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Fisk has referred to the repossession as "nothing less than a theft of the art from Fisk." The school also argues that taking the art collection may cause the university to shut down forever.
The idea came about after Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle rejected the university's proposal to sell a 50 percent holding in the art collection in order to raise funds. The school has been struggling financially and was finding ways to pay bills. The collection was going to be shown for half the year in Arkansas, and the school would receive $30 million in return.
The school has mentioned that maintaining the art collection was prohibitively expensive and that it couldn't afford to keep it up. Since the school says it can't afford to maintain the collection, the state is trying to take possession of the art in exchange for paying the cost of the upkeep. The goal is to keep the collection in the city of Nashville for the entire year.
The attorney general's plan says that the collection would be returned to Fisk once it has demonstrated that it can afford to keep it. Fisk President Hazel O'Leary has protested the plan publicly:
"Nashville has a simple choice to make, and that is whether it is better to keep the art in Nashville full time and have Fisk close or keep the art in Nashville half the time and have Fisk survive," she said. "The state of Tennessee and Metropolitan Nashville have decided that the art is more important than Fisk."
I am in complete agreement with O'Leary about the state's unjust decision to confiscate one of the most valuable assets of a struggling university. Taking this art collection from Fisk is similar to the paternalistic notion of a black mother having her child taken by the state because she cannot afford to feed him. Rather than helping Fisk afford the cost of taking care of the art collection, the state is adding insult to injury by attempting to take the collection for itself. I can't imagine the same thing happening to the University of Tennessee.
The problems for Fisk go back to a fundamental survival issue for many Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The economic problems have never gone away, much of them due to the legacy of racism and financial exclusion exhibited by our nation over the past 400 years. Many predominantly white universities have endowments that are in the billions, while HBCUs struggle to pay the light bills. This financial disparity is not because of a differential in our commitment to education. It's because for hundreds of years, our wealth was stolen from us and given to somebody else. Taking the art collection away from Fisk at this critical time is nothing more than a continuation of the same racist legacy that created the inequality in the first place. The state of Tennessee should be ashamed. You don't deal with the effects of inequality by creating more of it.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce's commentary delivered to your e-mail, please click here.