to a drop in student enrollment,” the president eventually wrote to faculty.

Universities have been losing students since the 2008 financial crisis. But the pandemic dealt their enrollments an unforeseen blow. Most workers with college degrees can still expect to earn more money over their lifetimes than those without them. Yet for university administrators and boards, there’s a demographic shift that’s incontrovertible: Birth rates have declined, and that trend is about to catch up to colleges in a big way.

As the number of high school graduates peaks in the coming years, many less-resourced colleges that rely heavily on tuition revenue face a frightening deficit – especially small, private institutions like Wittenberg. Between next year and the early 2040s, higher education may look a lot different, according to Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Carleton College and an expert in what college administrators have ominously named the “demographic cliff.”

“Effectively, we’re looking at a new normal,” he said. “One way or another, we’re going to have to figure out how to reduce costs.”

The direness of Wittenberg’s finances became clearer last December, when, according to emails reviewed by USA TODAY, faculty were informed at a meeting that the university had hired Huron Consulting Group, a management consulting firm, to look for ways to cut costs. (The university confirmed that Huron was among the advisory entities Wittenberg sought out before issuing its final budgetary recommendations.) The same company was among the firms recruited by West Virginia University in recent years for similar reasons. Last year that school’s leaders voted to cut 143 faculty jobs.

"Huron was engaged by Wittenberg University to help think through its long-term strategy which included expanding current and adding new academic programs to support revenue growth," Allie Bovis, a spokesperson for the firm, said in a statement to USA TODAY. "Huron was not asked to make recommendations regarding headcount reductions and did not recommend faculty reductions."

Seven months after the December faculty meeting, music professor Brandon Jones was driving his family home from a vacation in Montreal when his phone began to flash with a stream of texts and emails. Wittenberg's president had just proposed an “academic restructuring.” The plan recommended cutting 60% of the full-time faculty and pivoting toward significantly more online instruction.

“This is going to be it for me,” thought Jones, who conducts the university’s symphonic band.

On Sept. 5, Jones and all the other professors in the music and language departments were called into an afternoon meeting with the president and provost. An anxious colleague asked him what he thought the gathering was about.

“‘They’re not going to tell us we’re all getting a raise,’” he said.

The conference room full of professors discovered this year would be their last. Roughly two dozen faculty jobs would be eliminated, according to a Sept. 3 email from the president and the chair of the board of directors, along with dozens more staff positions.

In a statement to USA TODAY, Karen Gerboth, a spokesperson for the university, said there were no “easy solutions to the significant and complex challenges facing Wittenberg.”

“Change was urgently needed to balance our budget to ensure the University’s long-term viability,” she said. “We know everyone in the Wittenberg community desires the absolute best for the University, now and for the future; however, we also know not everyone agrees on the right path forward.”

William Edwards, the chair of the board, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Grief, falsehoods and threats

Twenty-four hours after that tense meeting with the soon-to-be-shuttered music and language departments, Askeland, the English professor, received the same grim news over email.

She wasn’t shocked to hear that her job would disappear next year. The estimate of potential layoffs had fluctuated so much she’d lost faith in the projections. Besides, she didn’t want to stay at Wittenberg under these conditions.

“I feel grief,” she said, “because I know what good work can be done at this place.”

What happened in the few days after learning of her layoff was more unexpected. The same day the music and language professors learned of their impending layoffs, a conservative account on the social media platform X posted a screenshot of an anti-immigrant trope about Springfield’s Haitian community.

Many Haitian immigrants have recently settled in the city, drawn by jobs and the low cost of living. That influx has strained local resources and increased Springfield's population by an estimated 25%, according to The Columbus Dispatch, part of the USA TODAY Network.

“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” JD Vance, a U.S. senator representing Ohio and Trump's running mate, wrote in a post on X the following week. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.”

USA TODAY’s fact-checking team has found no credible evidence that immigrants are eating pets. Vance brought up the topic of Haitian immigrants again in his debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz two weeks ago.

"You have got housing that is totally unaffordable," he said, "because we've brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes." (According to Springfield's official website, "Haitian immigrants are here legally.")

Some professors at Wittenberg have struggled to square Vance's current persona with the man who gave a prestigious lecture at the university in 2017. Seven years ago, on a Monday before Halloween, the bestselling author spoke to a packed gymnasium on campus about “Hillbilly Elegy,” his narrative charting the struggles of America’s white working class. A professor who attended that lecture described it as “very well received,” though she noted that Vance was “saying very different things in 2017 than he’s saying now.”

After Trump repeated his running mate's claims in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, bomb threats targeted Springfield’s City Hall building and public school system. Still reeling from the faculty layoffs, Wittenberg’s students and staff barely had time to process it all before the threats came their way, too.

Just days after the debate, an email warned Wittenberg administrators about a campus shooting, according to The Dispatch. Another message the following day claimed a bomb was hiding in a red Honda Civic. Though police found a car matching that description, neither threat was deemed credible.

In a statement to USA TODAY, Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for Vance, distanced the senator from the backlash.

"Sen. Vance condemns these threats and believes those responsible should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law," Schroeder said.

For students, a 'lack of stability'

Wittenberg's campus shifted to online instruction for a week out of an abundance of caution. Vanessa Plumly, a German professor, briefly took a student from France into her own home.

“The parents of these international students were terrified,” she said.

Plumly didn’t see her Haitian neighbors out and about for days. It felt like all the energy had been drained from the town and the campus. She and the French student escaped for a day with a trip to Cincinnati.

Plumly’s job was eliminated in early September, along with the other foreign language positions. Despite Wittenberg's founding by pastors who broke with the German church, the school will no longer have a German program. (The university's website says Wittenberg was created to be an "institution that would serve the educational and cultural needs of new immigrants and new communities.")

The cuts will force students like Allyson Gardner to graduate after just three years. The child of a military family, Gardner, 20, said she’s used to instability: She has lived in many places, from Wyoming to the Netherlands. It’s part of the reason she loves foreign languages.

She originally planned to get certified to teach German in Ohio, but with all the recent changes, that’s no longer possible at Wittenberg. If Gardner opts to spend what would have been her senior year in a master's program instead, she could still get a teaching license. Plumly plans to tag along with her on a campus visit this month to another school in a different state.

"Right now, there’s just a lack of stability in most facets of my life," Gardner said.

And Wittenberg was just starting to feel like home.

Contributing: USA TODAY data and graphics reporter Sara Chernikoff

Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Wittenberg University was in crisis. Politics made it worse.