Mary Pope Hutson “absolutely” remembers exactly where she was when she heard the news.
“I was sitting in a convention center in Sacramento, California, preparing to speak to 400 land trust representatives from all over California,” Hutson recalls about that March day in 2015. “I was sitting at a table with young people from 4-H who were interested in conservation. It was very comfortable sitting there visiting with them about their futures in conservation. Then my phone started blowing up.”
Her alma mater had just announced it was going to close.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Hutson, a 1983 graduate of Sweet Briar College who in 2015 was executive vice president of the D.C.-based Land Trust Alliance. “I was awash with grief. How could this happen? Why didn’t alumnae know there might be a problem?” When her time came to speak, “I quickly threw out my speech and started giving a speech about the responsibility of organizations to their stakeholders.”
After her talk, Hutson had to fly to Texas to speak to another group of land trust professionals. She remembers running through the airport, trying to talk to other Sweet Briar graduates on the phone to piece together what they knew. By the time Hutson arrived at her layover in Phoenix about two hours later, Sweet Briar alumnae had already organized a national conference call, a small precursor of what was to come. Hutson joined in from the baggage claim.
“Imagine hundreds of Sweet Briar alumnae talking with passion and despair,” Hutson says. Finally, she interrupted: “Ladies, I appreciate your passion, but we need a plan.”
Fortunately for Hutson, her flight to Texas was canceled, buying her a bit more time. That night she and other alumnae started planning the fundraising campaign for what became Saving Sweet Briar — and an unlikely but ultimately successful legal bid to take over the school from a board that had lost faith in the mission of the women’s college in Amherst County.
All that drama is now more than eight years in the rearview mirror. Sweet Briar today remains very much open and alive — and Hutson sits in the second-floor office of Fletcher Hall as the school’s 14th president, and the first alumna to hold the position. Even after all this time, the Sweet Briar story continues to hold some surprises.
By most standards, Hutson was an unconventional choice for Sweet Briar’s presidency after Meredith Woo closed out six years. Hutson did not come from academia, and her path to college administration was an unusual one that saw her spend time dealing with both wild animals and disaster relief. Given her background as a key fundraiser for Saving Sweet Briar, though, Hutson might have been the perfect choice for the position.
The reason that this is appearing as a column under the “opinion” category and not a news story is that I have definite opinions about Sweet Briar. I’d never been on the campus — never knew anyone who had gone there — when the news about its closure broke. I was editorial page editor for The Roanoke Times then and became something of a cheerleader for the alumnae — not out of sentiment but because the facts seemed to be on their side. The school was never in as bad a shape as the male-led board made it out to be. I met Hutson — universally referred to as “Mary Pope” — back then, and we’ve had several occasions to talk Sweet Briar business over the years since. But it wasn’t until after her presidential appointment that we had a chance to talk about what led her to Sweet Briar in the first place.
She grew up in western North Carolina; her father was head of a private boys’ school near Asheville and had previously been headmaster at a private school in Tennessee, both rural locations with lots of land. “I guess that’s why I loved biology,” she says. “We could run wild everywhere on those campuses. The environment was embedded in my ethos.”
Hutson had another interest as well. “I also happened to have a pretty good tennis game,” she says. She looked at one school in Virginia that told her she wouldn’t make its tennis team. She won’t say which school that is, but it’s one that Sweet Briar played. “I didn’t lose one match against that team,” she says. Hutson is not without a competitive streak.
Hutson had some relatives who had attended Sweet Briar and a camp counselor had recommended it. She’d grown up around single-sex schools, and Sweet Briar felt natural to her. She played all four years on the tennis team, earning her a future spot in Sweet Briar’s Athletic Hall of Fame. Biology proved more troublesome. “I started off as a biology major — pre-med — and then hit the chemistry wall,” she says. She pivoted to international politics instead.
Within a few years of graduation, she was working for the U.S. Department of the Interior as the Guam Desk Officer, where she dealt with typhoons. “I coordinated disaster relief for seven Pacific Islands,” she says. As a liaison to the Virgin Islands, she dealt with Hurricane Hugo in 1989. “I always said it was good preparation for Saving Sweet Briar,” she says. The following year, she was named a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to Kenya. In Nairobi, she got to know the famed conservationist Richard Leakey. “I spent as much time on the weekends as I could going on safari,” she says. “I really began to focus my career in land conservation” — a combination of her original interest in biology with her later interest in politics.
She wound up in Charleston, South Carolina, working for the Historic Charleston Foundation, the first in a series of conservation-related jobs that eventually led to the Land Trust Alliance job that had her speaking in Sacramento. For the next three months, Hutson worked two jobs — her regular day job with the land trust, then volunteering at night with Saving Sweet Briar. “It was a wild and wooly 90 days,” she says. There’s probably a case study somewhere to be written about that effort — for something that came together spontaneously, it was a well-organized operation. The alumnae formed three teams: legal, fundraising and communications. On the fundraising team, Hutson took the lead on major donors. Within 90 days, Saving Sweet Briar had raised $21.5 million in gifts and pledges, and also won a legal case that was fast-tracked to the Virginia Supreme Court. Hutson emphasizes she was just one part of that fundraising — “hundreds of people were fundraising,” she says. Under mediation set in motion by then-Attorney General Mark Herring, a settlement was reached — the old board was out, a new board came in.
Hutson was surprised to read a newspaper account that listed her as one of the new board members — that’s how quickly things came together. Many boards meet quarterly, if that. The new Sweet Briar board met 15 times in the fall of 2015 alone as it set about rebuilding the whole operation. Phil Stone, the former president of Bridgewater College, had come out of retirement to lead Sweet Briar on an emergency basis. “I remember telling him, ‘You’ve got to get a new vice president of alumnae relations,’” Hutson says. “He said, ‘The one I want is not available.’ I said, ‘Do you want me to give the number? I’ll call.’ He said, ‘Well, it’s you.’ I said, ‘I’m working in land conservation.’ He said, ‘You can work in land conservation here at your alma mater.’”
Hutson went to work for Sweet Briar. “It’s really hard to say no to Phil Stone,” she says.
Stone, now retired again, puts things like this: “Persuading Mary Pope Hutson to join our administration was critical to our success in restoring Sweet Briar to fiscal strength.”
In the eight years since the attempted closure, Sweet Briar has raised $140.8 million and has now embarked on a $130 million capital campaign. Sweet Briar also has been busy renovating facilities and establishing new programs, most notably an agricultural program that now includes a greenhouse, vineyards and an apiary on its vast 2,840-acre campus. (For comparison purposes, the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg is about 2,600 acres.) Now, Hutson says, “We are well positioned to soar.”
While we talked, she unrolled a long document, printed in Sweet Briar’s colors of pink and green, that charted out where the school has been and where it’s headed.
Raising more money is one goal. The school’s endowment stands at about $70 million, a little higher than it was when the school almost closed. “We want to grow that to over $100 million,” she says. (The current figure puts Sweet Briar on a par with Shenandoah University and ahead of Averett University, Ferrum College, Marymount University and Mary Baldwin University, according to a report by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. It was Sweet Briar’s endowment that originally alerted me that finances weren’t as dire as the old board claimed. While every school wants a bigger endowment, Sweet Briar’s has never been out of line with other schools.)
Growing enrollment is another goal. The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia lists Sweet Briar’s enrollment at 700 for the fall semester before the board tried to shut it down; 320 students came back the following year. Enrollment is now up to 465, and Hutson has set a goal of getting it to 650. “There are about 30 of us who meet every other week to talk about enrollment,” she says. Over the last seven months, there’s been a 26% increase in applications.
Enrollment is a challenge for every college, with the so-called “enrollment cliff” looming — a demographic tipping point where the number of college-age students is going to start declining. Hutson talks up how Sweet Briar has positioned itself as a “niche institution” — it’s one of only two women’s colleges with an engineering program and its agricultural program further sets it apart. Those are also assets she believes can be leveraged. Engineering students have already built a solar-powered golf cart to transport visitors around campus (I saw it but did not get a ride). Hutson is looking to save energy costs by converting Sweet Briar’s 1938 steam plant into a geothermal plant that would tap heat from underground. She’s hoping the school’s engineering students can gain experience by working on that.
Hutson believes all these goals and others can be achieved by the school raising its national profile.
“I’ve been called a nontraditional president,” Hutson says, but Sweet Briar also has a nontraditional background. “We worked on saving, then stabilizing. Now it’s time to secure the future.” The will of Indiana Fletcher Williams that set up Sweet Briar in 1901 referred to the school as a “perpetual memorial” to her late daughter. It was that will that offered the legal opening the alumnae needed to get into court. Hutson offers this advice as Sweet Briar moves into its next phase: “Perpetuity is expensive.”
