NEW update on campus sale
Photo by Ken Larson
Summary Recap of recent legal developments (to the best of our ability), with News below:
In May 2026, Harriet Higgins’s Minerva Institute filed suit against Wells College, in opposition to the planned sale of the campus to the Hiawatha Institute for Indigenous Knowledge (HIIK) The Minerva Institute was scheduled for an in-person status update in court on July 29th. The public was not permitted to attend. As a named respondent, HIIK was present through its attorney.
On June 26, HIIK challenged the college’s June 22nd unilateral termination of their Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA). The PSA had been announced in January and approved by the Attorney General and Cayuga County Supreme Court in April. Read more here. The College responded to HIIK’s lawsuit on July 17th, and filed a Notice of Motion on July 27 to have it dismissed. The Court is scheduled to hear this motion on September 8th.
News:
On July 15th, in an email to the Village of Aurora, Ms. Higgins said she had signed PSA for the campus and had a closing date set for August 17th. (The WLS acquired the email via FOIL, and you may read the email here.) She may have had a PSA at the time. But according to her realtor (posting on Facebook on August 15th, Harriet Higgins currently has no contract with the college.
On August 11th, the Minerva Institute withdrew its suit against Wells College and HIIK, and the next day, the head of the Syracuse Office of the Attorney General, Mr. Ed Thompson, filed to appear in Case # E2026-0491, the withdrawn suit.
There also are unconfirmed rumors from credible sources that the college will declare bankruptcy soon, probably a liquidation under Chapter 7. We are unsure how that might be handled, but if the process is overseen directly by the NYS Office of the Attorney General, that might be beneficial to the people of NYS, the Village of Aurora, and the Wells legacy. Stay tuned.
