As long as humans have roamed the earth, we’ve developed routines for what to do with our bodies when our clocks run out. Eventually, by some ritual, we are all put back in the earth. But it wasn’t until after the Civil War that the American death industry emerged. With tens of thousands of families wanting last looks at their husbands and sons who died on distant battlefields, embalming became increasingly popular. Abraham Lincoln’s blood was drained and replaced with fluid so that when his corpse arrived by train in Springfield, Ill., he looked as fresh to mourners in his hometown as he did in D.C.

Today, the funeral business, like many other professional services, is heavily regimented, from required coursework to board certification to industry-dominating companies. And the mortuary science program at UDC is one of 58 programs around the United States that feed this system. There are 124 students enrolled for the 2012-13 academic year in the UDC program, which takes two full academic years to complete at a cost of $100 per credit hour (for District residents). Finishing the program takes 73 credit hours.

But all is not well with the mortuary science program these days: Last fall, it landed on the probation list of the American Board of Funeral Service Education, which accredits mortuary programs around the country so their graduates can be licensed by the jurisdictions in which they practice.

To be considered in good standing, a mortuary science program must, among other things, have at least 60 percent of their students pass the national board exam on their first try. Most schools routinely hit the 70s or 80s; a few even hit 100 percent. Last year, according to statistics released by UDC, only 10 out of 21 students who took the test for the first time passed the written exam; the year before, it was five out of 10. UDC is currently up for re-accreditation for that reason and others, says Michael Smith, the ABFSE’s executive director.

Vincent E. Hill, the UDC program’s director since 2011, declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.

But Hill, according to students and Smith, is mending the issues that brought UDC under closer scrutiny. Besides the low examination rates, the ABFSE’s accredidation body found problems with the school’s embalming laboratory, which is now in the process of a $500,000 renovation. Smith, who visited UDC’s Van Ness Campus last week, says the blueprints for the new lab are promising, as are some of the other fixes the program is working to make.

That would include management issues. Hill took over the program after the 2011 death of Leander M. Coles, one of the department’s founders. That was followed by the departure of other instructors, leaving the program with several staffing holes. The transition, though, brought some scientific heft to the department. Whereas Coles was a funeral director and minister by training, Hill, a licensed pathologist, was a deputy medical examiner for the D.C. government for many years.

Smith says Hill’s leadership of UDC’s program is promising.

“Dr. Hill came in and he had a major task to get things in order,” Smith says. “They weren’t in order when the regular visit occurred last fall. They’ve made pretty remarkable progress.”

Outsiders often approach mortuary science programs with a certain morbid stigma. Writing in Social Psychology Quarterly in 1999, Spencer E. Cahill, a professor at the University of South Florida, found that mortuary science students, whether conversing with their fellow students at parties or simply buying books for the semester, were frozen out as soon as their course of study was mentioned. Even in his analytical participation in mortuary science, Cahill experienced this.

“The student cashier greeted me with a smile and a pleasant hello, picked up the book to find the price, saw that the title was The Principles and Practice of Embalming, coldly told me the price, and studiously avoided my eyes throughout the remainder of my transaction,” he wrote.

Cahill, who died in 2006, heard other students’ stories about being peppered with odd questions about brain removals, and frequently being rejected for dates after saying what they were studying.

Gradoville, however, is quite open about the topic. At 38, she’s looking to switch from her career as a dental hygienist, and a few years ago, when a UDC course catalog randomly appeared in the mail, mortuary science seemed appealing.

“My husband said, ‘You’re weird,’” Gradoville recalls.

Gradoville enrolled in fall 2011 with no preconceptions about the death industry. “I kind of went in blindly,” she says. “But I kind of like it. It’s different from what I had been doing. Obviously no one’s complaining.”

Swapping out cranky dental patients for silent corpses isn’t the only difference. To Gradoville, the mortuary science program is a track to perhaps one day owning her own funeral home, though in D.C., where space is tight and opening such a business takes many regulatory and licensing hurdles—to say nothing of the capital required —that’s a long-term goal. Most mortuary science graduates in D.C. and elsewhere land jobs in funeral homes, Smith says.

Before any of that happens, however, Gradoville first needs to do all the work required for a license to practice in the death industry. There’s the associate’s degree in mortuary science, which she’s a few months away from completing, though not before she takes her first crack at the national board exam, which costs $400 a sitting. Following that is an apprenticeship, a yearlong term at an actual funeral home that, if she’s lucky, will pay a salary.

With so many funeral homes having names that include the phrase “and Sons,” it’s easy to expect that most students in mortuary science programs are doing it to join the family business. That’s the case for some of Gradoville’s classmates, but they’re not joining up at a young age. In fact, she places herself in the median age of her class. Many, like her, came to it as a second career. “There’s people in their 50s and 60s in my class,” she says.

The same can be said for some of the six instructors. While trying to stake out Hill, I meet with John Kirksey, who teaches an embalming class. Kirksey, a former sales representative for Remington Arms, tells me got into the death business through contacts he made at the skeet and trap ranges where he competes. He still works regularly as an embalmer.

Kirksey is more eager to talk about his marksmanship skills than his funereal ones, but it’s obvious he is very methodical about his embalming work. The night before he takes a class to an off-campus mortuary to perform an embalming, he takes a call from a student and sternly reminds his charge to wear a suit and bring medical scrubs.

A student needs to embalm 10 corpses to graduate; Gradoville is on No. 9. “The first person I embalmed was scary, I guess,” she says. “The first time you do anything is scary. Everyone’s got this fear of the dead. It’s that mentality that society has.”

But Gradoville says any fright she experienced wasn’t from seeing too many zombie movies. It was more a matter of nerves and making sure she didn’t miss when making the incision to drain the corpse’s blood.

“It was more the fact that I was scared to cut into them to find their [carotid] artery,” she says. “What if I did it wrong? Kirksey said, ‘You’re not gonna hurt him. He’s dead.’”

Since then, the process has become more automatic. Still, Gradoville tries to humanize it. Sometimes she’ll talk to a body while it is being drained of blood and pumped with formaldehyde. Anything to distract from the smells, which, in the case of bodies delivered from the District morgue, are “not good.”

The procedures themselves can be over in less than an hour or be all-day affairs.

“Best-case scenario, they have no problems,” Gradoville says. “You make the incision in the carotid artery, pump the embalming fluid in, pump the blood, no problem. Then there’s the restorative art.”

That’s where the artistic side of mortuary science comes in, and it can be tricky. In one of Gradoville’s classes, students were asked to construct an ear for a man who had lost one of his. During our interview at a Shaw restaurant, Gradoville pulls out her iPhone and shows me a photo of her handiwork. It’s a pretty good resemblance of a human ear, made from some kind of resin, complete with raised lines where cartilage would be and sagging, rubbery lobes.

There are also nondeath-related career options for an embalmer, Gradoville has learned these past 18 months. People skilled in preserving flesh are needed when harvesting organs for life-saving transplants, something Gradoville says she might be interested in, though she’s still leaning toward preparing the dead for their final appearances.

If Gradoville ends up working in one of D.C.’s funeral homes, she’ll be treating a different kind of corpse. Unlike the forgotten ones from the morgue who can linger for months before UDC’s students work with them, people who die peacefully can be on the embalmer’s slab three hours later. There’s also a good chance she could end up working for one of the two major corporations that own an increasingly large number of funeral homes and cemeteries around the country. Some of the best-known facilities are subsidiaries of Houston-based Service Corporation Inc., like Joseph Gawler’s Sons in Friendship Heights, which boasts among its former clients President John F. Kennedy. Most funeral homes in D.C., however, are still independently owned.

“I would rather not work for a corporation,” Gradoville says. Either way, once she passes the board exam, obtains the associate’s degree, and completes the 2,500-hour apprenticeship, death will be her business. “I’m going to see it every day.”

Real Estate 101

How gentrification fueled a property windfall for Howard University

By Aaron Wiener

Developers in greater Shaw looking to bring home the bread are turning increasingly to, well, bread.

Douglas Development pounced on the old Wonder Bread factory on S Street NW, shuttered since 1988 but now in high demand thanks to its location steps from the Shaw Metro; it’s set to reopen as offices in May. Howard University, meanwhile, is in the process of developing the former Bond Bread building on Georgia Avenue NW between V and W streets into Howard Town Center, a mixed-use project for which the developers plan 445 apartments, a supermarket, and other retail. The long-defunct Bond apparently made a mean cinnamon streusel swirl bread, but by developing the property, Howard is likely to generate much more dough.

Since the turn of the millennium, the area surrounding Howard University has seen its fortunes rise more quickly than perhaps any other part of the city, and vacant industrial spaces are giving way to swanky new office and residential buildings for which tenants are paying top dollar. Howard bought up a wide swath of land near its campus between the late 1970s and early 1990s, when property values were still depressed following the 1968 riots and the depopulation of the District.

“Howard was acquisitive of land over its history,” says Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning. “It bought lots of land, even if it didn’t know what the heck it was going to do with it.”

Much of that land has sat undeveloped as surface parking lots, to the dismay of students and neighbors who’d prefer restaurants and shops and dorms. But now, with property values in the Shaw area skyrocketing, these lots suddenly represent opportunities for a healthy profit. Some of them were assessed last year in the tens of millions of dollars.

Colleges constantly make land-use decisions as they expand. But rarely do they find themselves gaining as much property value as Howard has in recent years. Georgetown, George Washington, and American University have been in pricey neighborhoods for quite some time; Catholic and Gallaudet are surrounded by up-and-coming neighborhoods that haven’t reached their peaks. But the areas around Howard, according to census figures, have seen the most marked shift from low- to middle- or upper-middle-income between 2000 and 2010 of any in the city. Howard’s property windfall could offer the best glimpse into the choice colleges must make when they find the neighborhoods around them gentrifying: capitalize on the boom and use the proceeds to fund other priorities, or ignore the trends and use their properties for campus facilities?

In Howard’s case, the answer is both.

“I don’t think we entered into a conversation where there was an either/or proposition,” says Maybelle Bennett, director of the Howard University Community Association, the school’s liaison to its environs.

On the profit side, Howard Town Center is Exhibit A. In 2008, the university completed a long-planned swap with the city, handing over a plot of vacant land at Florida and Sherman avenues NW for a parcel that included the big Bond Bread building. Howard will lease the space to developers Cohen Companies and CastleRock Partners in exchange for rent, which Howard spokeswoman Kerry-Ann Hamilton says will increase as the development grows and will likely be between $1 million and $2 million per year. The property, according to last year’s tax assessment, is worth more than $35 million. To ice the cake, in December the D.C. Council approved a $11 million tax abatement for the development that D.C. Chief Financial Officer Nat Gandhi and the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, a prominent good-government group, had deemed unnecessary.

Bennett acknowledges that gentrification can be a boon to universities like Howard by allowing projects like Howard Town Center to generate more revenue. But she stresses that revenue must be balanced with pressing campus needs. And so with other properties, Howard plans to eschew easy money and devote these spaces to campus functions like dormitories, a research building, and a fitness center.

Universities are required to submit a campus plan for approval by the Zoning Commission every 10 years, and the tenor of a school’s campus plan debate says a lot about its relations with the surrounding community. In advance of Georgetown’s Zoning Commission hearing, the Office of Planning recommended in 2011 that Georgetown fit all of its undergraduates in university-provided housing by 2016 in an effort to tamp down conflicts with peeved neighbors. At the same time, American University tried to build more dorms in upper Northwest, but faced community opposition to the construction.

Town-gown relations generally haven’t been as strained at schools other than Georgetown, American, and GW, but Howard has occasionally felt the push and pull of changing demands from neighbors. Bennett recalls the debate over parking lots in the 1980s, when she was on the Zoning Commission.

“I remember sitting on the master plan hearing back then, when the neighbors were complaining about the number of faculty and staff who were competing with them for parking,” Bennett says. “At that time, they were asking us to create as much off-street parking as possible. As we all have become more sensitive about the environment and greater sustainability, a lot of that has changed public opinion. And now instead of being seen as a benefit to the community, parking lots are being seen as a problem.”

Neighborhood leaders have at times lamented what they perceived as Howard’s foot-dragging when it came to developing the unsightly, polluting lots that dot the campus perimeter, particularly the lots bounded by Georgia Avenue, V, 9th, and Barry streets.

“There has been a vast, vast improvement on Howard University’s community relations and the handling of their property holdings,” says local Advisory Neighborhood Commission Chair Myla Moss. “There was a time, maybe about 15 years back, when they were not the best at being proactive in moving their property.”

The changes in the neighborhood may be spurring on changes to the campus that will benefit the community. The creep of gentrification prompted plans for Gallaudet University to open up its campus in the direction of commercially buzzing NoMa and the newish Red Line Metro station. To a lesser extent, the same dynamic is at play at Howard. “Some of the changes in the neighborhood had an effect on Howard’s latest plan,” says Tregoning, who was involved in the discussions that produced the plan and pushed Howard to create more physical connections with its surroundings. “They were really interested in having a more open campus.”

But the biggest planned changes are to those pesky parking lots, which will become apartments for upperclassmen and a wellness and fitness center. The student housing, in particular, is sorely needed. Unlikely many colleges, Howard doesn’t guarantee on-campus housing to any class of students. Bennett says about 60 percent of undergraduates, and 40 percent of all students, are housed on campus. In its approval of the campus plan last January, the Zoning Commission mandated that Howard provide on-campus housing for at least 70 percent of its more than 7,000 undergraduates by fall 2026.

Given the university’s dire needs, neighbors who might have otherwise preferred public amenities in the areas to be developed support the move to build dorms.

“They’re losing Rhodes Scholars, literally, because they have the worst dormitories, period,” says Moss, who believes that a successful university will ultimately benefit the whole community.

Clearly, the dorms are needed for the university’s future prosperity. But the trade-off is big: When the rent from Howard Town Center starts rolling in, it’s hard to imagine that the university’s planning and finance officials won’t occasionally look at the school’s new residence buildings and think about the millions that could have been.