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 unmentioned in this national coverage is 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 is even more troubling given that Adam Levine sits on the University of Toledo Board of Trustees. The University of Toledo has reportedly promised to absorb displaced Lourdes students. It strains credibility to suggest that the leadership of Toledo’s flagship cultural institution was unaware of Lourdes University’s crisis.
And yet there was no public effort to help.
No emergency partnership.
No museum-led fundraising campaign.
No $5 million intervention for Toledo.
Why?
Because saving Lourdes University would not have produced national headlines. It would not have earned praise in the New York Times or Forbes. It would have been local, quiet, and inconvenient.
Instead, the museum chose symbolism over substance, national optics over local responsibility—while Toledo watched one of its institutions disappear.
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.