The higher ed bubble cometh.

Oregon Live reports.

Enrollment plunges at Marylhurst University, as feuds, financial losses threaten recovery

At first glance, nothing appears amiss at Marylhurst University.

The private liberal-arts school sits 10 miles south of Portland between Lake Oswego and West Linn, its manicured lawns and ornate stone buildings fringed by dark woods and the languid Willamette River.

Sunshine highlights angular features of a 1950s house designed by the late Northwest architect Pietro Belluschi and reassembled this year at Oregon’s oldest Catholic university. Soft rays illuminate stained-glass windows in a newly renovated chapel.

Yet Marylhurst by day is a ghost campus. Dog walkers sometimes outnumber students, who traipse past dorms closed for 40 years. Beneath the pastoral veneer is an institution in crisis, bleeding from firings, infighting and financial losses and cuts that slice to its academic core.

Students, many of them older learners taking a course or two at a time, say classes have been cut or consolidated, complicating paths to degrees. Daniel Cosley, a part-time music professor, distilled widespread frustration with President Melody Rose’s administration in a resignation e-mail sent to more than 350 people July 1.

“I will no longer participate in a … scheme built on the backs of students amassing crippling lifetime debt and the labor of faculty who live on pathetically low wages,” Cosley wrote. “I choose dignified poverty over exploitation and indentured servitude.”