Dana College’s legacy lives on through alumni, scholarships

Published 1:58 pm Monday, October 12, 2026

Every year, alumni of Dana College gather in Blair as if the buildings still belonged to the college and classes would start again in the fall.

Dana closed in 2010. This year’s homecoming, a celebration and remembrance of the college, is Saturday, Oct. 17. It is open to the public.

Bob Coffey graduated from Dana in 1975. He later served on the Dana College Board of Regents for the college’s last 10 years. “It was a very special place. I think its smallness contributed to that a great deal,” he said. “You essentially lived with people in a relatively small space, and you were with them for those four years. … But I really think that so much of what made it the place that it was, of course, was the faculty.”

“Having a faculty who was dedicated to teaching rather than research … it just became an intimate relationship with them and created too that whole sense of family, I guess.”

Many alumni met their spouses at Dana. Coffey met his wife there. “As someone put it, that we all came in there as left or right shoes and came out a pair,” he said.

“Your dormitory floor was essentially your fraternity or sorority ’cause you went and ate at the cafeteria together, you participated in intramurals together,” he said. “When I was a freshman … we didn’t have a freshman dorm, we didn’t have a freshman floor. We were mixed. And so we got that experience from the older guys that would tell us, ‘Oh, don’t take the class from this guy.’”

To the public, the closing seemed to come out of nowhere. Coffey said the board saw it coming for years. “We were struggling for many, many years financially,” he said. “The financial troubles began before I got on the board. We were in deficit spending mode even then.”

Dana had 1,100 to 1,200 students when he arrived. By the end, it had roughly 500 full-time-equivalent students. “Twenty years before it closed, there was no such thing as an online degree, and that contributed to a loss of enrollment,” he said. “The cost of providing education rose dramatically more than inflation. The upkeep of old buildings cost a lot of money as well.”

The college spent heavily on facilities to compete. “Difficult to attract a student who comes there and the gymnasium is half the size of what they had in school,” he said. “So we made some dramatic improvements in facilities, and it wasn’t enough to bring in the additional students that that cost.”

One of the biggest blows, he said, came when Iowa began offering tuition grants to students who attended private colleges in the state. “When I was in school, almost 50% … of the students were from Southwest Iowa,” he said. “When they started providing those grants, all of a sudden, we were no longer price competitive. … When Dana closed, I think less than 15% were from Iowa. So just those numbers right there would have been enough for us to keep on going.”

The University of Nebraska at Omaha became a residential campus, cutting into Dana’s other prime recruiting area. A new chancellor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln boosted scholarships to keep top students from private colleges. “That just really pulled the rug out from under us,” Coffey said. “At the time, our chairman of the Dana College Board of Regents says, ‘It was a perfect storm.’”

A severe recession followed, and major gifts dried up.

The common belief in the community is that Janet Philipp, Dana’s president from 2005 until it closed, was asleep at the wheel. “I completely disagree with that,” Coffey said. “She kept the college going probably for three more years than what it would have otherwise.”

“Dr. Philipp was not the most personable person in the world, so she rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But she was a more effective business manager than Dr. Christopherson was,” he said, referring to her predecessor, Myrvin “Myrv” Christopherson. “Myrv Christopherson, I loved him to pieces. He was the guy who could stand up there in his booming voice and get people rallied and raise money. … But Myrv Christopherson also wouldn’t take that initiative to say, ‘Hey, we have to cut some spending in these areas where we’re not getting any return for it.’ She did.”

Coffey said the 1988 merger that formed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America also hurt Dana, which had been the American Lutheran Church’s college in Nebraska. “The congregations that fed students to Dana year after year after year, all of a sudden their clergy were told, ‘You can’t favor just Dana anymore,’” he said. “The money that they gave us would not pay for a single faculty position.”

The board kept the depth of the trouble quiet because rivals would use it in recruiting, Coffey said. 

When it became clear the college’s model would not survive, Philipp reached out to for-profit education groups to take on the college’s academic side. “Knowing full well that she’d be out of a job. And yet she did that,” he said. “It was going to be a totally unique program of foreign study.”

According to Coffey, The Higher Learning Commission denied the transfer of academic control.

“Then we had no money,” Coffey said. “If we had gone past the end of July … we had financial commitments that we would have had to attempt to keep, and we couldn’t do it. So we just had to declare that this was it. We’re done.”

Coffey believes the closing was coming.

“I think that the close of Dana was inevitable just because of the cost factors,” he said. “It cost us over a million dollars a year for utilities at Dana in 2010. … How does one of the smallest colleges in the United States gather the resources to do those things?”

The alumni kept the Dana College Foundation going to preserve Dana’s legacy.

“Dana’s legacy is the celebration of what Dana College was, to let people know of its history, to serve as a reminder of the impact that the college had on this region, and to maintain alumni relationships,” he said.

That includes scholarships for descendants of Dana alumni, faculty and staff who attend other colleges, among them Northwestern College in Iowa, Hastings, Buena Vista, Grand Canyon University and Midland.

“We’ve had a couple from Midland, although all of us still hate Midland. The rivalry is still there,” he said.

“When I’m paying my tuition, I’m not paying for the full cost of my education. Somebody else donated money,” he said. “We all, as alumni, recognized the value of those experiences we had. And there are other colleges that provide similar experience, and we want to see that other students get that.”

“As I said, you know, the buildings are just the physical manifestation. It’s all about the experiences that we have, the shared experiences.”

Homecoming draws 100 to 150 people a year, some from as far as Norway, Japan and Africa.

Kringle and Mingle at the archive is held the same morning. The events are separate, but many people attend both.

Homecoming will be in the atrium between the two gymnasiums, now named Dana College Alumni Hall. The foundation secured the naming rights with a gift to Lutheran Family Services for the building’s refurbishing.

The day also includes the dedication of a new state historical marker paid for by the foundation, Athletic Hall of Fame and Distinguished Alum awards, and the Dana College bookstore, where the foundation sells Dana logo gear.