Financially strapped Fisk University says it will appeal a Tennessee judge’s decision last month to deny the school access to all the sale proceeds of a proposed ownership sharing agreement involving the school’s valuable Alfred Stieglitz Collection of art and photographs.
The judge, Ellen Hobbs Lyle, had ruled Fisk could get a third of the money ($10 million), as long as the remainder ($20 million) went into an independently managed endowment whose income would be used solely to support future costs associated with maintaining and exhibiting the collection in Nashville. That would generate about $1 million a year for the collection.
“This restriction effectively confiscates proceeds from the approved sharing agreement and places Fisk in a more risky position than before,” says a Fisk statement quoting Fisk President Hazel O’Leary. During the five years of litigation over the school’s attempts to monetize the collection through various sale schemes, O’Leary has insisted the school has the right to sell all or part of the collection and put proceeds to use as it sees fit.
The statement quoted Fisk board chairman, Robert Norton, as calling the court-ordered endowment as “excess,” noting Fisk had told the court it felt it needed approximately $100,000 annually to care for the collection. “Under the current ruling, the excessive overfunding of the Stieglitz Collection would starve the University’s core educational mission,” says Norton. “This leaves the University no choice but to appeal the Chancellor’s (Judge Lyle) decision.”
The decision to appeal Judge Lyle’s ruling comes on the heels of the departure of two key members of O’Leary’s executive team and only weeks after a group of legacy alumni called on Fisk’s trustees to abandon the art sale strategy, asserting it was costing the school hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs and getting it nowhere in five years.
On Tuesday, Dr. M. Christopher Brown, Fisk Provost and Executive Vice President, was named president of Alcorn State University in Lorman, Miss. He had been at Fisk just over 18 months and for a while had been viewed by observers as a possible successor to O’Leary. Brown succeeded Dr. Kofi Lomotey, Chancellor of Southern University-Baton Rouge. Lomotey, who has faced draconian state-mandated budget cuts and an unfriendly faculty during his tenure at Southern, resigned his post last week, effective next spring.
“The school is losing a major administrator,” says one veteran higher education consultant familiar with Fisk’s efforts to survive amid a steadily deteriorating financial condition and troubles raising new revenue. He said the executive team departures at Fisk created an untimely void and said Fisk would have a difficult time finding a provost outside the school due to its financial condition.
