A Small College, Painted Into a Corner

Strapped Randolph College Weighs Sale of Its $100 Million Art Collection

LYNCHBURG, Va. -- In the spring and summer of 1920, students at Randolph-Macon Woman's College came up with a heady plan for the small school in a postage-stamp corner of the nation. They would pool their nickels, dimes, quarters and dollars to enhance the school's fledgling art collection by obtaining a masterpiece: George Bellows's "Men of the Docks."

Under the direction of art professor Louise Jordan Smith, students put together $200. The college came up with $495. Townspeople and alumnae scraped up $1,500. As the students closed in on the purchase price of $2,500, the student paper jauntily reported: "Yesterday, one friend of the college donated $24 and another $50. Of course, the plan will come to a glorious end. Randolph-Macon undertakings always do. Who would like to donate the next $100?"

Talk about your glorious endings: "Men of the Docks" became the cornerstone of the school's $100 million collection of American art, including works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe and William Merritt Chase. The works, many of them bought directly from the artists, were displayed for decades in common rooms and open hallways and gave the 700-student college an identity of culture, refinement and prescient artistic taste.

The federal government sure thought so back in the day -- it located "Project Y," a Cold War emergency shelter for the National Gallery of Art's masterpieces, in a museum-quality building at the back of the school. The nukes never flew, and today that shelter is the school's Maier Museum of Art.

Now college administrators say they may sell some or share part of the collection to prop up the school's sagging finances.

Many alumnae say such a move would be so breathtakingly outrageous, such a strike at the school's core identity, that it'd be as if the college started admitting men.

Oh. They did that this year, too.

"We have very hard financial issues we're trying very hard to deal with," says John E. Klein, president of the school, now called Randolph College. "The art is obviously a large asset that cannot be overlooked."

That sort of blunt financial assessment, translating the school's most prized cultural possession to dollar figures, has set off alarm bells throughout the school, its 13,000 alumnae and the usually hushed realm of campus art museums.

"This collection was built painting by painting, with blood and sweat and tears from students, faculty, alumnae and the Lynchburg community. It belongs to the students of this college and to our community -- not to the Board of Trustees," says Ellen Agnew, an alumna who resigned in protest last month from the school's art museum, where she had worked for 23 years.

"If the arts aren't sacred at a liberal arts college, where are they sacred?" asks Laura Katzman, who resigned her tenured position in the art department in April, also in protest over the school's proposal to translate art into finance.

"The ethics are very clear: You don't sell artwork to fix the boiler," says Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums.