Oregon College of Art and Craft — A 112-Year-Old Craft School That Spent Its Endowment to Death

Summary

The Oregon College of Art and Craft, the studio school on the wooded hillside west of Portland that traced its lineage to 1907, voted itself out of existence on February 7, 2019, and held its final commencement that May, after 112 years. It was one of the last colleges in the United States built around craft — clay, metal, fiber, wood, book arts, the deliberate making of objects by hand — and when its board concluded that closure was "the only responsible option," the country lost not just a school but a particular idea of what an education in the handmade could be. Roughly 135 students were enrolled when the end was announced; about 112 of them were undergraduates weeks or semesters from a degree that would soon be issued by an institution that no longer existed.

The college's roots ran to the Arts and Crafts Society, founded in Portland in 1907 by the artist and philanthropist Julia Hoffman as part of the international Arts and Crafts movement's revolt against industrial sameness. For most of its life it was an esteemed community art school, not a degree-granting college; the fateful turn came in 1994, when it began awarding the BFA and, in 1996, renamed itself the Oregon College of Art and Craft. Becoming an accredited college brought prestige and federal financial aid — and the crushing fixed costs of accreditation, administration, and a campus, costs a small craft school could not cover from tuition alone.

To paper over the gap, the school did the thing that quietly kills under-endowed colleges: it spent its endowment. As one chronicler put it, "board members and presidents approved dipping into the school's endowment till there wasn't much left." By the late 2010s OCAC was a college with rising costs, falling enrollment, administrative turnover, and almost nothing in reserve. It tried to save itself by merger — first with the Pacific Northwest College of Art across town in 2018, then with Portland State University in early 2019 — and both deals collapsed, the latter judged "not financially feasible." With no partner and no money, the board chose a quick, dignified closure over a slow, undignified insolvency.

The end was swift and clean. The 9.5-acre Barnes Road campus, the school's home for forty years, was sold in April 2019 to the neighboring Catlin Gabel School for $6.5 million — a buyer that, at least, taught ceramics and woodworking to children and could be trusted with the ground. Students were referred to a partner institution; faculty and staff lost their jobs; and a 112-year experiment in teaching Oregonians to make beautiful, useful things by hand came to a close in a single spring.

Timeline

The Society on the Hill

The Oregon College of Art and Craft was older than the word "college" in its name suggested, because for most of its long life it was something humbler and arguably more durable: a community art school. It began in 1907 as the Arts and Crafts Society, founded by Julia Hoffman — herself a photographer, painter, sculptor, metalworker, and weaver — out of the conviction, then sweeping the Western world, that industrialization was draining beauty and meaning from everyday objects and that the antidote was teaching people to make those objects well by hand. The Society's first classes met in members' living rooms. From that genteel beginning grew one of the West Coast's finest studio schools.

For decades the school moved upward and outward without changing its essential character: a downtown building in 1934, a converted hospital in Northwest Portland in 1962, and finally, in 1979, the property that would define it — a 9.5-acre wooded campus on Barnes Road, a few miles west of downtown, where the studios sat among the trees and the work was clay and fiber and metal and wood and the printed, bound book. At its fullest the BFA program enrolled somewhere between 140 and 200 full-time students, with a small MFA cohort and, crucially, a continuing-education operation that taught some two thousand community members a year. That last figure is the key to understanding OCAC: it was beloved by far more people than it ever granted degrees to.

This was its golden age and also the seed of its undoing. As a community school of craft, OCAC was sustainable — modest, tuition-light, supported by donors who loved it and students who took a weekend class because they wanted to, not because they needed a credential. The forces that would eventually kill it were the very ambitions that made it a "college" rather than a "society." But for most of its 112 years, OCAC was simply the place in Portland where you went to learn to throw a pot, weave a tapestry, or bind a book — an institution stitched into the cultural life of the city as deeply as any museum.

The Cost of Calling Yourself a College

The decisive turn came in the 1990s. In 1994 the school began awarding the Bachelor of Fine Arts, and in 1996 it renamed itself the Oregon College of Art and Craft, formally becoming an accredited, degree-granting institution. The logic was sound on its face: a college could enroll full-time degree-seekers, draw federal Title IV financial aid, and claim a stature a "society" never could. But accreditation and degree-granting carry a fixed cost — administration, compliance, faculty credentials, facilities, the whole apparatus of a college — that a community craft school's tuition and class fees were never designed to bear. OCAC had taken on the overhead of an institution many times its size.

The ambitions kept climbing as the foundation thinned. In the 2010s the college opened the Jean Vollum building and launched MFA programs, including a joint applied-craft-and-design degree with the Pacific Northwest College of Art — more prestige, more cost, more rooms to heat and staff to pay, chasing an enrollment that was not growing. Behind the new buildings, the balance sheet was quietly hollowing out. Leadership, across multiple presidencies and a churn of administrative turnover, repeatedly did the thing that has no recovery: it spent the endowment to cover operating shortfalls. By the account of those who watched it happen, the reserve was drawn down "till there wasn't much left." An endowment spent on this year's electric bill is not an investment; it is a meal eaten in advance, and OCAC ate most of its future.

By the late 2010s the math was inescapable. A small art school — fewer than two hundred degree students — was carrying college-scale costs against a depleted endowment and a national environment in which institutions enrolling under a thousand students were finding it nearly impossible to weather the economics that pull would-be students toward full-time work and away from a costly studio degree. OCAC was not the victim of any single scandal or any villain in the boardroom. It was the victim of a slow, well-intentioned mismatch: a community treasure that had spent two decades trying to be a college, and had finally run out of the savings that allowed it to pretend the books balanced.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the students, the outcome was the difference a few months make. Because OCAC announced the closure in February and finished the spring term, its final undergraduates were able to graduate that May, and those who could not finish in time were referred to a partner institution rather than left to improvise. But "referred" is not "guaranteed," and a transfer into another school rarely reconstructs a craft education built on specific studios, specific kilns and looms and presses, and specific teachers — much of what made an OCAC degree distinctive simply could not be packed and moved. Faculty and staff, many of them practicing craft artists with few comparable employers anywhere, lost their jobs and, in a real sense, their professional home; the closure removed one of the only places in the country where a person could earn a degree in craft at all.

The campus was the part that landed softly. The 9.5-acre wooded property on Barnes Road went to the adjacent Catlin Gabel School for $6.5 million — a fortunate stewardship, since Catlin Gabel was itself a nonprofit that taught ceramics and woodworking to children and intended to use the studios for an expanded middle school. The ground where Oregonians had learned to make things by hand for forty years would, at least, keep teaching children to make things by hand. The deeper loss was harder to sell or relocate: OCAC was one of the last freestanding colleges of craft in the United States, a direct descendant of a 1907 movement to defend the handmade against the mass-produced, and its closure thinned an already small field. In the literature of the closure era, OCAC stands as the cautionary case of the beloved institution that ate its own endowment — proof that a college can be cherished by thousands and still go broke, and that affection is not a balance sheet.

Lessons

References

• Small Oregon art college will close Inside Higher Ed
• Oregon College Of Art And Craft To Close In Spring Oregon Public Broadcasting
• Saying Goodbye To The Oregon College Of Art And Craft OPB State of Wonder
• It's over. OCAC is sold. Oregon ArtsWatch
• Oregon College of Art and Craft Wikipedia