Get That Life: How I Started My Own College
Paula Wallace was just 29 when she quit a grade-school teaching career to pursue her dream of starting an arts college. Her family scraped together all the funds that it could, and Wallace relied on her training as an educator to work through the process of finding a location, creating a curriculum from scratch, and attracting teachers and students. She thought maybe a few hundred students would study with her one day. More than 30 years after it opened its doors, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) offers more than 100 degree programs and graduates approximately 2,600 students every year from its campuses in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia; Lacoste, France; and Hong Kong.
Wallace reflects on making her dream of creating a "utopian educational environment" into a reality.
I started playing piano when I was 6 years old. When I was 12, I started teaching other children in the neighborhood. I found it so gratifying to be able to share all that I knew, even though I didn't know much at that age.
I studied education and music at Furman University [in Greenville, South Carolina] and earned my bachelor's degree in education. After graduation in 1970, I got a job right away teaching second grade for the Atlanta public school system and then started graduate school at Georgia State University. I went to class at night and on the weekends while I was teaching full-time during the day. I would use my students as experiments, testing everything I was learning at school.
I earned my master's degree in education in 1973, and I taught about eight years total in the public schools, ranging from kindergarten to fifth grade. I leaned on my music education when trying to teach new concepts. I would drag a piano into the classroom and whenever we were trying to learn something new, we would write a song about it. I knew it was important to engage the imaginations of my students, so I constantly sought new ways to capture their attention and stretch their learning. Once my class wrote their own musical, and performed it on a stage my father and I built in the classroom. I found that all subjects can be more accessible to students when approached through the portal of art.
After a decade or so of teaching, I remember looking at my young students and wondering: What would they do when they got to college? Where would they go? The prevailing wisdom at the time held that art was simply not a viable vocation. I started to feel that I could contribute [to arts education] on a larger scale.
The idea of creating a college for artists began germinating in my mind. Successful teaching and learning are basically the same for young or mature students. The subject matter is more sophisticated at the university level, but the tenets of education are the same. I wanted to create a place for young people to pursue their artistic dreams and make them into a career. As I gained more experience in teaching and in developing curriculum, I became more confident that a new college for the arts could succeed and thrive. I believed the ideal educational environment to be simultaneously personal, delightful, and relevant. And I thought it would be fun.
I was 29 years old. Maybe it was fool-hearted to think that because I was successful at teaching, I could run an entire college, but I just thought I could do it. And no one told me I couldn't.
The only problem was that I was an elementary school teacher. Where would I ever earn the money to finance it? When I was in graduate school, I had helped my mother [also an educator] write a language arts textbook. She had earned some royalties from that and she put them away for her retirement. When I suggested the idea of starting a college, she immediately volunteered to give me the royalty fees. She helped me take it from a dream into a reality. I quit my teaching job to devote myself to starting the school. I pieced together different income sources like a quilt to make it work. I sold my VW Beetle that I really loved, and I was able to sell a house I had designed in Atlanta to help cover expenses. During this time, home design and historic preservation had become a hobby of mine. I had no training, but I would find old homes and restore them back to their original glory. Preservation became a big part of developing SCAD. We've taken old factories, homes, school buildings, an old coffin factory, an old jail, and a medieval village, and revitalized and repurposed them. I believe in the sustainability premise and that every link in a [building's] chain of history is important.
I invited friends, colleagues, and fellow educators to serve on a board of trustees to be the governing body of the university. We had artists, doctors, lawyers, and community leaders; a good representation of society. To develop the curriculum, which I wrote myself, I consulted artists [in a variety of fields] on what they thought should be in the coursework. I referenced what other accredited arts colleges offered and developed the catalogue and course materials. The eight initial majors were ceramics, graphic design, historic preservation, interior design, painting, photography, printmaking, and weaving/textile design.
We still had no students and no buildings to photograph. So I hired a photographer who shot a series of black and white images that suggested these programs of study. We sent catalogues out to high schools across the country. I would then call up individual schools and tell them about us, encouraging students to check us out. Students would send in inquiry cards, and we would send them a catalogue. We had no student work to show them that first year, but they believed in it. I think there are some people in the world who are inclined to be pioneers. They find great satisfaction in being part of a startup. Those first students liked that idea that they were the first.
Simultaneously, we were being approved by the state of Georgia to offer degrees and looking for buildings. We looked at an old morgue, an old hotel, and several old houses throughout the state of Georgia. And then we came upon this big, hulking fortress-like structure, which was the former Savannah Volunteer Guards Armory. This was [once] the home of the local militia. It's a red brick building with grand arches and cannons flanking the doors. I signed the lease in 1978 and moved [from Atlanta] to Savannah to start work restoring the building and turning it into our first campus. My team consisted of my husband at the time, my parents, and some of our friends and relatives who volunteered to help on the weekends.
Just a few weeks before the Savannah School of Art and Design was supposed to open, Hurricane David tore through Savannah. Everyone was evicted from the city. We held on and stayed in the armory of our building, and we weathered the storm. We had no electricity, but the building proved how strong it was. We worked by candlelight in the building, polishing the floors and painting. Once we got past that, I figured, there can't be anything worse than a hurricane.
There are so many different aspects of starting a university. You have to create a schedule. You have to register students for classes and figure out when classes start. You have to create a grade report and a mechanism for doing that. You need a student and faculty handbook. One by one, all of these mechanical aspects had to be created from scratch. In order to be accredited, you need a library. How do you start a university library? You can't just take the books from your nightstand. I got a list of every public, university, and research library in the country and sent letters to [many] of them, asking for donations. In my experience as an educator, I knew that libraries often had redundancies in their collections. The State University of New York at Fredonia said they had 10,000 volumes they would be glad to donate. All I had to do was come up there and get them. So I called up [a local trailer company] and asked if they could pick up the books for me. These were all lessons in learning to ask for what you need. I think that people are willing to help you when they see you are doing the most that you can do and that you care about your work.
I dragged my kitchen table into the armory building and started interviewing teachers. We started with about seven. The photographer who shot our catalogue became the first chair of our photography department. Another was the visual artist Joanne Easten. Very talented, qualified people were interested in being a part of what we were doing.
We opened our doors in the fall of 1979. We had 71 students that first year. Some were older, nontraditional students; some came right out of high school. Our first graduate was a transfer student who had enough credits to graduate after two years, rather than four [with everyone else]. We all put on our caps and gowns, went out into Savannah's Madison Square, and arranged for her to arrive in a horse-drawn carriage. She came to the stage and we held a graduation ceremony just for her.
There are two ways to grow a student population. One way is by student word-of-mouth - students would go back home and talk about their experience with us and refer friends. The other way is by offering new disciplines and degree programs. We began with eight undergraduate disciplines. Now there are over 100 different undergraduate and graduate programs, and our Savannah campus has more than 70 buildings. We have over 45,000 alumni working in fields from architecture to interior design, from fashion to film and beyond.
We expanded to Lacoste, France, in 2002 because of a former student. After graduating from SCAD, she was working at a school in France called the Lacoste School for the Arts. The founder had died and the board was looking for next steps. She said to them, "Maybe you can become a part of SCAD." Their board came and visited and I went to Lacoste, and their board ended up giving SCAD the whole campus in the South of France - one nonprofit can give to another nonprofit like this - all because of this one graduate. The second expansion was in Atlanta in 2005. And then we opened our Hong Kong campus in 2010.
SCAD shows that we can educate students and prepare them for successful careers in creative fields. That was a revolutionary idea when SCAD began, but our students and alumni - who hail from over 100 countries - are proof positive that it's true. If I leave any kind of legacy, there's nothing more joyful than that.
Corrections: A previous version of this article said Wallace "fumbled through" the process of establishing the school. This was a mischaracterization of her efforts, and the language has been changed. A previous version of this article also stated that SCAD has more than 32,000 alumni. The actual number of alumni is more than 45,000.
Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.
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