A Small College, Painted Into a Corner

"The heritage and history of the collection are, in a sense, as important as the quality of the collection itself," says Sarah Cash, a former director of the Maier Museum and now a curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. "To break it up, in part or in whole, would be a huge disservice. It's like they're undoing their own greatness."

A Puzzle

Here's the financial puzzle, according to a May study by the consultant group Campus Strategies:

The school has seen enrollment decline for years, from a high of 800 to about 680 this year. In a bid to reverse that trend, the school has been offering huge tuition discounts -- an average 68 percent discount per student. To compensate for the loss of tuition, the school has been spending from its $140 million endowment principal and interest at a rate of 13 percent per year -- twice the national average. This year, the school is planning to pay more than 40 percent of its operating expenses from its endowment, a percentage the consultant deemed "staggering."

This sort of financial performance led to the warning from SACS last year. If the school doesn't improve by December, the agency could put it on probation, which could, over the next several years, lead to losing its accreditation altogether, which is a nice way of saying it would close.

The financial review suggested the school freeze hiring, abandon plans to build athletic facilities for its male students and "leverage" its art collection to inject cash into the endowment.

The school laid off 15 percent of its staff this summer and reduced the average tuition discount from 68 to 55 percent this year. College spokeswoman Brenda Edson says the latter move alone generated an extra $680,000 in revenue.

But here's the rub: No one has ever said exactly how much money the endowment needs. Is it $4 million? $40 million? SACS did not say, and neither will the school administration, saying there are many pieces of the financial puzzle that are still undetermined.

"We certainly did not tell them to sell any art," says Belle S. Wheelan, president of the accreditation agency. "There are standards that we set. They are not in compliance with those. . . . We don't ever tell members how to settle their finances. That's a choice for their board to make. They could have done any number of things -- hot dog sales, bake sales. It's strictly their choice."

Klein stresses the school has not made any firm decisions with another institution about selling or sharing any of the art (the latter would be an agreement in which an institution would buy partial ownership of a painting, and could display it for part of the year).

"We're going to do everything in our power to make sure it remains part of the fabric of the college. . . . We'll only do what we really have to do."

The Cost of History

What is any painting worth? Is it like a stock, something that rises and falls in value, and should it be sold at peak value?

In the display space of the Maier Museum -- a small building that draws about 7,000 visitors and students per year -- there is the quiet alienation of Edward Hopper's "Mrs. Scott's House," the warmth of the barefoot woman in John Sloan's "Sun and Wind on the Roof," the intelligent clarity in the eyes of "Tom," by Robert Henri.

And there is the cold unspoken poverty of Bellows's "Men of the Docks." Heavy-coated men of a hundred years ago, faces slack, hands in pockets, looking into the morning sunlight by the warehouses and steamers and grimy tugboats, looking for labor, looking for warmth, looking for any sort of answer to the questions that life has imposed upon them.

You wonder what that view of the eternal means to the American experience, both as art and as history, and you wonder if the dreams of Louise Jordan Smith ever put a dollar value to something like that.