In Nashville: Fisk Makes a Comeback

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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.