Raj Peter Bhakta, founder of Bhakta Spirits, is offering to give away the former Green Mountain College campus in Poultney, Vermont — an asset he estimates would cost $200 million to rebuild today — to a Catholic or Christian institution willing to carry out what he sees as a mission of spiritual and cultural renewal.
“There’s a deeper, more fundamental need in this country,” Bhakta told Fox News Digital, “and that is to go back to our Christian roots.”
His first preference for the recipient is a Catholic institution, followed by a broader Christian organization. Only if neither can be found will he consider selling the property — though he says he doesn’t expect it will come to that.
Bhakta purchased the shuttered campus in the summer of 2020 at auction for $4.5 million — a fraction of its $20 million asking price — after Green Mountain College closed in 2019 due to declining enrollment. He originally intended to lead a new institution himself, but soon found that launching a college while simultaneously building a spirits startup was more complicated than anticipated. He has since shifted to vetting what he calls “credible potential beneficiaries” with both the vision and the organizational capacity to bring the campus back to life.
That vision, for Bhakta, is unambiguously spiritual. He sees the crisis in American higher education not merely as an institutional failure, but as a symptom of a deeper moral and religious drift — one that only a faith-centered response can address. A technical fix or secular alternative, he believes, would miss the point entirely.
Bhakta has spoken of hoping for a “revival of our country and our civilization,” grounding that aspiration explicitly in Christian faith. He draws on the history of American religious revival, pointing to the two Great Awakenings as precedents for the kind of transformation he believes the country needs now.
“We’ve had two great awakenings in this country before,” he said, “and I think we’re at the dawn, God willing, of a third great awakening. And that will hopefully, by God’s grace, lead to the revival of this great country and this great civilization.”
His company’s philosophy echoes the same convictions. Its website states that mankind’s greatest achievements flow from humility and service — virtues Bhakta ties directly to a Christian understanding of human dignity and purpose.
The campus itself sits on picturesque Vermont grounds that a local official once described as a place where someone “definitely got a steal.” For the right Catholic or Christian institution, it could represent something far more than a real estate opportunity — a ready-made home for the kind of counter-cultural, faith-rooted education Bhakta believes America desperately needs.
As he put it simply: “That, incidentally, is worth fighting for.”
