Santa Fe New Mexican

CSF: movie potential, needs star power (Editorial)

The impending end of the College of Santa Fe, our state's oldest chartered college, is bad news not only for academia, but for our community as well.

In the days when mayors were mayors, Sam Pick would have rallied the city's business and educational leaders to find ways of keeping the 150-year-old school alive, recognizing, if nothing else, its economic value.

Today, city officials and business leaders are twiddling their thumbs and hoping that state government will ride to the rescue, making CSF a branch of New Mexico Highlands University or the University of New Mexico. Or maybe the Legislature might make it our eighth four-year college — which is only four or five more than New Mexico needs or can afford.

So what is the community's answer: Let the venerable Catholic-affiliated institution die, dismissing it as the once-wealthy church's problem?

Not without a fight — especially to keep the college's motion-picture, photography and creative-writing programs alive. If the church can't keep the place going, then how about Hollywood?

We've jestingly wondered if one of the stars resident in Santa Fe might like to have a college named after him or her. But the constellations clustered in Northern New Mexico are some of the film industry's more serious, less egomaniacal members; actors, actresses, producers and directors who, besides being part of our state's moviemaking boom, are dedicated to greater artistic achievement.

Surely they see the college's value — for the sound stage it offers, as well as for the training ground it has been in dramatics and in the many technical areas crucial to film and video production.

Just as surely, these luminaries-turned-locals carry all kinds of influence — particularly the political and economic kind.

Could they form an ad hoc coalition, or a more permanent kind, to round up support to buy the college and make it a visual arts-oriented creative center?

If anyone, in these tough times, could charm contributions from charitable foundations, it would be people such as Gene Hackman, Shirley MacLaine, Val Kilmer, Alan Arkin, Ali MacGraw, Marsha Mason, Brian Dennehy and Julia Roberts. They could be the nucleus of a fund-raising effort as well as guiding forces of a motion-picture revolution based in this famously photogenic locale.

Those ilustres, along with our state's politicians, might also prevail upon our nation's next commerce secretary and the coming congressional delegation for federal economic-development aid to the institution. Gov. Bill Richardson, soon to join the Barack Obama Cabinet, threw lots of his considerable energy into making New Mexico a popular place to shoot movies. He should be quick to see the value of Santa Fe's midtown college campus to an ongoing industry.

The College of Santa Fe, once St. Michael's College, might not last long — but what the Christian Brothers built with generous contributions from families like the Marions and the Shellabergers and from the immortal actress Greer Garson still has great potential. What it needs is a new driving force.