This study of conditions making for the decline of an organization examines a college from the advent of charismatic leadership (emerging in a crisis) through its routinization to the period of decline. Critical factors in its decline are revealed as: sharp discontinuities in succession of personnel (faculty, student traits to be processed), absentee leadership and Trustees unable to give or respond to early warning signals, program innovations resisted by workers, or that workers were incompetent to execute, external programs that siphoned resources from the parent organization, and conditions in the social surround that contributed to disruption. The central orienting notion is that factors making for decline or death emerge at the intersection of an organization's legacy—its inherited purpose, procedures, and product—and influences that pour through its permeable boundary from its social and cultural environment.