Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright loved the desert, and in 1937, he bought land in Scottsdale and called it Taliesin West, which today draws thousands of visitors every year.
Wright also loved to teach, and Taliesin West still is the winter home for students of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, who spend the other half of the year at Taliesin in Wisconsin.
The school offers a unique master’s program where a small group of students -- usually between 20 and 30 -- live full-time, grow their own food and build their own shelter as part of their education.
It has functioned this way since Wright established it in the early 1930s. But last month, current students were told that was going to change.
"We were shocked by the fact that our own foundation is the one that wants to close the school," said Pablo Moncayo, a second-year master's student at the Wright school.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which owns the school, told Moncayo, his fellow students and the public that master’s degrees won’t be offered after 2017 because the school was losing its accreditation.
For Moncayo and really anyone with a basic appreciation of Wright’s work, this was shocking and upsetting.
"Our first reaction was like what the … Like what? What?” Moncayo said of his initial reaction.
Things between the Wright foundation and the Wright school have gotten tense. When the school’s board of governors disobeyed orders not talk to the media, the foundation’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter last week.
But that hasn’t stopped board member Jerry Van Eyck.
“There’s no legal ground for that. It’s just sort of a threat I think," Van Eyck said.
Van Eyck said he has nothing to lose by speaking up and thinks this is just too important to keep quiet.
"It’s very important to protect the school but also protect the foundation, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation board and the foundation itself, against sort of an international disgrace," he said.
The problem started with the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits the Wright school and other colleges and universities such as Arizona State University. In 2012, the HLC changed its bylaws to say schools must be separate from their parent organizations.
That’s the heart of the problem here because the Wright school is an arm of the Wright foundation.
The only way the school could keep its accreditation was to spin it off into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the foundation. But doing that needed a two-thirds vote by the foundation’s 17-member board of trustees, which didn’t happen and the plan died.
"Subsidiary is the legal structure, but they’re not allowing what you would assume to be the case in a subsidiary organization," said Sean Malone, the foundation's CEO and the only individual within the organization who's allowed to speak publicly on the issue.
Malone said the HLC had many restrictions as to how the subsidiary was to be structured, and the foundation decided that it was ultimately too risky.
For example, the school doesn’t make enough money to pay all of its bills, so the foundation would have to make a long-term commitment to keep it funded, about $1 million a year. At the same time, it wouldn't be allowed any control over how that money was used.
“Any organization would have concern about guaranteeing seven-figure ongoing funding with no direct governance and no operational control," Malone said. "But when you think about a nonprofit, it’s, I think, an even deeper issue than concern. There’s a public trust here and the primary responsibility of a nonprofit board is to be accountable for and be responsible for and oversee the use of that organization's resources."
But it wouldn’t be as powerless as Malone might make it seem.
For example, in a letter the HLC sent to the foundation in July that was obtained by KJZZ News, the HLC said the foundation would have the power to appoint and remove the same school board members who would oversee the foundation’s money. The foundation could also have control over some other aspects of finances, such as the capital budget, and have general oversight.
It's details like these that make people like Van Eyck and Dave Myers, a Wright graduate and architect in St. Louis, feel as thought the foundation could make this subsidiary option work, but just doesn’t want to.
“I guess what I don’t understand is the CEO and the foundation are looking at the school at this time as a liability," Myers said.
Malone vehemently denies any ill-intent to get rid of the school, adding that the school will still exist without accreditation, but operate more like a post-professional program. But Myers said the school is meaningless without a master's program because in order to get an architect license, a degree is required.
Malone said the ultimate goal is to partner with an accredited school, such as Arizona State University. Under that structure, Wright students would obtain their degrees from the partner school, not the Wright school, and that doesn’t sit well with Myers either.
Also, if the partner is the one giving out the degrees, wouldn’t that raise the same concerns about funding and control of the school that the foundation had in the first place?
Malone said it's still too early on in the process to answer those kinds of questions, but wants to be given the benefit of the doubt that the foundation and future partner would do the appropriate thing.
Eric Lloyd Wright -- Frank Lloyd Wright's 84-year-old grandson -- said his grandfather would be disappointed by either option being proposed by the foundation.
He said his grandfather wouldn't have wanted accreditation in the first place because, "he never thought much of college. He didn't think you really got a good education through an academic school. He felt you learned by doing," he said.
But Eric Wright understands the world has changed since then. He said that losing accreditation means the school would change in a way that his grandfather wouldn't have wanted.
KJZZ News also obtained a copy of Wright’s will, which he signed the year before his death in 1958. In the will, Wright explains that he established the foundation as an outgrowth of the Taliesin Fellowship, which is now called the Wright school. Together, the foundation and the fellowship operate as a college, Wright wrote.
“The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation was to be there to see that the Taliesin Fellowship survived," Eric Wright said. "It was to help it. And it’s done just the opposite. It’s gotten rid of it. And once the Taliesin Fellowship is gone ... if you lose that you lose the concept of what my grandfather was trying to achieve.”
Moncayo, the student, said he wants others to have the same opportunities that he’s had. That's why he and some other students requested to meet with a few foundation board members, which is happening this month, in hopes of changing their minds.
"There’s no other school in the world that is doing this," Moncayo said. "So I, like all of us, the students that have been here, we’re gonna work so hard and do whatever it takes to make sure that the school stays accredited.”
But as far as Malone, the CEO, is concerned, the decision has been made and the foundation is moving forward.
