With Lourdes University on the verge of closing, the Toledo Museum of Art was busy generating national press for purchasing a painting from Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama—an acquisition framed as an act of institutional rescue.
Talladega College, a small Southern college with an enrollment of roughly 700 students, faced a financial crisis. The Toledo Museum of Art stepped in, purchasing The Underground Railroad for an estimated $5 million, a move widely reported as helping to save the college from closure.
In the New York Times article “To Avert Crisis, Talladega College Sells Its Art Treasures” (October 29, 2025), museum director Adam Levine stated, “My objective and the objective of the Toledo Museum of Art is to support Talladega College.”
The painting—a mural depicting freedom seekers fleeing enslavement in the South, standing in Kentucky and looking north across the Ohio River to Ohio—will feature prominently in the museum’s reinstallation. It will remain at Talladega for a period before coming to Toledo, reportedly no later than 2027.
In Forbes, “Art Imitates Life: Hale Woodruff’s ‘The Underground Railroad’ Headed North To Ohio” (Nov. 1, 2025), Levine added: “Much of the African American population of Toledo traces its genealogy to individuals who fled on the Underground Railroad, so this will be deeply meaningful for our audience.”
Really?
What went largely unexamined in Toledo, even as national coverage praised the museum, was the uncomfortable local reality.
An actual Underground Railroad stop—the Lathrop House—is located in close proximity to Lourdes University, the very institution now being allowed to collapse quietly in Toledo.
While the museum was applauded for “saving” a college in Alabama, Toledo was losing one of its own.
This is a city with one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Its residents are struggling. Its educational institutions are fragile. Yet the Toledo Museum of Art continues to spend aggressively—pouring money into a sweeping, expensive, unnecessary reinstallation that nobody wants—while a university in its own backyard faces extinction.
What would have been genuinely meaningful to Toledo’s population is not symbolic generosity directed elsewhere, but tangible support for the community that sustains the museum.
The situation becomes even more troubling when governance is examined more closely.
Adam Levine sits on the University of Toledo Board of Trustees, and the university has reportedly promised to absorb displaced Lourdes students. It strains credibility to suggest that leadership at Toledo’s flagship cultural institution was unaware of Lourdes University’s crisis.
More significantly, Thomas J. Winston serves as Treasurer of the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors and also served as Treasurer of the Lourdes University Board of Trustees for the 2024–25 term. Joe Napoli is a member of both the Toledo Museum of Art board and the Lourdes University Board of Trustees. Susan Conda, a major donor to the museum, also serves on Lourdes’ board.
These are not distant or symbolic roles. They involve direct fiduciary responsibility and institutional oversight.
If individuals with governance and financial authority at both the museum and the university could have weighed in to help preserve Lourdes, why was that support not forthcoming? Why was a $5 million intervention possible for a college in Alabama, but not for a university in Toledo under their watch?
Why did the Talladega College bailout make national news while Toledo residents learned of Lourdes’ collapse only when it was too late? Why was there no sustained local coverage, no public reckoning, no warning?
What is striking is not simply what was reported, but where.
The museum’s $5 million purchase was covered extensively by national outlets, yet received little sustained scrutiny in Toledo itself—particularly as a local university was sliding toward closure at the same moment. At the same time, there was no comparable local reporting that alerted the public to the severity or imminence of Lourdes University’s crisis.
Two major institutional stories unfolded concurrently—one celebrated nationally, the other barely examined locally.
Instead, there was no visible effort to help—and little public discussion in Toledo about why.
No emergency partnership.
No museum-led fundraising campaign.
No $5 million intervention for Toledo.
What there was, instead, was praise—national praise—for symbolism.
The Toledo Museum of Art, and those who govern it, chose national optics over local responsibility. They chose abstraction over accountability.
The story being told inside the museum walls may be about escape and survival. The story unfolding outside them is about abandonment.
And that is a story Toledo cannot afford to ignore.