This is an opinion column.

A well-crafted spreadsheet can spoil a mystery with a bar chart.

On July 23, 2010, one such spreadsheet landed in my email inbox.

It told a story that important, powerful people in Birmingham wanted to keep quiet — that my alma mater, Birmingham-Southern College, was bleeding to death.

It showed in clear terms that the story the college had been telling — that its financial woes were due to a miscalculation of Pell Grants — just wasn’t true.

It proved the problem was much bigger and had been going on for much longer than college administrators had said.

It was also a warning. The college was in danger of closing and the people in charge couldn’t be trusted to fix it.

The sender — a faculty member — asked to remain anonymous. If I had questions, I should call Marietta Cameron, a computer science professor at the college, the person said.

It was Cameron who had made the spreadsheet, and she had shared it with the entire school.

“I sent it to the entire campus with my name on it, knowing full well that somebody was going to send it to the media, and everybody would think it was me,” she said when I spoke with her again last week. “I would just wait. And then you called.”

Back in 2010, Cameron asked to remain anonymous, too, but she walked me through the data and explained to me where she had gotten it.

Fourteen years later — after the college announced its years of financial struggles would force it to close — I asked Cameron if I could tell this story again, this time with her name on the record.

A discovery she didn’t want to find

At BSC, Cameron was an anomaly in several ways. She was a computer science professor at a college that favored humanities and business majors. She wasn’t only a faculty member, but also an alum. And at the time, she was the only faculty member who was Black.

Like a lot of BSC students, she first attended the college as a summer scholar — a program for rising high school seniors looking for college credit. Cameron says she planned to go to UAB, but one math professor changed her mind, Dr. Lola Kaiser. “Dr. Kaiser was such a supportive person and took such an interest in me that, if all of the professors at Birmingham-Southern would be like Dr. Kaiser, I wanted to be at Birmingham Southern College, too,” Cameron says.

Later, it was those same friendships with Kaiser and other faculty that drew her back to become a professor. In 1991, she left her job at Blue Cross Blue Shield to join the faculty.

The college’s computer science program had often been in danger during lean years, Cameron said. Between her graduation and her return as a professor, the program had been cut once already.

“At a liberal arts institution, there was a bias against what people perceived to be pre-professional,” she says.

In 2010, computer science became a target for budget cuts again.

BSC administrators began 2010 with assurances to faculty that the college’s financial picture was strong, according to faculty meeting minutes which the college now keeps online. That February, the provost even teased the possibility of raises, a prospect that had disappeared with the Great Recession.

But by late spring, those administrators were telling a different story, and by June they warned the faculty that the school might have to cut staff or even whole courses of study.

At first they said the college had a $3 million hole in its budget.

Then $5 million.

Then $10 million.

The administration blamed miscalculations in financial aid to students.

The faculty formed an advisory committee to figure out the extent of the problem, but members complained they weren’t being given access to the college’s financial data.

“And that’s when I said, ‘I know how you could get numbers,’” Cameron recalls.

Nonprofits are exempt from paying taxes but not from filing financial data with the IRS. They must disclose that information publicly in a form called a 990.

Cameron retrieved several years’ worth of the college’s disclosures and began using the information to build her spreadsheet.

“What I found instead was — ‘Oh, shoot, this is not $10 million,’” she recalls.

The college, according to the data, had been running at a $10 million deficit three years earlier, and those deficits had been growing. Nonprofits file their 990s the year after their books close, so the most recent fiscal year was still a mystery.

“The rate we were going up — with a nice little regression line, I estimated that we were most likely at $30 million,” Cameron says.

Her estimate would turn out to be much closer to the truth than what administrators had shared.

Under BSC’s new president, David Pollick, the college had gone on a spending spree, building new dorms, an alumni welcome center and what could either be described as a large pond or a small lake. Amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the college had spent money on a water feature to attract students.

The college paid for much of this from its endowment, cashing out investments when the markets were in a slump. It was, in effect, buying high and selling low.

The day Cameron’s spreadsheet landed in my inbox, I first reached out to Cameron by phone, leaving a voicemail at her office, then by Facebook messenger, which 14 years later still memorializes our first exchange.

“I am happy that someone forwarded to you. However, if I am to fight a battle in Thursday’s faculty meeting I should not make a comment just yet,” she wrote.

Cameron was about to have that battle with the college’s then-president, David Pollick.

Showdown with the president

Time can corrode memory, but 14 years later Cameron can recall what was said in that faculty meeting with remarkable precision, and the meeting minutes kept by the college show she remembers some comments verbatim.

“Let me begin, though, by saying that I have told you things over the course, particularly in the last year, that were not true. I have never lied to you,” Pollick said, according to those minutes. “There is a fundamental difference between that.”

Pollick told the faculty that he and college trustees had been duped by the finance department. A summary of the college’s finances, called a green sheet, had not been accurate, he said.

Further, he told them, the college had been taking out unauthorized bridge loans from Regions Bank, unbeknownst to him or Dowd Ritter, the board president and also then-CEO of Regions Bank.

Still, Pollick tried to argue that the college’s 990s were inaccurate and misrepresented the college’s true financial position.

“So we misrepresented on a tax form?” Cameron asked, according to the minutes.

“The information on the 990s is accurate,” the vice-president of administration, Lane Estes interjected.

Pollick asked for calm and said the college could recover through austerity. Other administrators, including the college’s spokesperson, gave additional reports. Cameron began to think Pollick was trying to run out the clock, she recalls.

“I would like to make a resolution as follows: due to either intentional negligence or incompetence or malfeasance or all of the above, I call for a vote of no confidence in our President and in the Executive Committee of the Board,” she said.

Pollick left the room and several faculty members balked at the resolution.

I went to Birmingham-Southern — before Pollick and before the crash — where I had classes with many of the people in the room that day. Today, it’s heartbreaking to read these faculty minutes, to see professors I respect leave Cameron stranded at such an important moment in the college’s history.

She had taken a stand, but few were ready to stand with her.

One moved to table the motion until more faculty could take part in the discussion. A history professor moved to table the motion for good.

“If word gets out that we have set a meeting certain to discuss a motion of no confidence on this president — if that gets into the press, which it will — it is a disaster for this college,” he said. “I move to table it period.”

Cameron’s motion was tabled by a vote, 54-to-14.

Loneliness of a whistleblower

In the end, the vote didn’t save Pollick. Cameron’s spreadsheet had exposed the truth and neither he nor the college could fully dispute what it revealed. Two weeks after that faculty meeting, Pollick resigned.

In the years since, Pollick has insisted the college’s financial problems were not his doing and that he and the board had been deceived.

Even if that is true, it’s still damning.

The most charitable interpretation of the facts is that a computer science professor uncovered in a day of digging what the college president, the board and the board president — himself the CEO of one of the nation’s largest banks — didn’t see during six years on the job.

However, Cameron’s discovery didn’t save her department. The college cut the computer science program.

And Cameron with it.

Today, Cameron serves as dean of Natural Sciences at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.

I asked her how her experience at BSC changed her.

“My experience at Birmingham-Southern has made me be more aware of university operations and governance,” she says. “It forced me to say that there’s a part that faculty need to play in it.”

When she reflects on her last days at BSC, she struggles with disappointment in some of her colleagues who, she says, kept quiet because they were afraid. After she shared her spreadsheet, one professor pulled the college’s 990s from a cabinet in his office and commended her for having put them in a form everyone could understand.

“And I’m like, why are you not saying something? You have more influence. You’ve been here longer than I have,” she recalls. “I had tenure at the time, but this person had been my professor.”

Cameron’s struggle to find allies in her last days at the college is a story I’ve seen play out in other places — at HealthSouth during its financial fraud, at Jefferson County before its largest-in-U.S.-history bankruptcy, in a governor’s office trapped the in the quicksand of a sex scandal.

In a crisis, it can feel safer to do nothing. To let someone else step forward and speak up.

Rather than rallying a rescue effort from the inside, whistleblowers often wind up alienated, ostracized, or even blamed for the crisis itself.

“A lot of them just sat back and let me speak because they did not believe that the only Black faculty member was going to be fired,” she says.

Cameron’s spreadsheet and her push to censure Pollick didn’t create the disaster at BSC. She alerted the world that a disaster was in progress — so somebody could do something about it. In the end, Cameron’s spreadsheet didn’t save the college, but had she not forced the issue when she did, it’s easy to imagine the college going under much earlier. In the last 14 years, thousands of students have passed through BSC — something that might not have happened had the college’s financial problems been left to fester that summer in 2010.

Cameron has any number of reasons to be bitter about her time at BSC — racism she endured as a student, her department’s odd fit within the liberal arts and sciences, her colleagues’ silence at such a perilous moment. Despite all that, she still feels an attachment to the school and a sadness that it will soon be gone. “I love Birmingham-Southern like a child, as if it were a family member,” she says. “Even when I left, at the time, I thought I would probably one day go back and be part of the leadership.” Like a lot of other alumni I’ve spoken with in recent months, she lets herself daydream there’s a happy ending waiting.

“I fantasize about finding the miracle money to save the college,” she says. “I still do. I still pray and hope that some miracle happens.”

But Cameron already did her part to save the college when many others stood frozen in place.

When no one listens to whistleblowers, the only consolation left for them is getting to have the last word.

Kyle Whitmire is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Alabamafication.