ROCKFORD, ILL.—Facing loan payments and vendor bills amounting to $10 million, Rockford College examined some ways to pay its debts. In fall of last year, the liberal arts college raided its 3,000-work art collection to sell approximately 2,000 works at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago, netting $1.1 million. This past spring, works from the college’s rare book collection earned "more than $100,000," according to John McNamara, director of college development at Rockford, who was in charge of determining what would be sold. The artworks and books sold "were not displayed publicly, and they were rarely used in the teaching environment," he says.

A growing number of museums on college campuses are having their collections raided by school administrators looking to raise money. Many are not pleased with this turn of events, least of all the American Association of Museums (AAM), whose rules for the member-accredited museums state all money earned through deaccessions be used for new acquisitions. "Our obligation is to remain viable," McNamara says, and the college agrees that donations of artwork and rare books should be treated "like a gift of stock or land."

Seeking to replenish its overall endowment, establish faculty chairs in business, science and mathematics, as well as provide funding for the construction of a new science building, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, got caught up in an ongoing legal dispute over the decision by university’s president Hazel R. O’Leary’s decision last year to sell two paintings—Marsden Hartley’s "Painting No. 3" (1913) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s "Radiator Building" (1927), thought to be worth a combined $16 million to $20 million—that had been part of 101-work gift from the Alfred Stieglitz estate by Georgia O’Keeffe in 1949. (The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation had offered the school $7.5 million for the O’Keeffe painting, claiming that the original gift stipulated that no items could be loaned or sold, but withdrew its suit in September.)

In a statement, O’Leary says that "the sale of two pieces of the Stieglitz collection will relieve Fisk of its near-term cash crunch."

The actions of these and other colleges and universities have brought strong reactions from the art world, with claims that short-term financial moves deprive students of long-term cultural benefits and that "art collection governance requires the proceeds from any and all sales be used exclusively for acquisitions," according to Lisa Tremper Hanover, director of Ursinus College’s Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art and president of the 400-member Association of College and University Museums and Galleries.

AAM President Ford Bell notes that the deaccession-to-acquisitions rule protects the interests of donors, visitors to the museum and the integrity of the institution itself. "You don’t want objects sold to pay someone’s salary or to build a new building or to pay for heat and lights," he says. "You need to maintain the art for the intention for which it was acquired, and if it is deaccessioned—and, don’t get me wrong, deaccessioning takes place all the time at museums—the money should go toward fulfilling that original intention." He adds that "the idea that artwork is interchangeable with other assets" diminishes the prestige of the museum and "the community that it serves."