In Nashville: Fisk Makes a Comeback

By Gregory Jaynes

Little liberal arts colleges everywhere have had a hard slog lately, but the troubles at Nashville's Fisk University, the institution founded in 1866 to give freed slaves a shot at learning, have been particularly poignant. At one point about two years ago, the local utility shut off the gas, forcing the faculty and student body to make do with space heaters brought from home or donated by friends of the college. Another time, food services were discontinued. On paydays, an unfounded rumor among the staff was that the first 20 employees to reach the bank stood a chance of cashing their checks; the rest would bounce.

Being on the brink of ruin was nothing new to Fisk: in October 1871, the place was down to $1 to its name; a year earlier, a teacher apologized for petitioning for back pay, saying it was a case of going barefoot through the cold months; a year before that, the faculty voted to forgo desserts to cut costs in the dining room. For better than a century, then, the place has always managed to claw itself through every penurious period. And so in the spring of 1984, when the prospect of real collapse looked near, those who love Fisk were beside themselves. The anguished question on every lip: How can this be allowed to happen?

The answer: it was not. The alma mater of Philosopher W.E.B. DuBois (class of 1888), among other distinguished alumni, is still alive--not kicking, not out of the red, but alive. The paint is peeling, the roofs leak and ruptured heating pipes spout plumes of steam in places that once would accommodate quiet reflection--but Fisk still functions.

Much of the credit, by all accounts, is due Henry Ponder, who took over as president in July 1984. At the time, Fisk was $4.1 million in debt, the price of bringing the dog-eared facilities back to minimum standards was put at $7 million, the creditors were beginning to feel litigious and the only remaining path appeared to be prayer. As Ponder recalls, "The morale was just in the pits, just in the pits."

Ponder, brought up in a family of 14 children on an Oklahoma farm, was introduced to education in the 1930s in a segregated country school in which two teachers taught eight grades. Fifty years later, he had a doctorate in economics from Ohio State University under his belt and was a director of the United Negro College Fund. Riding high in academic circles as the man who had built the endowment of South Carolina's Benedict College from an inconsequential sum to $20 million, Ponder came to tackle Fisk. He found a faculty that deserved medals for even bothering to stick around. They had gone years without salary increases, after voluntarily accepting cuts.

The student body, what was left of it, was demoralized. In just over a decade, enrollment had dropped by roughly two-thirds and was holding at around 500. Student activities had been slashed to nothing. The newspaper was gone. The library--whose special collections hold not only the works of DuBois but those of celebrated Black Achievers William Dawson, Marcus Garvey, W.C. Handy, Charles S. Johnson, John Mercer Langston, Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes--was stretched so thin that in the periodicals section you would be lucky to find a well-worn Ebony and a month-old newsmagazine that someone had snatched from a dentist's office.

And yet, in recalling the worst of it, students and faculty alike say the level of academic excellence did not dip. History Instructor Reavis Mitchell is articulate on the subject: "The quality hasn't suffered as much as the reputation. People equate leaky faucets and cold classrooms with the totality of education. I try to tell my students there has always been an element of suffering, unfortunately, in the black tradition of education."

With that, Mitchell offers a primer from his own experience at Fisk. "It got to the point where I carried a kerosene heater to the classroom. It gave off more fumes than heat, but it made the students feel better. You cannot take notes in gloves. It got so bad that I had to write tests on the board. We had no Xerox paper. We made our own maps. We still do, with Magic Markers and butcher paper. Maps are expensive. And history professors are pretty good geographers."

Ponder says he came to the task with a lot on his mind and not enough time to make a list of priorities. Like Mitchell, he was given comfort by the school's standing. "Academically, this institution had never been in trouble. If you have credibility, the credentials, you can get the money." Looking at the ledgers, he found that his predecessors had been covering shortfalls by reaching into the endowment, reducing it from a high of $14 million in 1968 down to the present $3 million. "There was no incentive to stop spending."

Looking into the cellar, Ponder found a boiler that needed $350,000 in repairs just to pass municipal inspection. He called in an engineer from the Fisk class of '57, Vander Harris, a maintenance genius he had known in South Carolina. Harris got the boiler going for $60,000. To this day, Harris attends to the nuts and bolts of running Fisk. "We can't afford thermostats," he was saying recently. "Either the heat is on or off. You just have to figure out the retention rate of your buildings." Always looking for ways to save a buck, Harris has put bricks in the tanks of all the toilets. "It reduces your water consumption by one-third, believe me."

While Harris was patching the place up, Ponder was looking for benefactors and credit. He was telling companies that had been burned by Fisk, "If all our creditors got a judgment against us today, we'd close down and nobody would get any money. Give us six months, twelve months, 18 months." He was also saying, "Keep working for us. We will pay for everything from this day forward, and we won't forget the back bills."

All the while, Ponder furiously searched for money. His pitch was that he would run Fisk as a business, in the black. In time he got local banks, corporations and his alumni association on the bandwagon, as well as a deeply concerned Nashville businessman, Ben Rechter, whose support at last look came to half a million dollars. At the beginning of 1986 the debt was down to $890,000. Ponder pledges that it will be erased by commencement this spring.

There is still a great air of neglect about the place, the air of people scraping by. The 54 faculty members not only continue to bring supplies from home that should be supplied by Fisk--chalk, say--but they are painfully aware that they are working for peanuts; since 1980 the school has provided a single 5% raise. Ponder says he is going for salary adjustments as soon as he is rid of the debt.

As for the students, a sampling say they are encouraged. Juliette Williams, the student government association president, remembers that as Fisk grew poorer, the young scholars grew cynical. She lists the deletions from student activities, saying, "As there was less and less to do, apathy set in. But now you look up and notice, oh, there's new paint over there. You hear there's going to be a new yearbook. There hasn't been a yearbook since '81. They're actually taking pictures! Apathy is dissipating."

April Taylor, a junior in political science and religion, says she has been sustained by "the diversity of people and the level of intelligence" at Fisk. "And what is more important, they are black people. Because of the socioeconomic status of the black man, it is important we as black people become educated, sophisticated about life and our economics." She is wearing a sweatshirt that says BLACK BY POPULAR DEMAND.

But what of the future of any little liberal arts college, broke or flush, in the day of M.B.A.s and corporate specialization? "Big corporations won't come to small liberal arts colleges to recruit," Ponder laments. "They want engineering students." Nonetheless, he has a plan: "We will call attention to our own, a person who can read, write, spell, think. You can teach him the technique of running your shop."

Mitchell, the historian, has his own thoughts along this line: "If you're only interested in Bass Weejuns, tartan plaids and boola-boola, you probably won't have a good time here. But if you want a quality education, this is still the place."

At that moment, Harris, the maintenance director, was figuring out how he could get by without a $900 expansion joint by jury-rigging a small loop in a pipe.