O brothers, where art thou? A brief history of CSF
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COLLEGE OF SANTA FE
One week from now, about 90 seniors will graduate from the last class at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. They leave behind a campus ghost town of tumbleweeds, torched and bulldozed barracks, abandoned dorms and classrooms, and cryptic graffiti referring to their own version of the end-times. The fish pond by the Fogelson Library is dry. The Greer Garson Theatre is empty, save for the ghostly echoes of dramatic productions past. A line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes to mind, evoking the sense of a possibly post-apocalyptic dream: “If we shadows have offended/Think but this, and all is mended,/That you have but slumber’d here,/While these visions did appear.”
Nine years have passed since the College of Santa Fe closed due to untenable financial difficulty. In 2009, as the country plunged into a vast recession, some faculty members accepted early retirement as others were forced to re-evaluate their careers. The campus on St. Michael’s Drive reopened a year later as a for-profit art school, Santa Fe University of Art and Design — and now that institution is closing, too, citing financial challenges.
The simple explanation for CSF’s money woes, which mounted over years and decades, is that expenses increased while revenue did not. The budget was tuition-driven. Although there were some generous donors who contributed to master building plans and even gave cash — when times were really tough — to help the college make payroll, there was no significant endowment to count on. Despite intense local and national marketing efforts in the final years, CSF could not attract enough students to change its fate.
In the waning days of the original college, public comment from the school focused mostly on finances and attempts to keep the place open. But there are more complicated questions that loom over the legacy of the College of Santa Fe — a once-thriving Catholic institution that educated thousands of local young men and women. What led to the financial difficulty? Why was it so hard to attract students? And why did it appear, to many Santa Fe residents, as if the college had fundamentally changed its identity over the years?
If you ask 10 people these questions, you will likely get 10 different answers that will depend largely on the respondent’s relationship to CSF. My relationship