Modern Age * Summer 2017 cally, SLAC alumni have donated to their small colleges because they genuinely believed in the small-college, residential, faceto-face, liberal arts form of education. The current crop of SLAC presidents are (with a few possible exceptions) no longer fellow travelers and true believers in that cause. Their words ring hollow. Yet their pocketbooks grow fat. That alumni donations have dropped off dramatically in the past twenty years at SLACs across the country should come as no great surprise.10 Pause to ponder this well: many American small colleges are in a death spiral (admittedly not Pomona and other elite schools) precisely during a period when presidential salaries are zooming skyward. It doesn't have to be this way. I pinch myself with gratitude after every seminar with my students. The classroom is and must be the moral center of a college. That's where the action is. That's where the priorities must be placed. That's what must be protected and promoted. We need college leadership that believes in providing the right kind of modern bang for the buck, with budgetary sobriety starting at the top. 134 modernagejournal.comhttp://www.modernagejournal.com