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February 2006
The Last Gasp?
A beleaguered Knoxville college with a proud tradition faces an uncertain future
By Sara C. Shoemaker
Though the pride of private, Presby-terian-affiliated Knoxville College is as ever-present as that of its distinguished alumni, it may take just short of a miracle to stave off financial ruin for East Tennessee’s only historically black college.
Knoxville College is still reeling from the sudden August 2005 firing of former president Barbara Hatton, whose plan to strengthen the college’s financial situation and reestablish the accreditation it lost in 1997 ended with piles of utility bills and as much as a year’s worth of faculty and staff wages unpaid.
Despite the pall hanging over the institution, no one close to the school has given up hope. Robert Harvey is now serving for the fourth time as interim president since he graduated from the college in the 1940s and is working to keep the school and its 130 students afloat until a new president is found.
“When Knoxville College was challenged in a leadership area, it caught pneumonia. When [the University of Tennessee] gets challenged in a leadership area, it is just going to sneeze,” says Will Minter, referring to U.T.’s ouster of former president John Shumaker in 2003. “They can afford that kind of thing.”
Minter is a former Knoxville College student and division director with the Small Business program office at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who has stepped up not only financially, but also with a strategy leveraging his experience at ORNL. He plans to dedicate the next five years to various fundraising efforts specifically aimed at improving the college’s infrastructure. Beginning in January, the goal is to raise $2.5 million
in 90 days. That could be enough to sustain, briefly, a 16-building campus that once bustled with as many as 1,600 students back in the 1970s. Many of the facilities lay vacant, even condemned, or in need of maintenance.
Knoxville College’s plight is not unique among historically black colleges in Tennessee. Fisk University in Nashville recently put two paintings from its prized collection on the auction block to fund new construction and secure teaching endowments. And the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools recently placed LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis on probation until it resolves its debt.
With so many other educational opportunities, why bother saving Knoxville College?
“The question is, how do we fulfill that need for our kids to get educated no matter who they are or where they come from,” Minter says. “There’s no reason for us to turn our back on them.”
We’ll see if enough agree.
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