PORTLAND, Maine (NEWS CENTER) — The Maine College of Art (MECA) will house and run the storied Salt Institute of Documentary Studies, but with a hitch. MECA will run Salt as a semester-long program inside its Congress Street buildings.
“We’re looking at two or three spaces actually in this building right now for Salt," said Meca President Don Tuski. "The first floor, second floor and third floor."
In June 2015, Salt announced it would close its doors over financial issues and dwindling enrollment.
Salt, nationally recognized as a leader in educating students in storytelling, photography and videos, has been in Portland since 1973. Its students, 25 per semester, chronicled Maine people and places through documentary films, radio reports, photography and writing and many alumni work in media and the arts all over the world.
“The reason that we’re solely interested in Salt is because we believe that it really is a unique educational program,” said MECA Dean Ian Anderson. “We’ve spent months kind of planning to position ourselves to preserve everything that’s special about Salt, and what Salt does matches a lot of the way we run our other programs.”
There are, however, detractors to the merger.
Alumni and professors who created the group 'Save Salt' worry the merger “would mean compromising Salt’s integrity”, a direct quote taken from its Facebook page. Mike Eckel, an alum and member of the group, says it’s an open question whether the merger will be a good thing.
“I’m just upset that we haven’t been included in this at all," Eckel said. "Alumni’s involvement has been minimal to nil in discussions or plans for Salt’s future."
He’s hoping he and others will be asked to the table to help MECA leadership plot out Salt’s future.
“We were very conscious and sensitive to the importance of keeping Salt’s identity and independence as much as possible,” Tuski said. “There was this notion of wanting to be independent and we understood that. We wanted to make sure, as they became part of Maine College of Art, that they could keep as much independence and identity as possible."
MECA student Josh Creeger says he doesn’t know much about the merger. But, as he sits in one of MECA’s state-of-the-art basement music studios playing his guitar and recording his original music, he looks around and comments about the quality of equipment Salt students will be able to use.
“This right here is the most important tech we have here—this is the Avid S-6," Creeger said. "You’re likely to see something like this at the SNL (Saturday Night Live) studios. I think, according to their sales record, we’re the only place in the Northeast that has one of these.”
Much as with the newly built basement studios, MECA is relying on a hefty, yet undisclosed amount of money that has been gifted by the Quimby Foundation to run the new Salt program for the next three years.
The Salt program will begin in the fall of 2017, they’re estimating, with a class of between 20 and 27 students and a tuition of just under ten thousand dollars per semester.