Word: ponderings
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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...
...while, Ponder furiously searched for money. His pitch was that he would run Fisk as a business, in the black. In time he got local banks, corporations and his alumni association on the bandwagon, as well as a deeply concerned Nashville businessman, Ben Rechter, whose support at last look came to half a million dollars. At the beginning of 1986 the debt was down to $890,000. Ponder pledges that it will be erased by commencement this spring...
...place, the air of people scraping by. The 54 faculty members not only continue to bring supplies from home that should be supplied by Fisk--chalk, say--but they are painfully aware that they are working for peanuts; since 1980 the school has provided a single 5% raise. Ponder says he is going for salary adjustments as soon as he is rid of the debt...
...what of the future of any little liberal arts college, broke or flush, in the day of M.B.A.s and corporate specialization? "Big corporations won't come to small liberal arts colleges to recruit," Ponder laments. "They want engineering students." Nonetheless, he has a plan: "We will call attention to our own, a person who can read, write, spell, think. You can teach him the technique of running your shop...