At noon on May 31, students, faculty, and staff of the University of the Arts (UArts) received a devastating email: the school was closing. Without prior warning, the UArts community was thrown into chaos, with the status of careers and education uncertain. For some, this uncertainty has abated as short–or long–term solutions have been found. For others, the effects of the closure will last for a long time to come.
The majority of the UArts community had found out the news through either an Instagram post or an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and subsequent attempts to get information, like a canceled town hall, were disappointing. Since then, many students transferred to local colleges, such as Temple University, Moore College of Art & Design, and Drexel University. Some went to other schools in Pennsylvania, like Point Park University or Arcadia University, while others went elsewhere in the Northeast, like Bennington College in Vermont or the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Some former instructors were able to find temporary solutions, like teaching classes in local schools, but for some opportunities are few and far between.
“Many of them have no prospects of finding an equivalent position elsewhere because arts education has been so devalued,” says Bradley Philbert, former UArts instructor and the Executive Vice President of the United Academics of Philadelphia, the union of UArts faculty.
Along with the earlier closure announcement of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), some see a broader threat to the arts community in Philadelphia. “It threatens the next several generations of artists. This is going to make Philadelphia a far less interesting place culturally, because of how many students continue to live and work in Philadelphia when they become UArts alumni. And so that loss is very, very difficult to measure,” says Philbert.
A New Year
On the day of the announced closure, University of the Arts first year Cyrus Nasib, who was doing a Bachelor of Fine Arts, studying the unique one–of–a–kind major, “Directing, Playwriting, & Production,” received an email with a production assignment on campus for the next semester. Later that day, however, he received another email: the University was shutting its doors.
Now Cyrus is at Temple, settling into a new year at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and switching degrees to a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Studies. “They were really excited to accept the directing, playwriting production students, and they're letting us pick and choose a lot of our own classes, instead of having to stick to one theater studies track,” says Cyrus. UArts was unique in its almost exclusive focus on the arts. So for Cyrus, taking General Education requirements at Temple was something new. But transferring credits is difficult because there is no one–to–one equivalent for courses from UArts.
Cyrus says that despite the closure, the former UArts theater community is still strong, with about 50 former theater BFAs continuing to maintain a tight–knit community at Temple. The students mourn the loss of UArts, partly because “It was the most open place that they'd ever been in. I knew a lot of queer people found it was the first place they felt comfortable being in...because of its size, it was very intimate. I knew pretty much all of my professors,” notes Cyrus.
The intimacy fostered by the UArts and the close connections it provided with working professionals in the industry has made it a singular launching point for aspiring artists.
Other schools don’t have this professional focus. “It's a lot harder for what I can tell, to get opportunities here at Temple than it was at UArts,” says Cyrus, because the focus is less on students getting hands-on experience like they would in the professional world. Shows are mostly unofficial and run through student clubs, whereas UArts would cast directly from the student body.
However, for those who have transferred, there are some silver linings associated with attending a larger school like Temple. “[They can] take classes outside of their major, but also meet people outside of their major that are more than just an art student being friends with a music student,” says Cyrus. While many are sad to move on from the unique UArts experience, there are plenty of new adventures and perspectives that lie ahead.
Schools in the area have had to make some changes to accommodate this new influx of students. For Temple, this meant fast–tracking new curriculum decisions. For example, originally, Temple only offered a degree in Graphic Design for illustration students. There is now a BFA program in illustration at least a year sooner than expected, notes Matt Curtius, former UArts Illustration Director and current professor at Tyler. Through a team effort, Curtius and his colleagues were able to accommodate former UArts students and give them a comparable degree choice.
Searching For Answers
Unanswered questions still frustrate the UArts community, including the outcome of legal disputes. “You can't, by law, close a job site without notice, and we knew that the university was in violation of the WARN Act,” says Philbert. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 (WARN) states that employees need written notice at least 60 days prior to a mass layoff. The union had also just negotiated a contract, which included severance payments, which have yet to materialize.
For violating the WARN Act and for the lack of severance payments, former faculty are suing UArts, although the future is far from clear. “Because this is such an unprecedented series of events, there aren't actually that many lawyers who have experience in this type of situation dealing with the overlap of not just a nonprofit bankruptcy, but a university bankruptcy [and determining] what union representation means,” says Philbert. Since UArts is the “test case” in a few different ways, there is no sure path forward.
The university itself has moved to liquidate its assets, and nobody represents the university to negotiate contract fulfillment. This is where the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) comes in, which enforces laws that allow workers to organize and investigate alleged wrongdoing in labor relations. The union has filed additional charges with the NLRB in order to deal with the UArts' failure to negotiate with the union about pay and benefits as well as withholding information about the closure.
Philbert says that through the various ongoing investigations from state and federal entities, as well as evaluating criminal responsibility, the legal process for getting answers and working towards remuneration is underway. Additionally, through civil lawsuits and labor actions, Philbert and the union hope to get some answers for members.
The extent of mismanagement and irresponsibility of the closure is hard to gauge. There were discussions in early June about the possibility of merging UArts with Temple, but all fell through. Philbert says this is due to the inability of the trustees to act in the best interest of the university. As he sees it, the decision makers at UArts, including the board of trustees and the offices of the President, did not deliver on preserving the university and doing their due diligence for the students.
Daniel Fishel, the former UArts illustration program director, notes the effort put in by the deans of the school to come up with solutions to save the school from disaster. “I had a lot of optimism that the Deans would do something to make change because it sounded like their ideas of how to actually bring back the school from absolute implosion would work,” says Fishel. But in the end, the efforts of the deans to contact local and state entities floundered, because the trustees had already voted to close the school.
Millions in Limbo
The fate of UArt’s assets is still an open question.
The university’s endowment totaled 63 million at the time of its closure. Now, the Hamilton Family Foundation, a charitable trust that helped fund UArts for years, is currently in a legal struggle with a dozen universities to determine where this money will go. There is the potential that money could be redistributed among the universities that accept displaced students. In that situation, Temple could stand to gain $28 million. However, if the Hamilton Family Foundation is successful, they will be able to retain the money and use it later on for other educational purposes.
Another piece in this puzzle is the status of the real estate portfolio of the UArts, which, according to Philbert, totals in excess of $100 million. Since the University has moved to liquidate its assets, including the real estate, that is mortgaged, it would use that real estate as collateral for borrowing and credit. This “tangled” financial web will be one of the tasks for the bankruptcy court to unravel. But it seems right now that a lot of that real estate, save for some buildings with historical statuses, will be sold to developers.
Besides the fate of the buildings, there is a lack of clarity about possessions and collections left in UArts buildings. “There's still a lot of art in those buildings that people didn't get to take out because they didn't know anything was going to happen,” says Cyrus, who noted that former students haven’t retrieved many of their personal expensive materials and pieces of works.
This sentiment is echoed by Fishel, who mentions the uncertain status of a trove of famous original illustrations by Laura Jean Allen, one of the few women who worked in the mid–20th century as an illustrator, contributing to a number of New Yorker covers. “We have all those originals still on the seventh floor in the illustration department and the fate of that work, whether it's thrown away, sold in pieces, or even sold to an organization…is still unknown,” says Fishel.
A Tentative Future for the Arts in Philadelphia
Weighing on the minds of artists is the future of the arts without PAFA and UArts. These time–honored institutions have created generations of artists that remain in Philadelphia. “[These artists] give Philadelphia the reputation it has for being a city that punches above its weight in terms of its artistic and creative communities,” says Philbert. Beyond the loss of creative spaces on South Broad Street, the long–term effects are hard to grasp. One of the projects the union has been working on is an economic impact study, which tentatively places the loss in the hundreds of millions of dollars, all concentrated in the creative economy.
Another project from the union is the filming of a documentary entitled “Reckless Education,” which will explore the closure and its impact on students, faculty, and staff. “This documentary is one of the avenues to get answers and to try to make meaning of what has happened,” notes Philbert. The documentary, through creative means, will look at the breaking apart of the university and the decisions that ultimately led to its collapse.
One wonders how the arts will regain some support and stability. In the early 2000s, Philadelphia’s art scene was experiencing colorful development, including the opening of galleries like Space 1026 and artists like Shelley Spector and her gallery in the early 2000s, “[These] were all things that happened, not because of the help and funding or support of city government. It was despite it,” says Curtis. Now there are half as many art schools. “Maybe it's time for Philadelphia to finally stand up and say these are all the things that artists have brought to Philadelphia, and we want them to continue to bring into Philadelphia, and we've got a pony out with some type of support funding, etc.”
The UArts community feels they deserve answers. “At every level, folks who professed to love and care for this university, at the very top and among decision–makers and very powerful, wealthy, and influential people in the city have sort of thrown up their hands and not done the right thing,” laments Philbert.
