A college president and loyal donors transform a classic mill town.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE C olleges and universities might be ivory towers, but at the base of these towers are the cities in which they live and often thrive tax-exempt. Town and gown are inextricably linked and, often, a romance made in Hell. Yale, where I went to graduate school, had a notably sour relationship with New Haven.

Being indigenous, I tended to take the city’s side. Yale hogged prime real estate, walled itself off from what the school, more or less, considered riffraff, and championed the catastrophic experiment called urban renewal. It eventually became a good citizen, as it is today, after exhausting all the ways of being a bad one.

Colby College in Waterville in central Maine shows scalawag dons and deans what a good, creative partnership looks like. A few years ago, the college, city officials, businesses, and civic groups combined to resuscitate Waterville’s downtown, using the arts as a foundation. Local, commonsense planning and $100 million from Colby yielded a new, smart, and various arts center and other improvements in the heart of what had been an old, sad mill town. State, local, and federal governments and investors added another $100 million.

The new Schupf Art Center is the $18 million centerpiece of an arts complex that unites Waterville’s opera house, built in 1902, with three new cinemas that are now the home of the Maine Film Center and the yearly Maine International Film Festival. There’s also a new, 24/7 clay studio with eight pottery wheels and three kilns for local potters and young people learning how to make art. The Colby art museum will also have a big, new downtown gallery in the building in addition to its on-campus home.

This 32,000-square-foot complex connects to the old opera house. It’s an airy, practical space and — kudos to Colby — plays harmoniously with Main Street’s early-20th-century look. Most of the old buildings are brick and granite, with spots of brownstone and terra-cotta. The new art center keeps the scale of Main Street. Its façade is brick with high windows signaling welcome and transparency and not ego.

I know Colby well because the college’s art museum has a distinguished history and first-rate collection, mostly of American art. Waterville, with about 16,000 people, has always been the market town for central Maine. It’s also blessed by nature with the Kennebec River and the sweeping, placid Belgrade Lakes. Colby, a fine, small liberal-arts college, was chartered in 1813, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. Its pretty Georgian Revival campus is on the edge of town.

Waterville was once an industrial center. Workers made log haulers, paper plates, shoes, paper pulp, bolts of fabric, and shirts, and businesses made money. Dams on the Kennebec produced power.

Let’s not forget pleasure. Early on, Waterville had an opera house, movie theaters, department stores, and specialty shops for jewelry, fancy hats, and fine cigars. Colby added jobs and cachet.

Waterville’s a political fulcrum, too. Senators Ed Muskie and George Mitchell were from Waterville, as is Paul LePage, Maine’s governor from 2010 to 2018. LePage eagerly boosted the Colby-Waterville partnership while he was in power.

The city’s residential architecture is New England vernacular and Victorian eclectic. Its banks look staid, sturdy, and solvent. Colby’s lovely. Downtown has a nice, old-time feel, personable, human-scale, and solicitous, and looks ready to bustle. The surrounding towns are very rural Maine. Mainers tend to be solid, rugged people. All in all, I see this part of the world as a real place, and a good place.

Alas, urban renewal in the ’60s and ’70s, locally and scornfully called “urban removal,” diminished Waterville’s historic downtown. Lots was done on the cheap. The interstate highway brought chain stores to land by its exits. Downtown couldn’t compete. The mills closed. Waterville sat forlorn. There are a hundred places like it in northern New England.

I’m optimistic that the Schupf Center will make a big difference. It took 50 years and one disaster after another for Yale and New Haven to understand that sometimes the road to prosperity — and a good life — is paved with culture. New Haven’s industrial and downtown shopping sectors were as dead as Nathan Hale, but the arts in New Haven always thrived. Whatever revival New Haven is experiencing is through the arts, in partnership with Yale.

The Schupf Center and the opera house will work in tandem with the Colby’s new performing-arts center, now under construction. Together, they’ll give Waterville Maine’s equivalent of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, the premiere venue for performances for the entire region.

Nothing happens without movers and shakers, and that’s truer in education and the arts than in almost any sector. Their ideas and commitment are essential, but so is their inspiring leadership.

Among the movers and shakers at Colby, and the keys to the Waterville revitalization, are the Lunder and Alfond families, related by blood, Colby degrees, generosity — and shoes. Harold Alfond founded Dexter Shoe Company, maker of midline shoes near Waterville, in 1956. Alfond was a self-made man and kept the business in the family as it grew and prospered. His nephew, Peter Lunder, a Colby alumnus, was Dexter’s president in 1993 when his phone rang. Warren Buffett had come a-callin’.

Would the family be interested in selling Dexter? Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett said, wanted a midline-shoe company to diversify its manufacturing portfolio. They agreed on a price — $433 million — after which Buffett asked, “Do you want cash or Berkshire Hathaway stock?” Lunder said, “We’ll take stock.” Thus a deal was struck.

Buffett later called the purchase of Dexter “the most gruesome mistake” of his career, and he’s said it over and over, in interviews, his autobiography, and his letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. “It’s one for the Guinness Book of World Records,” Buffett once said, to be found under “B” for “blunder.”

Berkshire Hathaway’s $433 million in company stock would be worth $12 billion today.

At first, Buffett was so pleased that he said he sang “There’s No Business Like Shoe Business” in the car for days after the sale. He didn’t anticipate the devastation of the American shoe business by cheap foreign imports. As Dexter sank, 1,600 workers lost their jobs. In 2008, it folded. Hundreds of millions that would have been billions went down a drain in Omaha.

I’m not above loving it when good people get really rich and a billionaire’s best-laid schemes turn to shinola.

Lucky for Colby and Waterville, the Lunder and Alfond families are deeply committed to both and profoundly philanthropic. When I first met Peter Lunder about 20 years ago, he and his wife still lived in Waterville in a nice but by no means palatial house near Colby. They’ve done a million things for Colby but also for Waterville and for Maine. Like Vermont, Maine has few very rich people. High taxes chase them away.

Peter and Paula Lunder and Ted and Barbara Alfond are perceptive collectors of art, too. They were the anchor donors for the very nice addition to the college museum. The Lunders gave 500 works of art — superb American things — to the museum in 2013. The Lunders and Alfonds set a tone in their philanthropy. “Never forget Waterville” motivates them, and this mantra focuses the college. They were generous donors to the Waterville project.

Paul Schupf was one of my Andover donors. He made a fortune, lost it, made another, and then I lost track of him. He lived in Hamilton in Upstate New York across the town green from Colgate. He had good though odd taste in art.

He bought Richard Serra prints, and I mean an impression of every print Serra made. They’re made from paintstick, a combination of pigment, linseed oil, and wax molded into sticks, then run through a meat grinder and blended in a dough mixer with silica. The black goop is then applied to paper to make an image that’s abstract, dense, big, and aggressive. Two or three are fine but all 150? Paul also collected the best work by Alex Katz and the best Chuck Close prints. Those were his limits.

I found him engaging but tart and bellicose, fierce in his opinions and pushing them like a battering ram. I never got much. Colby had already nabbed him. My impression is that I was a useful foil. Whenever Paul felt neglected by Colby, he’d send a nice gift — art or money — to the Addison. That got Colby’s attention. Soon, boxes of chocolate embossed with Colby’s mascot — the mule — were on their way.

Paul had no connection with Colby except a relationship cultivated by Hugh Gourley, the Colby museum’s charming, enigmatic director. Hugh had been the director for years, building the museum from scratch. He didn’t have big bucks to spend but made up for in patience, taste, and erudition. He was the best fund-raiser. He was smart and wry and had a tinge of vulnerability. People asked Hugh what they could give long before he needed to make the request of them.

Stewarding Paul was not high maintenance but acrobatic maintenance. No one but Hugh had the patience, and he enlisted Bill Cotter, the college president in the ’80s and ’90s and himself a great steward and fund-raiser. Paul paid for a wing of the Colby Museum dedicated to Alex Katz, filled with Katz paintings that Paul gave. Over time, he gave the college millions and became a college trustee. He gave the museum all his Serra prints — a storage nightmare and a conservation one since paintstick isn’t stable. He left the college his estate when he died in 2019.

Hugh’s stewardship is instructive. In the philanthropy business, sometimes the payoff takes years. Lots of museum directors, development people, and, I suspect, college presidents lust for hit-and-run philanthropy. They dream of meeting a new prospect over drinks and extracting a million bucks before the second round.

In any event, Paul’s gift was transformative, as he wished, and unconventional, as was he. He felt at home at Colby. He never married. The Colby community became his family.

David Greene has been the president of Colby since 2014. If the Lunders and the Alfonds are patresfamilias and Paul Schupf the donor-out-of-the-blue, Greene is the man who plans, sells, and helms. He’s leading a $750 million capital campaign that’s nearly done. That’s big money for a small college in Maine. A big part of it goes to the Waterville projects.

Greene grew up in Worcester, Mass. I spoke to him this week and asked him what life experiences had led him to look at Waterville’s revival as a project. Worcester is far bigger than Waterville, but they share a sputtered industrial economy, as well as good bones. He said that Worcester and its ten colleges and universities never combined forces for their mutual benefit. He saw the chance to do something different.

Greene was an executive vice president at the University of Chicago before he came to Colby. There, he was in charge of real estate. He’s proud of the university’s role in promoting quality development in the surrounding neighborhoods. It benefited the school but created jobs and opportunity for the locals, too. This showed him the positive possibilities when an anchor educational institution gets involved. And it helps that Greene’s a dynamo.

Colby has become a high-ranked, prestigious liberal-arts college in the past 30 years, but it’s still got a practical, honest Maine spirit. Mainers know that local action, hard work, and merit are the raw materials of progress. They like to build things that last. The diversity-and-equity cult, especially in higher education, defies Maine values, based as it is on groupthink, quotas, low standards, and fairy tales. Colby and Waterville picked results. It’s good to see the college tackling a big problem it could easily ignore. It’s spending time, talent, and treasure to make a real, positive difference.