Word: fiske
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Much of the credit, by all accounts, is due Henry Ponder, who took over as president in July 1984. At the time, Fisk was $4.1 million in debt, the price of bringing the dog-eared facilities back to minimum standards was put at $7 million, the creditors were beginning to feel litigious and the only remaining path appeared to be prayer. As Ponder recalls, "The morale was just in the pits, just in the pits...
...economics from Ohio State University under his belt and was a director of the United Negro College Fund. Riding high in academic circles as the man who had built the endowment of South Carolina's Benedict College from an inconsequential sum to $20 million, Ponder came to tackle Fisk. He found a faculty that deserved medals for even bothering to stick around. They had gone years without salary increases, after voluntarily accepting cuts...
With that, Mitchell offers a primer from his own experience at Fisk. "It got to the point where I carried a kerosene heater to the classroom. It gave off more fumes than heat, but it made the students feel better. You cannot take notes in gloves. It got so bad that I had to write tests on the board. We had no Xerox paper. We made our own maps. We still do, with Magic Markers and butcher paper. Maps are expensive. And history professors are pretty good geographers...
Looking into the cellar, Ponder found a boiler that needed $350,000 in repairs just to pass municipal inspection. He called in an engineer from the Fisk class of '57, Vander Harris, a maintenance genius he had known in South Carolina. Harris got the boiler going for $60,000. To this day, Harris attends to the nuts and bolts of running Fisk. "We can't afford thermostats," he was saying recently. "Either the heat is on or off. You just have to figure out the retention rate of your buildings." Always looking for ways to save a buck, Harris...
While Harris was patching the place up, Ponder was looking for benefactors and credit. He was telling companies that had been burned by Fisk, "If all our creditors got a judgment against us today, we'd close down and nobody would get any money. Give us six months, twelve months, 18 months." He was also saying, "Keep working for us. We will pay for everything from this day forward, and we won't forget the back bills...