Will RISD Survive 2026?

My alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design, is devoting itself to diversity as demographic disaster looms.

I. Diversity

On June 23, 2020, the Providence Journal ran the headline “RISD, facing $50-million deficit, to lay off full-time faculty.”

For the first time, the Rhode Island School of Design is planning to lay off full-time faculty after the faculty union rejected a proposal of less draconian cuts.

In a letter to faculty, RISD President Rosanne Somerson said the college is reeling from a multi-million budget deficit caused by the closure of in-person classes this spring.

“To put this figure in perspective,” the president wrote, “It is at least 10 times the $5 million deficit challenge the college faced during the 2008–2009 economic crisis.”

Three weeks later, the school informed the Journal of their pledge to increase its diversity in hiring and the student body.

The hiring initiative, which will be supported by a donation to the college -- the details of which will be announced later, according to the letter -- is part of a series of actions the institution and its museum are taking around social justice and equity.

Four months after that, Artnet News reported that “The Rhode Island School of Design Is Hiring 10 New Faculty Members Dedicated Entirely to Race and Decolonization Studies.”

“In order to create a more racially just RISD, we must do more than simply combat racism where we find it,” RISD president Rosanne Somerson told Artnet News in an email. “We must be proactively anti-racist in principle and practice, and make consequential, scaled changes throughout the institution.” Ten new positions are set to be filled by the fall 2021 semester.

RISD is facing a $50 million deficit as a result of the prolonged lockdown this year. But the new hires will be funded by one of the largest anonymous donations in the institution’s history. The gift covers the first five years of the faculty members’ salaries.

How this was possible grew clear in later reports from the school, once the searches had been completed and the roster had swelled from ten to thirteen. There had been a “cluster hire” around the aforementioned donation, which was no longer anonymous by autumn 2021, when RISD publicly welcomed the new faculty.

“RISD is committed to being proactively anti-racist in principle and practice and to making consequential changes throughout the institution,” notes Interim President Dave Proulx. “RISD launched this search in October 2020 in response to student activism and calls from BIPOC faculty members to diversify RISD’s faculty and curricula and has hired an outstanding first cohort, thanks to generous donors RISD Trustee Kim Gassett-Schiller and Philip W. Schiller.”

Beneficiaries of the “cluster hire” subsequently have been said to hold the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design at RISD. The Schiller family is also attached to a philanthropic bequest for a Coastal Studies Center at Bowdoin, the largest single donation to Salem State University in its history, and an Institute for Integrated Science and Society at Boston College. Philip Schiller’s wealth is tied to his long tenure as senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing at Apple.

In December 2021, Boston University announced that its vice president and associate provost for community and inclusion, Crystal Williams, was leaving for Providence to become RISD's first black president.

[Williams] has been an important leader on issues of race at a time when the nation began a reckoning on the subject, still ongoing, with protests against police violence toward Black people. Williams organized BU’s Day of Collective Engagement in summer 2020, when more than 5,000 students, faculty, and staff joined a series of webinars to talk about the national protests over a number of high-profile police killings of Black people nationwide, several of which were caught on cell phone cameras and sparked outrage across social media….

Of her appointment to helm RISD, Williams says it was driven by her belief that art and design can “elevate and amplify” the human experience and “narrate who we have been and who we can become. 

“Art, education, and equity and justice are the three foundational foci of my life and everything about me—who I am as a teacher, a writer, a leader, friend, daughter, and human,” Williams says.

Unusually for RISD, Williams is not an artist, designer, or art historian. She’s a poet, and her one incidence of connection to visual art is a commission from the Museum of Modern Art to write verse in response to a painting by Faith Ringgold in their collection. She is a longtime diversity bureaucrat, having come to BU from Bates College, where she “served as associate vice president for strategic initiatives, professor of English and senior advisor to the president, developing programs, strategies and measurable outcomes that enhanced diversity, equity and inclusiveness,” as RISD elaborated. Prior to that she was at Reed College, where she “became a faculty activist, working with colleagues to envision and create a more inclusive and diverse institution.”

Realizing the power of a liberal arts education to uniquely elevate and magnify the interconnections and interdependencies between ideas and solutions, she was appointed the college’s inaugural dean for institutional diversity, directing multiple faculty-driven initiatives to create an infrastructure to support greater diversity and inclusion.

President Williams will be ceremonially installed over the weekend of October 7, during which time many activities are planned. Her contribution to the festivities is a keynote conversation with Ibram X. Kendi, the self-styled “antiracism” guru and Williams’s former colleague at BU. They will discuss “how art and design can help build an antiracist society.” Kendi, to this day, has never entertained challenging questions from audiences or debated other scholars about his views, despite having been invited to do so by African-American intellectuals including Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Coleman Hughes. In doing so he embodies the opposite of what I was taught at RISD, that the ability to receive intelligent critique and question your own premises is core to a creative life of any integrity. His five-digit speaking fee for the upcoming hour with Williams is an order of magnitude greater than my lifetime of giving to the school as an alumnus.

II. Demography

RISD notes on its About page that 38% of its student body are “domestic students of color.” 36% of its students are international. Those categories, visualized in graphs such as this one at Forbes, are non-intersecting. Domestic white students comprise 26% of the total enrollment. The “domestic students of color” are 38% of the whole student body, but they’re 59% of all domestic students.

Sources for other demographic information look a bit dated and disreputable in comparison to Forbes, but this one notes that 89% of the faculty are white. It also says that while the sex split on the faculty is close to even, women outnumber men in the student body two-to-one. If that ratio remains constant across race, then US-native white men comprise 9% of total enrollment at RISD.

If the faculty racial demographics are not representative of the nation as a whole, or even representative of 79%-white Rhode Island, the student body represents nothing else in the country. A white minority of comparable proportion lives in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. But the majority race “of color” at RISD isn’t black, by a long shot. It’s US-born Asian, at 19% of the student body. This is a prestigious New England school after all. Since 70% of international students studying in U.S. colleges come from countries in Asia, there are probably more Asians than whites at RISD by a significant margin.

(Put it this way: if you gave two-thirds of that 36% of international students to the Asians, which is probably too few, and gave the rest to the whites, which is certainly too many, the resulting population would be 43% Asian to 38% white.)

While it’s clear how one might go about diversifying the faculty, how RISD would fulfill its pledge to diversify the students is puzzling. Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented, but so are whites. Women are overrepresented. Asians are extremely overrepresented, if their proportions in the broader US population are the target. A “cluster hire” intended to make the faculty more representative of the students should have been mostly Asian. Instead it was mostly black. It’s not obvious for whose benefit the “cluster hire” was implemented. A reasonable guess, following the money, would be the Schillers’.

This is all disregarding what are arguably more salient demographic trends pertaining to the future of the school. Observers of higher education have for several years been predicting fiscal carnage to ensue from decades of dropping American birthrates, with a nosedive witnessed in 2008, brought on by the recession. Minds temporarily focused in 2018 with the publication of Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education by Carleton College economics professor Nathan Grawe. In the ensuing 24 months the book spurred a number of think pieces with harrowing titles: “Higher education is headed for a supply and demand crisis” (the Washington Post, January 2018), “The Higher Education Apocalypse” (US News & World Report, March 2018), “College students predicted to fall by more than 15% after the year 2025” (The Hechinger Report, September 2018), “The Coming College Enrollment Bust” (Bloomberg, May 2019), “The Great Enrollment Crash” (the Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2019), “The Looming Higher-Ed Enrollment Cliff” (the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, Fall 2019). As the Chronicle put it:

This is my summer of 2019 takeaway: Higher education has fully entered a new structural reality. You’d be naïve to believe that most colleges will be able to ride out this unexpected wave as we have previous swells….

As Nathan Grawe has shown, a sharp decrease in fertility during the Great Recession will further deepen the high-school graduation trough by 2026. Meanwhile, the cost of attendance for both private and public colleges insists on outpacing inflation, American incomes continue to stagnate, and college-endowment returns or state subsidies can no longer support the discounting of sticker prices.

2026 was significant because the children who weren’t conceived in 2007-8 don’t turn 18 in 2026. Grawe expected the trough to last through the early 2030s. US News quoted an administrator at Mount Ida College, which ran in Newton, MA from 1899 until the University of Massachusets at Amherst acquired it in 2018:

"Colleges and universities will have too much capacity and not enough demand at a time when the economic model in higher education is already straining under its own weight," he said. "Make no mistake – this is an existential threat to entire sectors of higher education. And New England, unfortunately, is ground zero."

The entire saga has prompted some to ask whether endangered schools are worth trying to save.

Then Covid hit. The New York Times, reporting “As Students Put Off College, Anxious Universities Tap Wait Lists,” quoted a New Jersey high school senior in May 2020:

“It doesn’t make sense to pay 20 grand to sit at my computer at home and take online courses,” he said. “You can get the same education from a community college.”…

Since mid-March, when colleges abruptly shut down campus operations and moved to online learning, schools have announced hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and say that a $14 billion federal aid package will not be nearly enough to keep struggling schools afloat. Executives have taken pay cuts, endowments have shrunk, hiring has been frozen and construction projects have stopped.

But experts say that is only the beginning if schools cannot persuade students to return in the fall, when many campuses are bracing for the possibility that online learning could continue.

Geroge Floyd died a couple of months later, and every institutional administrator in the country began to emit the same talking points about becoming actively anti-racist and treasuring diversity like never before. Whether despite of, because of, or coincidentally to this switched focus on diversity, enrollments continued to shed. As the Times reported in May 2022, two years later, “College Enrollment Drops, Even as the Pandemic’s Effects Ebb.”

The ongoing enrollment crisis at U.S. colleges and universities deepened in spring 2022, raising concerns that a fundamental shift is taking place in attitudes toward the value of a college degree — even as the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted operations for higher education.

The latest college enrollment figures released on Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center indicated that 662,000 fewer students enrolled in undergraduate programs in spring 2022 than a year earlier, a decline of 4.7 percent. Graduate and professional student enrollment, which had been a bright spot during the pandemic, also declined 1 percent from last year.

It emerged in the meantime that the trend to disdain college was being driven by white men. At the Wall Street Journal, September 2021, “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’.”

Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal….

Young men get little help, in part, because schools are focused on encouraging historically underrepresented students. Jerlando Jackson, department chair, Education Leadership and Policy Analysis, at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, said few campuses have been willing to spend limited funds on male underachievement that would also benefit white men, risking criticism for assisting those who have historically held the biggest educational advantages.

“As a country, we don’t have the tools yet to help white men who find themselves needing help,” Dr. Jackson said. “To be in a time when there are groups of white men that are falling through the cracks, it’s hard.”

The problem of male, particularly white male declines of student success has been recognized at least as long as the sinking birthrates. Efforts to address the issue have mostly been met with eye-rolling.

In 2008, [a University of Vermont mental health counselor] proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said.

Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built.

A basic tenet of diversity and inclusion is that people do not feel welcome where they don’t see themselves represented. It seems worth considering the possibility that a young white man looking at RISD, dominated by women and non-white ethnic groups, might see himself poorly represented and therefore unwelcome there. The typical excuse for this, that now he knows how everyone else feels, cruelly presupposes that he ever wanted such neglect for anyone else, or ever had the chance to experience some other kind of American life, or won’t suffer the effects that exclusion wreaks on anyone. It also seems worth considering how represented RISD’s Asians, who may comprise two out of every five students, might have felt when the school diversified the white-majority faculty by appointing a slate of black professors.

III. Destiny

A $50 million shortfall is an enormous fiscal blow for a school with a $350 million endowment. Nevertheless RISD caught some good financial news when Fitch Ratings revised the school’s financial outlook from negative to stable in September 2021. Fitch hinted at efforts of operational improvement (read, “efficiency measures”), which among other things has resulted in a pause of its European Honors Program through 2024.

I am an EHP graduate, and I have learned from sources at the school that it has no plans to continue it at its location at the Palazzetto Cenci, where it was founded as one of the first art-study programs of its kind in Rome. Given the unlikelihood that RISD will find a comparable property, within short walking distance of the Pantheon, this effectively means the end of the EHP as of 2020. Its hiatus through 2024 will render it unavailable to four graduating classes, which will erase institutional memory of the program among the students. As I have already communicated in an email to President Williams,

The EHP is of incomparable importance among programs of its kind, both in terms of history and influence. A move from Piazza Cenci would damage it beyond recognition. The loss of the program as a whole would reduce RISD's status to that of any other American art school, perhaps fine and still venerable, but not especially distinguished.

As of this writing the move out of the Cenci is decided, and the outlook of the program unknown.

Good economic times could turn things around for the EHP and the school in general. But we are not in good economic times. The Biden Administration continues to protest that we are not in a recession, but the protest was necessary in light of two consecutive quarters of negative growth, which until this administration has long been taken as the marker of recession.

That brings us to another item regarding 2026: it is the predicted date of our next “great recession” by economist Fred Foldvary, issued in 2012.

There has been one fundamental cause of the boom and bust cycle: massive subsidies to land values. Since these subsidies are a governmental intervention into the market, the cause of the cycle is not “business,” hence the term “business cycle” is misleading. It is a cycle of economic distortions caused by government policies.

Notable here is that while libertarian economists say this sort of thing all the time, Foldvary, on the contrary, is writing at Progress.org.

An artificial expansion of money and credit eventually causes price inflation, and one of its problems is that prices rise unevenly. Prices rise soonest and fastest where the money is being loaned out, and much of it goes to finance real estate purchases and construction. An example of relative price distortion is the increase in the purchase price of real estate relative to rentals. When the central bank reduces its expansion of money, interest rates rise, and the investments caused by cheap credit come to a halt, generating bank and other business failures.

This describes current events. The timing prediction is bold, to say the least, but Foldvary sees obvious factors in play:

If such shocks [from outside the US economy] don’t interrupt the cycle, the deep fiscal and monetary structures of the US economy, which have not changed in 200 years, will generate the next boom and bust just as they have done so in the past. But the Crash of 2026 will be much worse than that of 2008, because as the US government continues its annual trillion dollar deficits, by 2024, the US debt will have grown so large that US bonds will no longer be considered safe, and in the financial crisis, the US will no longer be able to borrow the funds needed to bail out the financial firms.

Indeed, it’s 2022 and the Biden administration just approved $4.8 trillion of new borrowing.

Reports like the ones from Fitch account for future trends, but they operate like snapshots in time, and are subject to revision as institutions commission them from year to year. As is standard practice, Fitch outlines what circumstances could result in a downgraded rating in the future:

Material change in demand profile or reduction in enrollment that contributes to declines in net tuition or total revenue;

Failure to sustain sufficient cash flow margins at or above 10% needed to generate sufficient economic debt service coverage;

Inability to manage the five-year capital plan and preserve leverage ratios above 90%.

RISD is already drawing on its endowment to meet expenses and capital needs, which is not inappropriate after an insult like Covid but is not good news either. Is it in a position to handle a calamity on the order of the 2008 crisis, or worse?

Should that come to pass, its new president is equally new to comprehensive institutional leadership, and has no track record of steering an institution like RISD through an adverse economic environment. She has benefited her whole career, both as an administrator and a poet, from the expansion of a diversity bureaucracy that will have to be unrolled drastically if bad times come. She seems to have little to contribute apart from the orthodox and inadequately challenged knowledge of that diversity bureaucracy, to an institution that does not show urgent need of it.

Nathan Grawe believes that the elite institutions will be less affected by the demographic crash. Lots of students will always want to go to Harvard. RISD’s future hinges on whether it is one of those elite institutions. It is certainly elite among its kind, long-established and of the highest reputation. But due to its specialty, it never makes the Top 100 lists. Its endowment is puny compared to unambiguously elite institutions like neighboring Brown University. It is connected to some of the worst-earning majors in the workforce.

The Schillers may be able to turn the school around from firing faculty to hiring faculty in a matter of weeks. But aside from the involvement of such plutocrats and their social justice interests, few trends are moving in RISD’s favor. As other schools founded in the 19th century fold or are absorbed - Mount Ida College, the San Francisco Art Institute, Lincoln College, Mills College, and quite a few others - no one should mistake RISD’s venerability for invulnerability.