Students, faculty and staff are long gone from Notre Dame College. Yet their presence – and their stuff – still lingers across the Northeast Ohio campus.
One of those items is an April 2024 calendar tacked to a bulletin board, showing events happening the month before the college closed. Officials cited ongoing financial and enrollment issues as motivating factors. Notre Dame and 16 other small nonprofit private colleges closed across the country that year, a record high.
In a Notre Dame art studio, a plate of long-dried red paint sits next to what appears to be a partially completed statue. A former administrator’s office now houses only a dusty desk, two rogue sets of keys and stacks of manila folders.
Several goodbye messages pop up on walls and whiteboards across Notre Dame’s 10 buildings, reminiscent of yearbook messages hastily scrawled on the last day of school.
“It was great while it lasted,” one said.
Notre Dame College enrolled about 1,400 students, but its campus – in this current, almost-apocalyptic form – won’t be around for much longer.
The property sold earlier this month, and thousands of campus possessions were auctioned off online last week as part of a court-ordered sale. As those deals wrapped up, Signal Statewide visited to get a first-hand look at what gets left behind when a college shuts its doors.
Tractors, video games among items auctioned off
Notre Dame’s financial woes didn’t end when the college closed. A federal judge appointed a receivership to liquidate Notre Dame’s assets in an attempt to pay off its debts, including a $20 million claim against the campus from Bank of America. Toledo’s Pamela Rose Auction Company and Georgia-based Auction Management Corporation are selling the college’s possessions.
Auction Management Corporation’s Alex Robey said he found the campus in “shambles” when he arrived for the first time in April. The grass hadn’t been cut. Classrooms had open drawers and scattered items – if, he said, they were even there at all.
“There were some closets that I came across where it’s like, ‘Hey, there should be a lot of microscopes in here,’ and there’s not a microscope to be found,” he said.
Robey surveyed what remained and ultimately put together 899 online listings for the two-day sale. It included lots of “lots,” auction speak for similar items sold as a group.
The sale gave a glimpse into how the college’s financial troubles may have manifested on campus even before it closed. Many pieces showed signs of wear or age. One tractor – that, per its listing, didn’t come with a key and may have a bad transmission – received a high bid of $6,600. A video game machine (winning price: $340) in the student center was released more than 30 years ago.
The eclectic mix of items also reflected colleges’ broad slate of responsibilities. A paper cutter and hole punch hit $70. That’s nearly double the bid received for the full contents of the men’s locker room, which included 32 lockers and a mini-fridge.
Robey estimated the auction could bring in up to $300,000.
What comes next for the campus of Notre Dame College
A few things didn’t make it to the auction block. Robey was “specifically asked not to sell any [computer] servers or any filing cabinets,” he said, potentially signaling further legal action or investigations. His company also chose not to sell any signage.
“If it’s got Notre Dame’s name on it, with lawsuits and items of that nature, we tend to just not even stick our toes in it,” he said.
Those pieces – along with unsold auction items, the many personal trinkets strewed about and everything else remaining on campus – all get turned over to the campus’ new owners. Akron Children’s Hospital won a separate auction for the nearly 50-acre site. Its $8 million bid now awaits federal approval to move forward.
Notre Dame’s sale is the second auction of a closed college Robey has worked on over the past year. His company auctioned off the remaining maintenance and athletics equipment from Limestone University in South Carolina.
Closing a college remains a rare move. Those that do close tend to be small for-profit institutions enrolling few students.
Still, a recent estimate projects more than a quarter of the country’s 1,700 nonprofit private campuses – places similar to Notre Dame and Limestone – may shutter over the next decade given the financial and enrollment challenges those schools face.
For Robey, he envisions these college auctions becoming a bigger chunk of his future business. He’s already thinking about potential next steps.
“Once this thing gets closer to completion, emails are going to be flying,” he said.
