At Cabrini University, there will be no next year: A chronicling of its final semester

Communication professor John Doyle picked up the May 9 edition of the Loquitur, Cabrini University’s student newspaper.

It was 10 days before Cabrini’s commencement and 11 days before he and every other faculty member at the Radnor college, home of the Cavaliers, would lose their jobs in a planned, sweeping layoff.

“Roll Cavs Forever” is all the front page said. Filling with emotion, he immediately set it down.

» READ MORE: With stats stacked against them, students get help from soon-to-close Cabrini University to enroll elsewhere

“That’s how raw it is,” he said. “I’ll read it in two or three weeks.”

It was the last edition the Loquitur would ever publish. Days earlier, Doyle, 60, an alumnus of the college, who held his wedding reception on campus and who has worked there off and on for more than four decades, had chaperoned the last dance at Cabrini. He had watched the students at the campus radio station produce their last hour of music. He taught his last class.

And for the entire semester, he and his students have been working on a series of videos, chronicling Cabrini’s history, legacy and people, which will be shown at a culminating event on campus Sunday, following the college’s last commencement ceremonies.

For Cabrini, the only college founded by sister Francesca Cabrini’s Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, there would be no next semester, no next year. Hit by falling enrollment and financial pressure, the college announced last June that it will be closing its doors June 30 after 67 years and selling its tree-lined, 112-acre campus to Villanova, a Catholic university just two miles away.

» READ MORE: With Cabrini University closing, where will all their professors go?

Some students transferred before the year began; by the spring, undergraduate and graduate enrollment had fallen to about 800, with only 250 living on campus.

During finals week, a visitor could walk from one end of the campus to the other and see no one.

“It’s quiet here,” the Rev. Peter M. Donohue, Villanova’s president, said to Cabrini president Helen Drinan earlier this month.

“And getting quieter,” Drinan responded.

The university set out this year to make sure undergraduates would continue their education elsewhere, establishing partnerships with several area universities that had similar academic programs and athletics and were willing to match students’ tuition and financial aid packages. Cabrini brought in job coaches and career counselors to help employees plan their next steps. Teams from Villanova and Cabrini examined the campus, deciding what to do with its possessions and how to honor agreements with donors.

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But nothing could prepare employees and students at the school, which has closely followed Mother Cabrini’s “education of the heart” mission, for the emotional toll an imminent closure would take.

Over the last semester, The Inquirer followed Doyle as he worked with his students on the videos, Drinan as she drilled down on final details and students, Abby Flanagan, a senior health sciences major and student government president as she tried to make the final semester the best one, and Rosaisela “Rosie” Ortiz-Pablo, a junior criminology major as she sought to find another university for her senior year.

“I’m just going to start by saying this is going to be a really strange semester,” Doyle told students one January day.

Sitting in his classroom in the communication wing of Founders Hall, he explained that they had been given the monumental task of producing videos for the May 19 “legacy” event, expected to draw more than 2,000 students, staff and alumni. The videos would focus on Cabrini’s mission, its history through the memories of those who worked and learned there and favorite places on campus.

“Can you raise your hand if you turned in an assignment late at Cabrini,” he asked, as a few hands went up. “That can’t happen this time.”

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Doyle, a Norristown native, graduated from Cabrini in 1985 and came back a year later as assistant director and later director of residence life. In 1992, he began teaching at Norristown High School, but continued to work periodically at Cabrini as an adjunct. In 2020, he moved to full time at Cabrini.

Over the course of the semester, his students delved into student newspaper archives dating back decades and strolled the halls of Cabrini with microphones and video cameras, asking students and staff to tell their stories. Every Thursday evening, alumni would visit to share theirs, too.

“Is there anything you’re planning to do this year in celebration of the closing?” Doyle asked 2018 alumna Ashley Sierzega, as the camera rolled.

She told him she and her fiance, a 2019 Cabrini alumnus, were getting married in Cabrini’s chapel June 1 — it would be Cabrini’s last wedding. When they made the decision, they didn’t know the school was closing, she told Doyle.

“So now we feel like it’s the last party,” she said. “All our friends are going to be there that we met through the school and kept through our own lives. It’s kind of going to be like one last hurrah for all of us.”

Doyle wants to film the wedding for a documentary that he and his students are working on but won’t complete until December. In this one, Doyle will liken the college to a patient in hospice, a metaphor he would set out to document through the course of the semester and beyond.

Having recently lost his mother and his father about a decade ago, he couldn’t help but make the comparison.

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“This year’s been like sitting at the bedside of my father when he was dying of lung cancer for a year,” Doyle said of the semester, “and trying to care for my daughters and my wife around me as we watched him getting sicker and sicker.”

Every day, he said early on in the semester, is filled with “triumph, trauma and tragedy.” That day alone he dealt with a student disappointed in what the school had become and determined to transfer, another who had joyously landed an internship after a tough fall semester, and a third who couldn’t get the math class she needed because there weren’t enough students enrolled — she had to take an advanced math class instead.

“She’s scared to death about it,” he said. “Suddenly, there is no opportunity for failure. There’s no summer school and no incompletes this spring.”

A failure would mean a $15,000 tuition bill in the fall if a student wants to complete a degree, he said.

By April, he had concerns about a few students who weren’t attending class. Meanwhile, his own deadline for the legacy videos was weeks away. There were things he needed “more of or better of.”

» READ MORE: With a mounting deficit, Cabrini University eliminates academic leadership positions, including the provost

Life crept in, too. A close friend of Doyle’s from elementary school died. His kids had to put their dog down.

“I’m feeling the wear and tear,” he said.

Cabrini’s small but mighty student government huddled in the lecture hall, planning a “kick-back” party for the campus.

They decided during their mid-March meeting that there would be therapy dogs, games, music and a Mr. Softie truck, a student favorite — and, of course, raffles, including a grand prize of a $150 Phillies gift card.

Flanagan, of Williamstown, and her crew over the course of the semester also planned events for International Women’s Day and Black History Month, a formal dance, and Family Day where students could celebrate and be celebrated with their loved ones. After all, these seniors had already been robbed of their final high school days in spring 2020 due to COVID-19.

Flanagan, like so many students, had a “drive-thru” graduation: She and her parents drove to the front of Williamstown High School; with a mask on, she jumped out, received her diploma, had her picture snapped, and they drove away — albeit in the car that her mother lovingly decorated.

“Our main goal in the final semester is just to do what the students want to do,” Flanagan said

There were fewer to work with. Student government had shrunk to about two-thirds its size from the prior year as some students chose to transfer rather than spend the final year at Cabrini.

“When we started meeting this semester, we were kind of waiting for people, and then I had a moment of realization,” she said. “This person isn’t here. This person isn’t here. OK, this is the new normal, and we have to adapt to that.”

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She used to lead admissions tours, telling prospective students why they should come to Cabrini. This year, the university obviously didn’t need that.

“I was very sad, but it gave me a little drive to make this last year the best it could be,” she said. “I want people to walk away and feel like school wasn’t closing.”

For Flanagan, there were triumphs. Last month, she entered Grace Hall where the kickback event was held and was thrilled to see the room filled with students.

Earlier this month, during Family Day, her parents and sister watched her get inducted into two honor societies. It was meaningful to her, she said, to see the underclassmen enjoy the campus one last time with their families.

On Sunday, she will graduate and have a chance to say her final goodbye to Cabrini.

“The memories I have made will last a lifetime,” she said. “These four years at Cabrini have been the best of my entire life.”

Drinan pointed to the document on her table, titled “Signing and Closing Check List.”

The school’s lawyers had put it together to ensure a smooth closure. It spanned everything from regulatory approvals to donor agreements — the broad, such as making sure layoff notices go out, to the specific, like finalizing the lease for the missionary sisters to continue living on campus in a property that Villanova will own.

“There’s a million details,” she said one day in her office in the Mansion, Cabrini’s signature campus building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Drinan, a Boston native who served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines in the 1970s, has decades of experience in leadership, spending her earlier career in banking and healthcare and then serving as president of Simmons University in Boston for 12 years until 2020. She then moved into consulting.

She came to Cabrini in June 2022 as interim president, with a search planned for a permanent one.

» READ MORE: As Cabrini begins its final year, remaining students note a smaller campus. Where did the others go?

“I wasn’t here a month when I said to myself I’m not sure about a new president,” recalled Drinan, twice a cancer survivor who had both breast and endometrial cancer.

The college’s deficit had mounted to about $6 million in its $45 million budget, and enrollment had slid to about 1,500, down 36% from 2,360 in 2016-17.

By early fall 2022, she decided to eliminate some administrative positions, including the job of provost. But a couple of months later, she knew it wouldn’t be enough and began looking for partners.

She called Donohue, Villanova’s president, and they discussed a solution. By March 2023, they had signed a non-public agreement to explore a sale of the campus, and by June, announced they had a memorandum. The news shook Cabrini’s community to the core. Villanova has not yet said what it will do with the campus.

Having Villanova as a partner allowed Cabrini to stay open another year and plan for an organized closure, Drinan said. Still, she has had to continue to lead, even as employees in key positions, including her director of financial aid and the chief financial officer, left for other jobs.

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The college offered incentives to get employees to stay, but she encouraged those who found good opportunities to take them. And her primary focus was making sure that underclassmen would enroll elsewhere to finish. The numbers looked promising early on: Cabrini invited all undergraduates to meetings in the fall to discuss re-enrollment plans, and 93% came.

By April, though, there were still some students that eluded overtures, Drinan said.

“They are literally pulling kids out of class and saying ‘You need to talk to a counselor,’” Drinan said.

By May 14, Cabrini was down to 31 students, or 7.5% of the more than 400 undergraduate and graduate students, who still hadn’t reported their decision.

The others added up this way: On Sunday, 388 students will graduate or get their certificates; 237 have enrolled at one of the partnership colleges that Cabrini arranged; 88 will attend a non-partnership college; and 47 reported they intend to continue their education, but haven’t decided where, a lag that Drinan said is likely fueled by continuing problems with the new federal financial aid forms.

Three withdrew mid-term. Four are going into the workforce. One is taking a gap year.

“I’m absolutely thrilled with those numbers,” Drinan said. “One of the big risks when a college closes is that kids will just lose track of what they have to do.”

It hadn’t really hit Ortiz-Pablo yet.

She chose Cabrini because of its Catholic mission, welcoming staff, generous financial aid, and proximity to her home in King of Prussia, which allowed her to commute and save money.

Now, it was closing and she still had a year to complete her degree. Almost all of her education had been covered up to this point with scholarships and aid. Her parents worried she wouldn’t find the same arrangement at another school.

“They entered panic mode,” said Ortiz-Pablo, a first-generation college student.

She got busy looking for her next step and decided to apply to St. Joseph’s University, another Catholic school that she had always admired.

Early indications, she said, were that she could get the same financial aid. With a 3.7 GPA and her string of leadership and community service activities, things looked promising.

While she was stunned at the closure announcement, Ortiz-Pablo said she never regretted her decision to attend.

“The school just kind of pushes you,” she said, “challenges you in a way to try to improve all the time, and be a better version of yourself.

For Ortiz-Pablo, a better version materialized: She was co-president of the college’s National Society of Leadership and Success chapter and, in November, went to Harrisburg to lobby legislators to pass a law that would allow undocumented people to get their driver’s license. She helped grow fruits and vegetables at the college greenhouse for those facing food insecurity. And she was inducted into the honor society for foreign language.

By early May, Ortiz-Pablo’s future was no longer uncertain. She would be going to St. Joe’s.

“I looked at the student portal ... and I saw that they accepted all my credits,” she said.

After St. Joe’s, she plans to attend law school, ideally at Yale.

Doyle last week was preparing to conduct the final interview for the legacy videos.

“There’s no way I won’t hit the deadline,” he said confidently, sounding more upbeat than earlier in the semester. “The more I go through this, the more the hospice metaphor is meaningful to me. It’s really about managing grief before death and the way you want to go out.”

He’s angry. He’s sad. He questions some decisions by the college. He hopes that other schools, which undoubtedly will face closure, too, will learn from Cabrini’s lessons.

But many of his students delivered as he had hoped, some exceedingly well. The audience on Sunday will see.

“That, to me, needs to be celebrated,” he said.

And then, his own future lies just footsteps away. On June 1, he’ll cross the street from Cabrini and start a new job teaching at Eastern University.