We Knew… We Should Have Known

In 2025 our small rural college on the shore of Lake Superior closed. We tell the story, or at least our experience of it, while immersed in a broader tale of similar college closure across the country. The story that unfolds represents a troubling of the methods that telegraph the factors leading to the erasure of these unique places. These factors are rooted in a wider shift in the cultural narrative, one centered on ever more striated space and the state sanctioned social sciences that police the methods of that striation. Through narrative, as both approach and stance, we evoke the impossible to quantify experience of college closure both on faculty and community. Troubling method for us enables a counter narrative to emerge, one of rhizomes and connection instead of hierarchies and conformity. While we are short on concrete solutions, we tell these stories in the hope it prepares others edging toward precarity.