When a college goes under, everyone suffers. But faculty at Mount Ida feel a particular sense of betrayal following its abrupt closure announcement.

Colleen Flaherty:

Bad news is often obvious in retrospect: unremarkable events become harbingers; seemingly unrelated developments become signs.

That isn’t the case, however, for the faculty at Mount Ida College, which announced April 6 that it is closing at the end of the semester. Instead, the soon-to-be-unemployed professors say, there were signals — including from the administration — that the college was doing well, or at least better than it had in some time.

The incoming freshman class had the highest grade point average in years, for example. There were also the 12-month faculty contracts delivered in March, assuring annually assigned professors and, by extension, their tenured colleagues, that the college would at least live to see another year.