A week later, Meiklejohn asked the advisers to close the college. Common public explanations for the college's closure include student radicalism, lack of discipline, administrative issues, and financial issues. "The Nation"s Eliseo Vivas blamed its lack of grades as detrimental to student incentive, and judged the effort to create self-motivated students through freedom to be a failure. In "School and Society", Professor Grant Showerman also credited the college's freedoms and lack of compulsions with its demise. Proponents of the Experimental College painted it as the foil of a conservative, standard college, and blamed educational stagnation on the existing order. Meiklejohn believed in a liberal education's power to change society through imagining alternatives to the status quo. He aimed to produce students who could counterbalance society with independence of thought, but admitted that he did not know how to facilitate this. The University of Wisconsin faculty and regents voted to end the Experimental College in May 1932. There was a farewell banquet for 250 guests in June 1932. Meiklejohn did not judge the college's success by its permanence, which he did not expect—he said he attempted the college as a test. Meiklejohn asked Sellery to give his graduate student advisers university assistantships, but was denied. Meiklejohn began to work on adult education in the University of Wisconsin Extension Division in July 1932, where some of the Experimental College's ideas took hold. He later moved to Berkeley. Advisers who stayed after the program's end—such as classicist Walter Agard, philosopher Carl Bögholt, and political scientist John Gaus—were known as popular and innovative, and Agard became the Classics department chair. Meiklejohn wrote a retrospective of the Experimental College during the first half of 1932. John Dewey reviewed the published book and declared it "a contribution to the philosophy of American education". He saw the college to be a true expression of liberal education as it fostered rational faculties and self-criticism, and noted the college's place in fighting norms on a much larger timescale. For its ability to produce free-thinkers in an age without similar values, Dewey found the college "a tragic success". In "The University of Wisconsin: A Pictorial History", Arthur Hove states that the Experimental College "had little discernible influence beyond the university", though it served as a prototype for the university's Integrated Liberal Studies (ILS) program, spawned interest in learning, and showed the university's role in making individuals as well as workers.