Watkins College of Art — A Free-Lecture Trust From 1885, Folded Into Belmont in 2020

Summary

Watkins College of Art, the oldest art institution in Nashville, traced its origins to 1885 and ceased to exist as an independent college in 2020, when it merged into Belmont University and reopened that fall as the Watkins College of Art at Belmont. It began not as an art school at all but as the Watkins Institute, a charitable trust established by Samuel Watkins — a former bond servant turned self-made Nashville businessman — who left $100,000 and a parcel of land to the State of Tennessee to provide free lectures and classes for the city's poorer youth. Over more than a century it evolved into a small, accredited, degree-granting college of the visual arts, granting BFAs in fine art, film, photography, graphic design, and interior design. By 2020 it enrolled only about 150 students, down from roughly 304 just six years earlier, and its president had concluded that small, specialized colleges could no longer "perpetuate themselves."

The merger, announced January 28, 2020, and effective that fall, distributed Watkins's programs across Belmont: fine arts, graphic design, illustration, photography, and art into a newly created Watkins College of Art at Belmont; interior design into Belmont's O'More College of Architecture and Design; film into the motion-pictures program in Belmont's Curb College. Continuing Watkins students kept their lower tuition rate — about $31,600 a year against Belmont's roughly $49,920 — with credits protected and added career and study-abroad support. It was Belmont's second art-and-design acquisition in two years, following its 2018 absorption of the O'More College of Design, part of a national wave sweeping small specialized colleges into larger universities.

The absorption was not frictionless. Two students and a professor sued to stop it, and an opposition group, "Save Watkins," argued that because the institution had begun as a public charitable trust, its assets could not simply be conveyed to a private religious university. In April 2020 a Tennessee chancellor declined to halt the merger, ruling the plaintiffs lacked standing under state nonprofit law. Beneath the legal question ran a cultural one: Belmont was a Christian university with religiously grounded employment and conduct policies, and Watkins was a secular art college, raising pointed concerns about academic freedom and the fit between the two.

In 2021 Belmont sold the 16.5-acre Watkins campus in MetroCenter for $22.5 million, dedicating the proceeds to a scholarship endowment for Watkins art students; the site is now a roughly 750-unit apartment development. The verdict is the classic absorbed ending: the programs and the name survive inside a larger university, the students were carried through, and a 135-year-old institution founded as a gift to the public — and the campus that housed it — dissolved into Belmont and a residential real-estate project.

Timeline

A Gift Before It Was a College

Watkins did not begin as anything a modern accreditor would recognize. When Samuel Watkins — a self-educated businessman who had made his money in Nashville — died in 1880, he left $100,000 and a downtown lot in trust to the State of Tennessee, instructing that the income fund free lectures on science and useful knowledge for the city's poorer young people. The school his bequest endowed opened its doors in 1885 as the Watkins Institute, which was, in its founding conception, a piece of civic philanthropy: an open door to learning for Nashvillians who could not pay for it, governed as a public charitable trust rather than owned as a private enterprise. That origin — a gift to the public, held in trust by the state — would matter a great deal at the very end, when the question of who actually owned Watkins's assets landed in a Tennessee courtroom.

For most of the twentieth century the Institute drifted, as such bequests often do, toward whatever the city needed, and by the 1970s that turned out to be art and design. A three-year interior-design course in 1976 became a state-approved associate degree in 1979; in 1994 the art and design schools merged into the Watkins Institute of Art and Design, a film school followed in 1995, and NASAD accreditation arrived in 1996. The institution had become, in everything but its founding charter, a small private art college. Its golden age was modest but genuine: a permanent 16.5-acre campus bought in 2002 and built out inside a converted movie multiplex, residence halls in 2005 and 2008, an enrollment that crested around 304 in 2014, and a reputation as the oldest visual-arts institution in a city rapidly becoming a creative capital. For a small art school, Watkins had arrived — just as the ground beneath all small art schools began to give way.

The Squeeze on the Small and Specialized

The forces that closed Watkins were the forces closing art schools everywhere. Small, specialized colleges are the most fragile institutions in higher education: they serve a narrow applicant pool, charge tuition for a credential whose market value is perpetually questioned, carry the high fixed costs of studios and equipment, and lack the scale or endowment to ride out a bad stretch. In the 2010s the bad stretch became permanent. Art-and-design colleges across the country merged or closed — the Memphis College of Art, the Oregon College of Art and Craft, the San Francisco Art Institute, and others — as rising costs, skepticism about the economics of an arts degree, and a shrinking pool of traditional-age students bore down. Watkins, with no large endowment and a single small campus, had none of the insulation a larger university enjoys.

The enrollment numbers tell it plainly: roughly 304 students in fall 2014 collapsed to about 150 by 2020, a near-halving in six years. President J. Kline put the diagnosis in the gentlest possible terms when the merger was announced: "It's becoming more and more difficult for small colleges, particularly specialized ones, to perpetuate themselves." That was less a euphemism than a sector-wide epitaph. A college of 150 students cannot generate the tuition to cover accredited studio programs, a campus, and faculty, and Watkins had no reserve deep enough to subsidize the gap. By 2020, as with so many of its peers, independence had become a slow form of insolvency, and the only real choice was the form of the ending.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the people, the landing was soft. No Watkins student was stranded: continuing students moved into Belmont in fall 2020 at their lower Watkins tuition, credits intact, with the fine-arts programs preserved as the Watkins College of Art at Belmont and film and interior design housed in established Belmont units. The $22.5 million campus sale funded a scholarship endowment expected to generate more than $800,000 annually for arts students, so Samuel Watkins's founding impulse — money in trust to educate those who could not otherwise afford it — found, in a narrow sense, an heir.

The losses are quieter and structural. The independent Watkins College of Art — the 135-year-old institution, its accreditation, its self-governance, its identity as a freestanding art school and the living remainder of an 1885 public trust — ended in 2020, its programs dispersed across three divisions of a university with a markedly different mission and culture. The MetroCenter campus, a former movie multiplex turned studio college, is now The Chartwell at Watkins, a roughly 750-unit apartment complex. The "Save Watkins" effort, having lost in court on standing, left behind the most pointed lesson of the case: that a gift made to the public in 1885, governed as a trust, could in the end be absorbed into a private university and its campus converted to apartments, with the founder's name attached to both — and that absorption, however humane, is still an ending.

Lessons

References

• Belmont Announces Plans to Merge with Watkins College of Art, Effective Fall 2020 Belmont University
• Another art school absorbed by Belmont University Inside Higher Ed
• Judge won't halt Watkins College-Belmont University merger Chattanooga Times Free Press
• Belmont sells Watkins campus for $22.5M Nashville Post
• Watkins Institute Tennessee Encyclopedia