A look inside ITT Tech's closed Carmel headquarters
The deserted ITT Educational Services Inc. headquarters in Carmel felt eerie.
Awards remained untouched in their display cases and framed marketing materials still touted the successes of the now-defunct for-profit college.
But the maze of cubicles where hundreds of people once worked was a ghost town.
Some desks had been stripped of everything, their owners likely having sensed the signs leading up to the for-profit college's abrupt closure on Sept. 6 and subsequent declaration of bankruptcy.
Other desks still held reminders of their former occupants: nameplates, notes on a whiteboard, important phone numbers tacked up, a bowl of hard candies and a clipped-out comic about job stress.
Anything that could be sold bore an auction sticker. Art on the walls, an American flag in the lobby. Planter pots with fake plants, planter pots with real plants, and a small desk terrarium with a half-dead plant. The white van parked outside was for sale, and so was this 43,000-square-foot building overlooking U.S. 31.
At more than 130 ITT Technical Institute locations across the country, assets were being liquidated.
For a single day earlier this week, ITT's doors opened to preview the wares being sold online.
A worker walked through, moving some of those thousands of boxes being sent to storage. A potential buyer walked through, perusing for possible personal purchases of office furniture or artwork. A former employee — still without a job — walked through, remembering items she thought she wanted to come back for.
On the first floor, the bankruptcy trustee oversaw the sorting of important documents, saving ones that might be needed. In an office on the second floor, a lone ITT employee worked on the last audits and the final reports to the U.S. Department of Education.
The bankruptcy case of ITT, which employed about 8,000 people and enrolled about 40,000 students across the nation when it shut down, will likely take awhile.
Around the country, ITT's leased locations have been emptied out, and properties owned by the company — including locations in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Newburgh — are up for sale. People have bought many of ITT's old textbooks, microscopes and skeletons, and they'll have a chance to bid for more.
Auction sale proceeds will go into a trust. Claims will have to be sorted out in court, including one filed this month by students who claim ITT defrauded them and seek to have their debts eliminated.
ITT had thrived in recession as working-class people sought higher-education credentials for better jobs. But scathing criticisms dealt blows to the booming business, with investigations into predatory lending practices and scrutiny of low graduation rates for high-cost degrees that were mostly subsidized by federal financial aid.
Like Corinthian Colleges before it, ITT eventually crumbled last year under a federal government crackdown on the for-profit college industry.
Outside the office of the embattled CEO Kevin Modany, a marketing photo still hung on the wall — of President Barack Obama listening to an ITT graduate who worked in an auto plant.
In 2014, Modany had announced he would resign but later decided not to. In 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission named him in a lawsuit alleging that ITT had lied and concealed information from investors about losses on two student loan programs that eventually amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Months after ITT's closure, a vase of fake flowers still greeted people at the entryway of Modany's office suite. His assistant's desk held a set of keys, a flash drive marked "legal" and a CD of the 2013 strategic update. A file cabinet drawer was open, with empty sleeves labeled for meeting notes.
Framed on the wall was the recognition of ITT as Fortune's 100 Fastest Growing Companies — No. 98 in 2011.
Inside Modany's office, which was maintained at a comfortable 71 degrees, the shelves of glossy wooden furniture had been cleared out except for two television remotes for a 55-inch flat-screen TV mounted on the wall and a single dried starfish.
His windows overlooked an outdoor break area and a parking lot where a dumpster was now parked. Two laptops were docked at his U-shaped desk, one with a flash drive still stuck in it. A desk organizer that stored files bore a CIA sticker. Placed on the desk were two personal photographs of Modany posing with people in the ITT lobby and at Zoobilation in 2007.
Tucked into the corner were an umbrella and a frame taken off the wall — a print of pizza ingredients, with "I (heart) pizza" written in the spilled flour.
Left on the wall was a New York Stock Exchange certificate from 1994, when ITT became a publicly traded company.
Modany's executive suite also included a small gym with two treadmills, an elliptical trainer, a pull-up tower and silver free weights ranging from 5 to 70 pounds. At an online auction, his gym equipment sold as is, for $3,362.02 in all.
The CEO had a small bathroom with a shower. In the kitchen, he kept a Keurig coffeemaker and a Ninja blender. The cabinet stored opened bags of pretzels and trail mix, and the refrigerator still chilled diet peach teas, low-calorie Gatorade, vitaminwater zero and a protein shake. In the freezer was a box of PJ's Organics Skinny Low-Fat Chicken Burritos.
(Keurig, Ninja and refrigerator unit: sold. Leftover food and drink: not sold.)
Much of ITT's headquarters still had this abandoned feel of having been lived in and then suddenly moved out — constant reminders of the 275 people who lost their jobs here when the company closed. A stack of white paper sat ready by the printer. The box from someone's last take-out lunch waited in a trash can.
Someone in the back room where the mail went out was a Colts fan, with posters of schedules dating back to 2009, and a Pacers fan, too. Someone kept a Jimmy John's menu taped to a whiteboard. Someone brought in and left behind a Three Stooges clock, and someone else used a tiny desk fan. Someone left behind spare shoes kept in a cubicle.
Half-empty soft drinks were forgotten on desks, and chip crumbs still adorned the floors. An office kitchen looked perhaps uncommonly clean, though not immune to the stray mugs and utensils ubiquitous to all workplaces.
How many business secrets of the controversial college lingered in this place? Sticky notes warned not to box up some offices piled high with papers and binders collecting dust, including logs of private loan disbursements and reports on PEAKS, the private loan program that had caused so much trouble.
Financial reports and student files, usually so carefully guarded, lay strewn about. A door was propped open to an access-restricted room, revealing a stack of servers and wires, curiously still whirring with activity.
But much of what filled this empty building qualified as heaps of junk — useful at one time, perhaps, but seemingly useless now. An entire box was devoted to nothing but phone headsets, another to red stirring straws. At every turn were an overabundance of binder clips and untold numbers of CDs.
One set of cabinets contained a shelf of jean jackets, a shelf of blue shirts, a shelf of tan uniforms, and a couple of white robes and plush slippers. The bottom shelf was stacked with Galaxy tablets, and a bag full of white gift bows sat on the floor.
True to office form, papers piled up by the copier. Things had come through by fax since ITT closed: an unpaid invoice from Cinta for first-aid supplies and several requests for student transcripts.
Call IndyStar reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.
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