Jennifer Anderson thought her job at Martin University was secure.
In October, employees said they were told that the college had enrolled enough students to stay open through spring 2026.
“We loved Martin,” Anderson, the university’s former financial aid director, told Mirror Indy. “Once we were told we would be there until May, we all paused our job hunts and were there to serve the students.”
That relief didn’t last long.
On Dec. 8, Martin’s interim
president Felicia Brokaw broke the news to staff: The university would “pause operations” at the end of the week.
“When we say financial difficulties, we’re struggling trying to pay your salary,” Brokaw told staff in that meeting, according to audio obtained by Mirror Indy from a former employee. “I’ll be lucky to get you out the door with what I owe you.”
The sudden closure left students scrambling to transfer and questioning whether they would be able to finish their degrees. Employees were laid off without severance or their final paychecks. At the end of last year, the university’s board voluntarily gave up Martin’s accreditation status. That meant the college could no longer receive federal financial aid.
And, despite insisting that the university’s closure was not permanent, Martin’s campus — and surrounding properties — were listed for sale earlier this year. Eastern Star Church later confirmed its plans to buy the property as part of its community development project, the ROCK Initiative, and closed on the property May 8, according to WRTV.
Meanwhile, students, employees and alumni say they were kept in the dark about how bad the situation truly was. As Martin hurdled toward closure, university leaders gave no public indication the school was in trouble.
“All these powerhouses that y’all got on this board, how come y’all didn’t see this closure coming?” asked Dewayne Whitney, a former Martin University student. “I’m pretty sure y’all knew before now what was going on.”
An investigation by Mirror Indy found that Martin University’s closure was preceded by months, if not years, of significant financial problems, and that leaders did not share the depths of the issues with employees, students and alumni. In its final months, Martin appears to have been relying on federal money to make payroll.
Since the college closed, Mirror Indy also discovered that students experienced delays getting their financial aid refunds, money students can get back when their financial aid is processed and results in a surplus. Some students were waiting on refunds when Martin closed, and at least one said they never received the money they were owed.
Other students discovered they were stuck in a different limbo once the school closed: Martin University still has a hold on their financial aid accounts, leaving them unable to get assistance at other schools.
That’s likely because Martin pre-approved students’ financial aid money for the entire school year back in the fall — a process known as origination. When schools close or students transfer from one college to another, the college has to cancel the aid to reflect that the student is no longer getting aid there. Otherwise, the money can get stuck in limbo.
Anderson told Mirror Indy that she wanted to begin the process of closing out financial aid for all students after the university initially announced it would pause operations.
But before she had the chance, nearly all of Martin’s staff were laid off, including her.
“If we hadn’t been let go so abruptly, the idea is that all of the students’ spring aid would have been canceled,” Anderson told Mirror Indy.
As for the refunds, it’s not clear exactly why some Martin University students never received their money.
While Mirror Indy is not aware of any local, state or federal criminal investigations into what happened at Martin University, failing to refund federal student financial aid funds can lead to a criminal penalty of a fine up to $20,000, up to five years in federal prison, or both, according to the Department of Education’s website.
Still, a group of students, former staff and the Martin alumni association have taken another route toward legal action, and filed a class action civil lawsuit April 22 against the university, its former president Sean Huddleston and the college’s board of trustees claiming Martin had a hold on their financial aid money, owed them tuition money and did not pay at least one staff member.
Mirror Indy reached out to five representatives and administrators with Martin University for this story — interim president Brokaw, marketing director Keona Williams, former president Huddleston, former controller Denise Johnson and board of trustees chair Joseph Perkins. It’s unclear whether any still collect paychecks from Martin.
While Williams responded to some questions about her involvement in the university’s closing procedures, she did not address all of Mirror Indy’s questions regarding the closure and the university’s finances. Perkins, Brokaw, Huddleston and Johnson did not respond to Mirror Indy’s questions or requests for comment.
The federal government issues financial aid to students by paying the schools those students attend.
Each college or university keeps a portion of the money for tuition and fees, which the college counts as revenue. Leftover money is then given to the student as a refund.
Students can then use those funds on anything from repaying loans to expenses like rent and groceries. Under federal guidelines, students are supposed to receive their refunds no later than 14 days after a balance is created, meaning that the university processed their aid and it resulted in a surplus.
But former employees say things worked a little differently at Martin.
Since March 2023, the university had been under a type of federal oversight called heightened cash monitoring. Under this system, Martin University had to prove it had paid students out of its own accounts. Only then could they be reimbursed by the federal government.
The process is meant to keep a close eye on colleges that are having financial problems.
But for a university that was — according to both former employees and public financial records — essentially broke, having enough to pay out student refunds on time was challenging. Indeed, two former employees said they believed or were told that the university did not always have the cash on hand to pay refunds before requesting the financial aid money from the government.
So, instead of getting their refunds days into the semester, some students were waiting weeks and sometimes even months for their money.
“Why are they short funds? Where did all the money go?” asked Kory Amyx, formerly Martin’s senior financial aid and veteran affairs advisor.
Before the closure, Amyx filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because of harassment he said he faced while at Martin. That federal commission is responsible for enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws in most workplaces.
Before last fall, the school had been issuing refunds to most students via direct deposit. Then later in the fall, employees said Martin University suddenly started issuing physical checks to all students — which multiple employees said was unprecedented. It’s unclear exactly why Martin stopped issuing refunds by direct deposit.
One former employee said that because the university was strapped for cash, some checks were not distributed to students until the school had enough money in the bank account to clear them, which they likened to paying bills paycheck to paycheck.
In the university’s final weeks, some refund checks were written but never distributed to students, multiple employees confirmed.
“We cut checks, wrote checks. But we’re not actually handing them out to students,” said Anderson, “which was a red flag.”
It’s not clear what happened to the money — or whether Martin ever received those funds from the federal government. The federal Department of Education did not respond to Mirror Indy’s questions about when the government last distributed financial aid money to Martin.
But two students told Mirror Indy they were waiting on a financial aid refund at the time Martin closed. Both those refunds were for thousands of dollars. It’s unclear how many students are waiting for financial aid refunds.
Martin University was no stranger to financial problems.
In 2014, Martin was placed on probation by its accrediting agency, a group that examines colleges and ensures they meet certain standards. Back then, that probation was largely because of financial problems. It took Martin three years to get off probation after it paid off debts and built up savings for operating expenses.
Martin’s enrollment — once at over 400 students — had taken a nosedive in recent years. In fall 2024, Martin had just 198 students total, according to the most recent available federal data. Seventy-five of those students were attending class part time.
In 2023, the state legislature granted Martin $5 million over two years, framing it as an effort to improve retention and fund the college’s teaching, law enforcement and STEM programs.
According to invoices Mirror Indy obtained through public records requests, Martin was also using the grant to pay for campus improvements and general upkeep, as well as faculty and staff salaries for certain programs. That was allowed in the grant’s language.
Last January, Martin made headlines after newly elected Gov. Mike Braun did not include funding for the college in his state budget proposal. After outcry from alumni and community leaders, Braun visited the college, but ultimately did not advocate for the school to get more state funding.
An independent routine audit for the year ending in June 2024 — the most recent one available — showed that Martin had no money in the bank and that the university had borrowed against its $733,441 endowment. But when the university announced its closure in December, it said in a press release that it had no endowment.
Anderson, though, said she was not aware of the university’s financial problems when she started last May.
Several months after Anderson arrived, she noticed that around the time payroll was due, she started to get more questions about when federal financial aid money would arrive. She began to suspect Martin was relying on federal funding to pay employees.
Many small colleges rely on tuition dollars — or even federal financial aid money that schools claim for tuition — to stay open, said Robert Kelchen, a professor at University of Tennessee and expert on higher education finance.
But if Martin staff knew they didn’t have enough money to pay staff and stayed open anyway, that’s a problem, Kelchen said.
“They should not be in a situation where they’re continuing to operate if they know they don’t have the money on hand,” he said. “That seems to be what happened here.”
Additionally, Anderson said Martin’s reliance on federal funding was unusual and unsustainable based on her experience. The two other colleges where Anderson previously worked had endowments or other revenue sources, as opposed to just federal funding.
It is unclear if Martin had additional revenue sources, but did not have an endowment at the time it closed.
In late fall, Anderson’s suspicion was confirmed when she was called into a meeting with Huddleston and Johnson, at that time the president and controller, respectively.
In that meeting, Anderson said, Huddleston and Johnson asked her how much more money Martin was expecting to claim in financial aid so that the university could determine how much would cover payroll.
“There were definitely concerns about how much longer we were going to be able to operate,” Anderson said.
But, she said, Huddleston gave “no indication” that the university was on the verge of closure in that meeting.
For students, the depth of Martin’s financial problems did not become apparent until after the university announced its closure.
In December, Latanya Ashmore had been three classes away from finishing her bachelor’s degree and had enrolled at Martin for her final semester in the spring.
But after Martin closed, she said the college reached out to tell her she’d earned her degree and would be receiving her diploma in the mail, even though she’d had another semester of classes to complete.
She was confused.
“Either they’ve been cheating us out of money, or fraudulently gave me my degree,” she said. “I don’t know.”
Still, she decided to keep moving forward, and enrolled at a new school, an online college called National University, for her master’s degree.
But soon after enrolling at National, Ashmore discovered Martin still had a hold on her tuition and financial aid money.
That meant she couldn’t get financial aid to attend National, even though Martin closed and never offered spring classes.
In April, Ashmore received an email from National’s financial aid office stating her student file on the government financial aid portal “indicates an overlap and pending financial aid at Martin University.”
That’s likely because of the pre-approval that Martin issued for all students’ financial aid earlier last year, according to Anderson. It’s a common process for colleges, known as origination.
Similar holdups with financial aid money can sometimes occur when students transfer from one college to another, said Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. But in those cases, a financial aid administrator would typically contact a student’s former school and ask them to release the money.
But by the time students at Martin realized their financial aid was held up, there was no one left to help address the problem as school staff was abruptly laid off.
“This is not necessarily something underhanded that the school that closed is doing,” Desjean said. “But now (the money) is just kind of hanging out there, looking like at any moment the school could disburse the aid, even though everyone knows that the school is closed, and that’s not possible.”
Three other Martin University students — two of whom are plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit — said the university either had not refunded their spring tuition money or that they also were unable to get financial aid from other colleges because they were still listed as receiving aid from Martin University for this year.
Kevin Getter, one of the former students in the lawsuit, said in an affidavit that his financial aid account at Martin was still listed as “active,” despite the closure.
Like Ashmore, Getter tried to enroll elsewhere after Martin closed. But he was told that he couldn’t get financial aid because of the overlap with Martin. Months after Martin’s closure, he was unable to enroll at another school.
Though his new university eventually was able to clear him for some financial aid, it wasn’t the full amount he had qualified for, so he’s still not enrolled in classes. And soon, he’ll have to start paying back his student loans, too.
“Martin created this endless loop going back and forth between schools and financial aid departments,” Getter told Mirror Indy in May. “Nobody’s really been able to give me solid answers.”
It’s not clear when money will be released, though Anderson said she believes students should be able to get financial aid at other schools for the 2026-2027 school year.
It’s also not clear when or if students will get their financial aid refund money. Many of the students Mirror Indy interviewed said they were unable to get a hold of Martin University representatives when they reached out in recent months.
Ashmore has reached out to Martin multiple times with questions about her financial aid. In one response, she received an automated email.
“Refund processing has not yet occurred,” a Feb. 3 email said. “Updates will be communicated as they become available.”
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This story was originally published by Mirror Indy and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
