The Maryland Institute, College of Art wants you to know: This is not a fire sale. The college does not need to sell its famed Lucas collection in order to keep its doors open. But it could accomplish great things with the millions of dollars it expects to gain.
That, anyway, is the word from institute officials, who are projecting hearty confidence in their controversial decision to seek a judge's approval to sell the 20,000-piece collection of paintings, prints and sculptures first acquired by the school 85 years ago.
"Not only did we have a right to sell it, but [attorney Richard W.] Emory, in a very nice way, was saying we had an obligation to sell it," said Neal Friedlander, chairman of the college's trustee committee that recommended the move.
In 1990, institute officials hired Mr. Emory, a lawyer with the Baltimore law firm of Venable, Baetjer and Howard, to review the conditions under which the collection was given to the institute. He wrote that the college should sell it to pay for the costs of educating its students, whose instruction was at best indirectly enhanced by the college's possession of the Lucas collection. PTC Last week, officials announced they had decided to do exactly that.
"We're not talking survival," Maryland Institute President Fred Lazarus IV said. "We're talking survival as a quality institution."
Officials said they want to increase the amount they invest in high-tech equipment from $100,000 to $250,000 each year. Art educators elsewhere echoed the need to keep up with the digital age. "Students used to come in and ask if you had computers," said Bill Barrett, the former president of the Art Institute of San Francisco. "Now they come in and ask, 'Where are they?' "
"There's a decision being made . . . to be one of the top institutions in the country," said John Slorp, president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a former instructor at the Maryland Institute. The Lucas collection "was meant to be an asset of a school intended to produce living art." Mr. Slorp said. "I tend to agree with the decision" to sell it, he said.
The college argued that the move would also ensure that financial aid keeps pace with the needs of students who cannot afford the $17,800 annual price tag for tuition and board. The college has about 860 full-time undergraduate students and about 100 graduate students. For the academic year ending May 31, 1994, the college spent $3.1 million of its own money on financial aid for its students out of a total budget of $17 million.
And pressures on financial aid are only going to increase, institute officials said. The advent of urban magnet schools in the arts -- such as the Duke Ellington School in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore's School for the Arts -- further complicates that effort as talented students from families with little money gain admission to the Maryland Institute.
"I lose the best of students to Yale [University] and the Art Institute of Chicago," said Grace Hartigan, director of the college's graduate school of painting. "They have not only scholarships but stipends."
Other than some grants targeted for minority artists, "I have nothing to offer them but the reputation of the Maryland Institute," Ms. Hartigan said.
The school depends on tuition for about three-quarters of its income -- $ 12.6 million last year, according to an audit by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young. Meanwhile, federal and state governments are scaling back their support for campuses and are likely to target the arts for even more cuts, Mr. Lazarus noted.
"It's a struggle because we do it without a lot of money," Mr. Lazarus said. "I think we do an incredible job with the resources we have."
While the college has not run operating deficits recently, the school's $9 million endowment is relatively small, administrators from other art institutes said.
The institute funnels the equivalent of 6 percent of its endowment principal -- a little under half the average interest it earns -- to each year's budget. Most colleges and universities now attempt to keep the rate of payout at or below 5 percent so that earnings will allow the endowment to grow more quickly. Mr. Lazarus said the school may reduce the payout to 5 percent, which would cause a drop in revenue of $90,000.
The college has embarked on a series of expensive construction and renovation projects in the past few years. They include $12 million for dormitories in Bolton Hill; a $5 million overhaul of the school's main administration building; and the $5 million acquisition of the former automobile association building nearby to house new studio classrooms and a bigger library.
These projects will be largely financed through the sale of bonds and through money from the $18 million in gifts and pledges raised so far during the school's four-year=old $22 million fund-raising drive.
As many of those pledges will not be received for many years -- bequests await the death of the donor, for example -- officials said they need to turn to new sources of revenue if they want their program to avoid stagnation.
In 1990, using much the same reasoning, the college sold a Henry Moore sculpture donated by USF&G; for $2.2 million, and it has previously sold other works, including a few from the Lucas collection. But the Moore sculpture is still at the Baltimore Convention Center, while critics of the proposed sale of the Lucas collection fear it will be lost to the city forever.