Once a Beacon, Now a Burden

In the evening of November 4 in Knoxville, Tenn., firefighters hurried to a largely empty campus. Knoxville College was on fire again.

Plumes of smoke could be seen across the city as flames engulfed Elnathan Hall, a former administrative building and women’s dormitory. The fire devoured the wooden interior and spit out its metal frames.

It took 40 firefighters more than four hours to extinguish the blaze.

By that time, the century-old building was nothing more than a smoldering pile of bricks.

At its height in the early 1970s, Knoxville College, a historically Black institution, enrolled more than 1,300 students on its 40-acre campus. The four-year college served as one of the few gateways into East Tennessee’s Black middle class and formed the backbone of Mechanicsville, the surrounding Black neighborhood.

But competition and a series of bad fiscal decisions ultimately resulted in the college’s loss of accreditation in 1997.

Most unaccredited colleges lay off their staff, shut their doors, and sell their property. But for almost 30 years, a passionate group of Knoxville alumni has been determined to keep the college running. They have made multiple attempts at restoring accreditation, even as enrollments hovered at a few dozen students. Last spring, the college graduated just three.

Knoxville College administrators can’t afford to raze the 17 buildings, eight of which are historic sites built by formerly enslaved people. Nor can they afford the amount of security necessary to prevent loitering on a mostly empty campus. So the college has turned into a sprawling homeless encampment, a nest for drug overdoses and crime, and a burden on Mechanicsville, 40 percent of whose 3,000 residents now live below the poverty line.

Since 2016, emergency workers have been called to the campus more than 1,100 times, according to public records. That includes 37 fires, five drug overdoses, two reported shootings, two sexual assaults, and one live birth. In the last eight years alone, seven dead bodies have been found inside the buildings.

Local residents complain that vandals hide in the abandoned dorm rooms, laboratories, and lecture halls, where graffiti plasters the peeling walls, vines cling to broken windows, and textbooks, car parts, and the remnants of a grand piano litter the floor.

Since 1997, the campus has been overseen by a series of 13 presidents, including one who was escorted out by police. Each new vision for the college gave alumni another dash of hope that it could be revived.

Last year, after serving for three years on the board and then another two as the college’s executive vice president, Dasha Lundy decided she’d had enough. She sought to oust the college’s president, Leonard L. Adams, and the Board of Trustees.

“There were little kids who were born in Mechanicsville, and have watched that school decline for 30 years. These people are adults now,” said Lundy, now a county commissioner representing the district. “How do you empower a generation and inspire people and all you see is buildings boarded up and fires all the time?”

Last year, with the support of several alumni, she had a lawyer deliver a letter to the office of Tennessee’s attorney general, demanding an investigation into administrators’ management of the campus. The letter also demanded that the entire board and the president resign.

“Many buildings have been deemed unfit for human habitation,” stated the letter. “Knoxville College has become a danger to the surrounding community and has exposed surrounding residents to criminal activity on a recurring basis.”

Public records obtained by The Chronicle show that the office of Tennessee’s attorney general has opened an investigation into the college.

The board closed ranks around Adams, who is also an alumnus of Knoxville. He continued as the college’s president until this past September, when he stepped down. Adams denied Lundy’s allegations. He said his decision to step down had nothing to do with her letter and more to do with the college’s need for a long-term president to guide them through the accreditation process.

Adams and the college’s board members have, for nearly a decade, rejected offers to redevelop parts of the campus. Selling it, they argue, would result in rapid gentrification of Mechanicsville to the benefit of white realtors and the detriment of Black residents and business owners.

“My background is real-estate development, so I felt that I was here for a reason and a season. And one of those reasons was because there are people who want this land, and they don’t want it for an institution of higher learning,” Adams said. “They want to develop this into a money-making oasis of mixed-use development.”

Adams’s vision for the college is clear: Regain accreditation, bring students back to campus, and turn Knoxville College into a four-year “destination” college for Black people.

“Knoxville wouldn’t be the Knoxville that it is today without Knoxville College,” he said of the city. “So let’s stop having to make me prove why Knoxville College is important today. Where all of us are standing wouldn’t be here if Knoxville College wasn’t here.”

The morning after the fire, Adams described the plight of the college in mythic terms.

“This is our ancestors saying it’s OK if some buildings go and return like the Phoenix from the flames and ashes,” he posted on Facebook. “She will rise yet again.”

Troubled colleges with loyal alumni often struggle to decide when it’s time to call it quits. The devotion of Knoxville’s graduates, many of whom have cycled through the board or served as president, is especially fierce. Their insistence on seeing the college as it used to be, rather than as it is, has not helped Mechanicsville — in fact, it has harmed the community. What keeps them holding on? Why won’t they pull the plug?

In 1876, a decade after the abolition of slavery, a white Presbyterian minister purchased land on a hill overlooking Knoxville that once served as a Confederate field position in the Civil War. He established Knoxville College with an explicit mission to educate Black residents.

In its early years, the institution was an economic and cultural powerhouse in the city. It operated a hospital and helped students stage sit-ins during civil-rights protests. It filled Knoxville’s government work force and, until the 1950s, was the region’s top producer of Black teachers.

Discriminatory housing laws clustered a large share of the city’s Black residents into Mechanicsville. Brandon Hardin, an airline pilot and entrepreneur, spent the first seven years of his life in the 1980s living with his mother, aunt, and cousins in College Homes, public-housing units nestled just below Knoxville College.

The HBCU, he said, offered respite and hope.

Hardin remembers going to the campus for after-school programs, Easter-egg hunts, and pictures with Santa Claus.

“As a kid, it was such a centralized pillar to the community,” Hardin said. But by the time he was ready to enroll in college, Knoxville had lost its accreditation. He attended Middle Tennessee State University instead.

Over the years, a newly integrated University of Tennessee and other high-profile Black institutions began drawing students away from Knoxville College. In 1989, its administrators decided to acquire Morristown College, a two-year HBCU an hour away and on the verge of closure, to operate as a branch campus. The acquisition included Morristown’s $500,000 debt. The decision devastated Knoxville College’s finances.

When the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, known as SACSCOC, revoked Knoxville’s accreditation in 1997, the college had just 500 students, $3.2 million in debt, and a $53,000 tax lien on its Morristown campus. Without accreditation, it could not offer students federal loans — a loss that can be detrimental to a college’s finances.

HBCU advocates have long complained that the SACSCOC system is biased against Black colleges. HBCUs make up just 10 percent of the colleges SACSCOC accredits, but they comprise one-third of the 19 colleges that have lost accreditation since 1997.

As an act of resistance, several, like Knoxville, have refused to close. Others include Paul Quinn College, in Dallas, Barber-Scotia College, in Concord, N.C., and Morris Brown College, in Atlanta. Both Paul Quinn and Morris Brown have become exemplars of colleges that regain accreditation after years without it.

Weeks after Knoxville College lost accreditation, its board hired Barbara R. Hatton, who’d recently retired as president of South Carolina State University, another HBCU. Hatton vowed to keep Knoxville open. She gathered a group of local business owners and politicians to design a plan, dubbed the “New Knoxville College”: Students would be sent to work for local businesses in exchange for tuition payments sent directly to the college.

The college also invested $500,000 in a nearby gas station to keep revenue flowing in and hired students to work there as part of its work-study program.

“In the past, government entitlements and student loans provided most of the support for the operation of the college. More and more now, and not just for Knoxville College, this is changing,” Hatton wrote in an article for the student newspaper in March 2005. “Today and in the future, we will live or die on what we collectively can produce ourselves.”

While Hatton’s “New Knoxville College” plan was short-lived, her shift to a work-college format remained a fixture until 2015.

But with enrollment plummeting, the college had a hard time paying its mounting bills. In July 2005, the Knoxville Utilities Board shut off the electricity to most of the campus.

The next month, Hatton and the college were sued by the U.S. Department of Labor for more than $14,000 because they had stopped contributing to employees’ retirement accounts to pay for other campus costs. They didn’t contest the lawsuit.

In a separate lawsuit filed the same month, a group of 12 faculty members said they hadn’t been paid for an entire year. Committed to the mission to uplift Black students, they had continued to teach for free.

That year, the Board of Trustees fired Hatton. She was escorted off the campus by a police officer after locking herself in her office for 40 minutes.

The next 10 years saw the arrival and departure of 10 presidents, each with different ideas about how to maintain the campus and build up enrollment. Presidents were often fired within months of starting. Board members quit out of frustration.

By 2013, the two dozen students still enrolled were living in the only functioning dorm on campus. Then it shut down due to exposed asbestos.

In the following year, the Environmental Protection Agency sent contractors in hazmat suits to the college’s science building to dispose of deadly chemicals. They found multiple sources of radiation and mercury levels five times above the threshold of what is deemed safe. High levels of mercury were found in the sinks and drains, officials said, which risked poisoning Mechanicsville residents.

Still, the board refused to close the college.

In 2015, Tennessee officials informed Knoxville that its 11 students were too few for it to be considered a functioning college. They suspended administrators from enrolling students for three years.

But alumni were resolute. They brought on new board members and again overhauled the college’s mission. They made the college an online two-year institution, and, for that, they hired another round of administrators.

“There’s no way that Knoxville College would be able to make it without the alumni,” said Frank Shanklin Jr., an alumni representative on the Board of Trustees. “We realized early on we were pretty much an island of ourselves.”

That kind of devotion from small-college alumni is not unusual. HBCU experts say the relationship between Black colleges and their alumni is especially intense. When Black students were excluded from other colleges, HBCUs became a haven and means of uplift. They continue to instill a sense of mission and purpose in their students, said Christopher D. Cathcart, an editor of a 2014 essay collection on the HBCU experience.

“When you attend an HBCU, you actually become part of a much larger family. You become part of something that is beyond your comfort and convenience,” Cathcart said. “When you see your school in peril, it’s almost like seeing your family or a close family member in peril.”

Read the latest stories about the nation’s 101 remaining HBCUs and where they go in the wake of the ban on race-conscious admissions and the attack on diversity efforts.

But that fervent attachment can be a problem when a college is in a state beyond saving.

“The intensity of that association,” he said, “can sometimes cloud reason.”

It was after Knoxville College became an online institution that Lundy, a physical therapist and rising county politician who had grown up in East Knoxville, was brought on the board. By then, it contained no other Knoxville resident. In 2021, she was asked to serve as the college’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.

After one year on the job, Lundy was the only person trekking to the campus every day. Adams, a former board member who became interim president in 2021, spent the majority of his tenure 200 miles away in Atlanta, managing the college remotely. The following year, he was promoted to president.

At first, Lundy’s responsibilities resembled that of any administrator for a small, struggling private college. She helped disgruntled alumni retrieve their transcripts. She paid the college’s bills. She resumed the decades-long effort to get the college accredited.

“I was a walking stress bomb,” Lundy said. The conditions of the college wore on her.

Every time administrators boarded up an abandoned building on the campus, someone would rip the boards off. The college could afford to hire only one security guard.

At any given time, close to 50 homeless people lived in the dorms, where they built fires to keep warm and exchanged drugs. Some rooms had beds, couches, tables, and a working TV powered by electricity the college struggled to pay for.

“I kept saying someone’s going to die here,” Lundy recalled.

An examination of police records since 2016 shows years of chaos on the north side of the campus.

In March 2020, a man forced a woman to walk nearly two miles to one of the college’s buildings, where he raped her. In the summers of 2022 and 2024, there were two shootings on the campus.

And in December 2022, when temperatures dropped to 28 degrees, Knoxville Police officers rummaged through mounds of clutter in a dorm and found a dead woman lying on the bed. Next to her lay a Bible with the name “Lisa Gibson” written inside.

Over the years, city and college officials struggled to devise an affordable plan to tamp down on the festering crime. A proposal to permanently place police and firefighters on the campus fizzled after the city complained about lack of cooperation from the board.

One day in 2022, after a series of fires were lit on the campus, Lundy decided she had seen enough. Wearing her signature African hair wrap and gold glitter shoes, she marched, alone, toward the north side of campus.

“Everybody’s got to go!” Lundy told the man and woman she found inside one building. “Y’all can’t stay here. This isn’t right.”

The two were upset. They had been living in the building for a year.

“How dare you?” the woman responded. “I just cleaned up today.”

HBCUs in economically distressed Black communities have an outsized influence. Many help run high-achieving K-12 schools, archive local history, and serve as gathering spaces for theater productions and art shows. But when a Black college unravels, local property values sink, Black-owned businesses struggle, and crime soars.

Mechanicsville, which residents refer to as “the Ville,” is lined with single-family shotgun houses. Cement porches double as gathering spaces, decorated with grills, children’s bikes, and kitchen chairs. Dozens of abandoned lots dot the neighborhood. On average, the houses are valued at 20 percent less than those in the rest of the city.

Knoxville’s booming economic development is mostly concentrated downtown, surrounding the University of Tennessee. Realtors contend that Mechanicsville has been largely excluded from this growth because of the dilapidated state of Knoxville College.

Andre M. Perry, a researcher at Brookings who focuses on investments in majority-Black cities, described the phenomenon as “you never want vacant, unused assets — commercial or otherwise — in neighborhoods because it drags the quality of life for the people living near them.”

People must weigh the fear of gentrification against the economic drag that a vacant property is having on a community, he told The Chronicle. “Something has to be done.”

Sometimes something is done. But that can come at a cultural cost. Even Howard University, a prestigious HBCU in Washington, D.C., ran into financial trouble after the Great Recession. In order to shore up its finances, college leaders began to allow developers to build private luxury apartment buildings on university property, which stretched through the Shaw neighborhood, a historically significant and impoverished Black community. The university sold and leased several other vacant lots.

Rent prices skyrocketed, and Black residents left in droves. The neighborhood that had 60-percent Black and low-income residents slowly became increasingly white and unaffordable. Today, Black residents make up just over 40 percent of Shaw.

In Knoxville, realtors and developers say they have attempted to develop all or parts of the campus, only to be rebuffed by board members.

Robert Bentley Marlow, who has lived in Mechanicsville for 20 years and owns 40 houses in the neighborhood, said he reached out to Adams earlier this year to ask about purchasing a plot of the college’s land that sits between two of his properties.

Adams rejected the proposal, saying the board wouldn’t want to sell any property to a white developer for fear of gentrification, said Marlow.

“That is some of the most beautiful property in the city, and it looks like something out of Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom,” Marlow said. “It’s in ruins. If any of those buildings are salvageable, there needs to be some movement soon. If they’re going to sit there and rehash the last 100 years of history amongst themselves and still don’t know where they want to go, then I’m afraid that the end is near.”

Adams did not respond to The Chronicle’s repeated requests for comment regarding Marlow’s proposal. Documents obtained by The Chronicle show several developers sent proposals to the board seeking to redevelop parts of the campus. In 2015 alone, the college received three competing proposals. All three deals lost momentum after the board repeatedly delayed meetings to vote on them.

“Knoxville College has the largest amount of land in the city. It’s also the largest amount controlled by Black folks,” said Shanklin, the alumnus and board member. “I do think it’s probably kind of a gatekeeper to gentrification.”

Jeff Talman, a mortgage banker in Knoxville, said Knoxville College’s dilapidated conditions discourage developers from wanting to invest elsewhere in the neighborhood.

“Here we have a 40-acre campus … that’s in horrible condition,” he said. Talman, who is white, also questioned the need and relevance of small HBCUs now that higher education is racially integrated. “It looks like a bombed-out city.”

Marlow, Lundy, and Talman all said the city’s leaders have failed to push for closure because they are afraid of appearing racist.

“We tip-toe around it in Knoxville,” Talman said. “And there’s no incentive for white political leadership to talk about it because you can only get accused of being bad faith or racist for trying to have a serious conversation about the college.”

In 2020, shortly after the George Floyd protests, the city set up the African American Equity Restoration Task Force to tackle “disparity and disenfranchisement in the Black community,” according to its website. Hardin, the pilot who grew up near the college campus and lives in Knoxville, is on the task force.

He said the topic of Knoxville College comes up often. When he looks at Knoxville College now, he has mixed feelings.

“I am disappointed in the blight that it has become on the Mechanicsville community,” Hardin said. “But I choose my words carefully, because I don’t want Knoxville College to continue to erode … I want it to be that beacon of light that it once was when I was a child.”

After confronting the couple living in the abandoned campus building, Lundy did not lose hope. Despite the crime and decay, she believed that reaccreditation was still possible.

After all, that year, 2022, Morris Brown College regained accreditation from the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS) after having lost it 20 years earlier. Knoxville College was sending its application to the same accreditor.

Morris Brown had succeeded only after demolishing its dormitories and selling several pieces of its property to the city, which was in the process of building a nearby Falcons football stadium.

Knoxville was missing many elements required for its application, like a student handbook and academic policies.

Inspired by a partnership between Morris Brown and the Technical College System of Georgia, the college asked the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to allow graduate students to work on its accreditation.

The UT students got hands-on experience creating and reviewing key documents. They worked to develop an updated handbook, documented faculty qualifications, and created an appeals process.

“There’s a long road ahead when they’ve been operating basically on bare bones for close to 30 years,” said Robert Kelchen, the UT-Knoxville professor who helped create the three-semester project.

The partnership saved Knoxville College a significant amount of money and resources, allowing it to focus on one of the biggest obstacles in accreditation: getting students to attend without offering them financial aid.

“Given what is there right now, and what the college means to the community, I think it’s worth a try,” Kelchen told The Chronicle. “But the perception I got is that this is the last chance. I think that’s what a lot of the community is looking for. They want to know: Can the college make it, or is this a tragic end and we just have to move on?”

Buoyed by the UT partnership, Lundy attended a conference at the White House in 2022 on advancing HBCUs. The annual conference allows presidents and other administrators to discuss plans for federal research partnerships and economic development in the communities they serve. Lundy heard them brag about their colleges’ size, prestige, and endowments.

Knoxville College, she realized, had so far to go.

Days after returning, Lundy discovered her blood pressure had shot up. “I just broke down crying and went to the ER,” she said. Doctors couldn’t bring her blood pressure down. She was having a hypertensive emergency. Her organs were at risk of failing.

In March 2023, after months of recovery, Lundy decided to confront Adams — the person she felt was largely responsible for the college’s faltering state.

At an emergency Board of Trustees meeting on Zoom, Lundy sat in front of her laptop, mentally exhausted, and calmly gave her verbal resignation. In a formal letter to the board days later, Lundy further outlined her frustrations with Adams.

“As a member of the KC team, I have observed several instances where the president has failed to demonstrate any evidence of fund raising and/or building relationships, demonstrating concerns with following the needs for accreditation, and the general well-being of restoring Knoxville College,” Lundy wrote in the letter she sent to the board. That August, she called on the state’s attorney general for an investigation.

More than a year later, Lundy and alumni continue to accuse Adams and the board of fostering a toxic work environment, mismanaging the college’s finances, and allowing parts of the campus to turn into a haven for crime.

“The school has made no progress whatsoever toward growth and enrollment,” said Franklin Tate, an alumnus and former board member who agrees with Lundy. “It’s just embarrassing.”

Still, neither Lundy nor Tate wants the college to close. They believe that, under the right leadership, Knoxville College could be a candidate for accreditation in under a year.

“If Knoxville College comes back, our heart will beat again,” Lundy told The Chronicle. “It will be a place where people can come together.”

Tate and Lundy have worked together to rally other alumni against the board and have even reported damaging information about the college’s finances and the board’s conflicts of interest to TRACS directly.

“They are going to find out sooner or later that Leonard Adams and the board are just lying,” Tate said.

“That hurt my heart,” Adams said. “We wore the same jersey. It was very hurtful to me that they could position this as if I … was somehow the wrong person for the job.”

Adams said that, as president, he focused on figuring out how to pay down the college’s debt, which was more than $7 million by 2021, according to tax filings. In 2022 the college sold its share of the gas station Hatton had invested in for $2.7 million.

Adams said the college’s total debt today is down to roughly $1.8 million.

He resigned this past September. Shortly afterward, TRACS informed Knoxville College that it was too financially unstable to receive accreditation.

Several weeks later, the board hired Rotesha Harris, associate vice president for internal audit and grants and contracts accounting at Clark Atlanta University, as interim president. A search for a permanent leader is underway; Harris is one of the three candidates.

Harris did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment.

Just under two months into her tenure, Elnathan Hall went up in flames.

The fire hydrants on the campus had been shut off years before, according to the fire chief. Firefighters had to lug their hoses up the hill from various hydrants in Mechanicsville, snaking them across the campus like strands of a spider web. That restricted the water pressure. In the end, they had no choice but to knock the building in on itself to smother the fire.

The next morning, Knoxville College alumni rushed to the campus to collect the bricks for a possible fund-raising campaign. It was valuable memorabilia of the college they loved.

“I’m thinking that this will pull all the naysayers and alumni together,” Shanklin said. “I still think Knoxville College is here for a reason, and we’re gonna move forward. We’re going to dig in deep so the college is back on track.”