The question came from the cold, digital chat field of an online town hall meeting for San Francisco Art Institute students, but it had the force of indignation.
“Why would you waste freshmen’s time,” the student asked, “and make us motivated for no reason if you’re going to close?”
Channeling the confusion and disappointment of SFAI’s newly sheltered-at-home students, the question became a statement: “I don’t want to transfer to a new school. I love SFAI, no one can replace it.”
It was March 25, two days after SFAI president Gordon Knox and board chair Pam Rorke Levy issued a letter to students, staff, faculty and supporters announcing the 149-year-old art school would not enroll a new class in the fall. The letter said the school was “considering the suspension” of regular courses and degree programs after May. It foretold mass faculty and staff layoffs, and advised continuing students to “pursue placement at another school.”
Above all, the student wanted to know: Why haven’t you solved this issue before?
Knox began describing efforts to grow the school’s endowment. Then his video feed glitched, and his audio became garbled and indecipherable. Levy stepped in to talk about “ramped up” efforts to reconnect with former donors, find new ones and court SFAI’s illustrious alumni, name-dropping Kehinde Wiley and Annie Leibowitz.
The heart of the question was effectively sidestepped.
More than anything else—the convoluted announcements, the long-winded attempts at clarification, the lack of any clear plan for the future—that question and its nonanswer sum up the current chaos at SFAI. A small school with an outsize reputation for producing fine artists, SFAI is near universally beloved by those who have attended it, taught at it or simply brushed up against its influence on the Bay Area art scene since 1871.
Of the dozen staff, faculty, students, alumni, board members and community members interviewed for this piece, nearly all of them used the word “love” in conjunction with the school. That love means everyone wants to see SFAI continue to exist. That love means decisions have been made over the years to preserve the reputation of the school while obscuring the truth of the matter: SFAI has been in crisis for a long time.
And it might be too late to fix it.
A Deal Too Good To Pass Up
SFAI’s long-term financial woes were widely known prior to March 23, but as many members of the arts community have since noted, the school always managed to right itself in crises past. It was hard to know which particular hard time might actually, finally spell the end of the institution.
Depending on who you talk to, SFAI’s problems stem from different causes. Some blame the first dot-com bust. Others, many others, point to the school’s expansion into Fort Mason. Still others blame the rise in San Francisco’s cost of living, or the difficulty of running a small school without an enormous endowment.
The thing is: everyone is right. The groundwork for SFAI’s collapse was laid years before the coronavirus pandemic derailed the school’s latest plan for survival: a now-stalled merger with a larger school. And while it may be hard to run a tiny private college in one of the most expensive cities in the world, it’s even harder to do so with $19 million in debt, loans SFAI repays in installments of approximately $102,000 a month.
Which brings us to Fort Mason.
The school’s 60-year lease at Fort Mason, a deal negotiated in 2015 by SFAI’s board and then-president Charles Desmarais (now art critic at the San Francisco Chronicle), relocated graduate studios, classrooms and exhibition space from San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood to a pier at the former military site in the Marina. Instead of a cross-town commute, the new space would be only a mile away from the school’s historic Chestnut Street campus.
According to Levy, the Fort Mason deal was too good to pass up. “The federal government paid the lion’s share of the seismic and infrastructure build-out of that pier,” she said in a March 24 phone interview. “All we had to do was build out the classrooms and space.” SFAI’s lease on the 67,000-square-foot building cost the school about $750,000 a year, well below market rate for Bay-front property.
What’s more, SFAI was growing. Enrollment was up to 699 students (undergraduate and graduate combined) during the 2014–15 school year, and the Dogpatch studios were completely full.
Levy says SFAI initially attempted to fund construction costs through a capital campaign, but raised only about $7 million of a hoped-for $14 million. Board members did question the wisdom of borrowing such a large sum, but the growing enrollment numbers and $3 million in tax credits convinced them to move forward.
SFAI shouldered $19 million of the $50 million project, borrowing the entire amount. A deed of trust on the school’s Chestnut Street campus secured the loan.
But as construction progressed, enrollment declined. By August 2017, when the new campus opened atop Pier 2, SFAI had only 433 students. Today, it has just 306. In the fall, it was projected to shrink further, down to 263.
A Commitment to Fine Art
In the days following March 23, Knox and the board pointed to a number of factors contributing to the decline in numbers: the Bay Area’s prohibitive rents, the expense of a private college education, the fear of graduating with overwhelming debt.
