Arts college becoming ‘ghost town’
Phaseout brings overgrown weeds and locked doors as remaining students try to make best of final year
Donna Litton expressed a dark sense of delight as she looked around the sunscorched, weed-laden, nearly deserted campus of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
“It’s fun to see nature reclaim it,” she said with a laugh.
She and fellow theater student Triston Pullen were among the few people who could be seen on the school grounds on a recent weekday, when many of the school’s buildings were shuttered and locked as early as 3 p.m. — a protective measure to keep out vagrants who have shown up on the St. Michael’s Drive campus, Pullen and Litton explained.
“There is a weird vibe,” Pullen said. “It’s kind of like a ghost town.”
Nearly a month and a half after classes began for the final year of the private, forprofit arts school, which opened in the fall of 2010 on the city-owned campus, some 160 students are finishing out their degrees. Their numbers might be dwindling: Pullen said a half-dozen students from the theater department have left already. Fewer than 40 remain enrolled.
“I imagine it was because of the state of the school,” he said.
The most prominent feature on the school’s website is a grim message in large, colorful letters: “transfer/teach out information.”
Last spring, leaders of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and its par-
ent company, Laureate Education Inc., announced they were closing the school in May 2018 because of financial challenges and declining enrollment.
About 680 students were enrolled last year, and — with the exception of three underclassmen who wanted to return for the last year — only incoming seniors were allowed to enroll this fall to finish their degree programs. That left hundreds of students scrambling to find a new school, including those on lucrative scholarships they couldn’t transfer to another university.
Some 50 students have filed lawsuits over the shutdown, accusing the school and Baltimore-based Laureate Education of fraud and breach of contract.
Litton and Pullen, as well as another student at the arts school who declined to give his name, said they have nothing but praise for the administrators and teachers working to ensure that their last year on campus is successful.
Adjunct teachers are now in charge of many of their courses, they said, but they had no complaints about the educators.
College spokeswoman Rachael Lighty said about 10 fulltime faculty members are working at the school, along with 47 “contributing” educators. About 60 percent in all are adjunct faculty, she said.
“They are working super hard to make sure we have a good year,” Litton said. “And we all seem just as motivated — or even more so than in past years — to excel. We all want it to be a good year.”
Pullen said he feels like he has more opportunities to shine with the staff focusing on such a small body of students. In November, he will direct a theater show, Red Light Winter — a shot he might not have been given if the campus weren’t so quiet, he said.
Still, the barren grounds are in disrepair. Wildflowers and weeds have taken over most areas, with the exception of the neatly kept green in the center of the campus, a circle of synthetic turf sporting picnic tables for the few students who remain.
Graffiti adorns some of the buildings’ exterior walls, and the fish pond outside the school’s Fogelson Library is slowly drying up, with just a trio of goldfish still scurrying around the bottom, looking for food.
Nearby, a fish net leaned against a rock.
Litton and Pullen said someone had rescued the rest of the fish, but they weren’t sure where the fish had ended up. Lighty said those fish had been relocated to private ponds in the community.
The cafeteria on campus is closed for good. Students are living in a dorm that has kitchens where residents can prepare their own meals. The Fogelson Library remains open most days, but some of the shelves have been thinned of books, and a few shelves, once laden with tomes, are bare.
Lighty said that’s because library staff have reorganized the space to make room for graphics arts classes to be held in the library.
A security guard passed by in a truck. He waved to the students, and they waved back. They said they still feel safe on the campus, though all three live elsewhere in the city.
Litton admitted she might not feel the same way if she were living on campus.
“Sometimes there’s no access to the buildings, and a security [guard] is hard to find,” she said.
Buildings are “locked for safety,” Lighty said, but students have access cards to open them.
More than half of the students are living off campus for the final year, Litton and Pullen said — which Lighty confirmed.
Often, the students said, they can walk across campus without running into another student during the course of a day.
The last graduates of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design will pack up and leave in May. It’s still unclear what will happen to the campus, operated for decades as the College of Santa Fe by the De La Salle Christian Brothers, an order with a long history of education in Santa Fe. The Roman Catholic order continues to operate St. Michael’s High, a private middle and high school.
But the Christian Brothers began to experience financial troubles following the recession and could no longer keep the college’s doors open. They sold the property to the city of Santa Fe for $20 million. The city then leased part of the campus land to Laureate Education and sold a parcel to the state.
A resolution that will come before the City Council later this month says the city has not found a prospective educationfocused tenant to take over the entire campus and continue offering academic programs. The resolution proposes, instead, that the city open the property to a variety of uses, including vocational education and research, low-cost housing, film production and retail space.
While Laureate has said publicly that it will close the school, it hasn’t formally notified the city of its intention to leave. The lease agreement requires the arts college to give seven months’ notice to the city if it plans to end the deal. As of Friday, Laureate had not yet done that, Lighty said.
“We will provide the appropriate notice under the lease agreement,” she said.