The nearly 150-year-old University of the Arts in Philadelphia will close its doors June 7. Many of its 1,149 students and about 700 faculty and staff members got the news from an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday or on social media, only later getting official word from the school.
“The situation came to light very suddenly,” an announcement on its website said. It noted that “UArts has been in a fragile financial state, with many years of declining enrollments, declining revenues and increasing expenses.”
Enrollment is down from 2,038 in 2013. In an interview with the Inquirer, the institution’s president, Kerry Walk, said that revenue, including grants and gifts, failed to arrive in time to bolster the school’s finances. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredited the institution, indicated on Friday that it had revoked the University’s accreditation immediately, leaving no option for the school but to close. Town halls are planned on Monday.
“At 2:47 p.m. on Friday I got an email asking me to apply for graduation, and at 6:03 the Inquirer posted the story that my school was closing,” Natalie DeFruscio, an illustration major who first took classes there in the sixth grade and would have started her senior year in the fall, told The New York Times. “If you spent five minutes there, you could tell it was oozing with talented students. And there were amazing professors I adore who were also blindsided by this,” she said.
The closing was the result of a mix of cash flow constraints that are typical of schools like UArts, which depend on tuition dollars. In addition, UArts faced significant unanticipated costs, including major infrastructure repairs. The escalation of the costs significantly increased and could not be covered by revenue, according to a statement from the board of trustees on Sunday. “Despite our best efforts, we could not ultimately identify a viable path for the institution to remain open and in the service of its mission,” the statement said.
The email on Friday, from Walk, who had been in the position less than a year, and Judson Aaron, chair of the board of trustees, pledged to assist students in transferring to area institutions. The school did not make its leadership available for interviews.
Alumni of the university, which offered about 40 majors, among them dance and theater, include the artists Charles Sheeler, Dotty Attie, Louise Fishman, Stephen Powers, Neil Welliver and Deborah Willis.
“There’s so much love and respect for the faculty and the institution over the years,” said Willis, a MacArthur grant-winning artist, describing the closing as “tragic.” (Willis got her Bachelor of Arts degree in photography.)
The school was created by the 1985 merger of the Philadelphia College of Art and the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts.
The news comes in the wake of similar closings nationwide, in part because of pressures on higher education generally but also because of art institutions’ particular vulnerabilities. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation’s first art school and museum, founded in Philadelphia in 1805, is dissolving at the end of the 2024-25 academic year. (The University of the Arts had been designated to take on some of the Academy’s students.) Last April, the 150-year-old San Francisco Art Institute filed for bankruptcy, and that fall, the Art Institutes, a system of for-profit colleges, announced the closing of eight campuses nationwide.
Some failed schools overextended themselves with building projects; others acquired real estate at the top of the market, then saw its value plummet. Many have faced challenges caused by the disruption in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process. The pandemic hit art schools especially hard since students prefer to study these subjects in person, Deborah Obalil, president of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, of which the University was a member, said in an interview.
Tuition for the 2023-2024 year was $54,010, according to a spokesman, although the average cost of attendance is lower because, the university says, all students receive some sort of institutional aid.
Without deep endowments, moreover, art schools are typically unable to provide much financial aid. The University’s endowment was about $60 million, according to officials there. Yale’s was $40.7 billion in 2023, and that of the highly ranked California Institute of the Arts — known as CalArts — was $213.8 million as of 2022.
The financial woes of the University of the Arts were widely known. Furthermore, there was relatively quick turnover among presidents with contrasting visions, leaving some repeatedly feeling a sense of whiplash, as well as rapid turnover at the level of deans and in admissions and advancement offices.
“It was an amazing place but I also thought it was troubled and miserable and crazy,” said Judith Schaechter, who taught for about a decade as an adjunct in the craft department. She added, “I didn’t just like the students and the other faculty. I loved them. But no one who worked there could possibly not know they’ve been in financial trouble.”
Jonathan Fineberg joined the school seven years ago to create and teach in a “Ph.D. in creativity” program. “When the pandemic hit, it almost killed us,” he said. “We all took salary cuts and lost half our pension contributions, and they haven’t come back. I haven’t had a raise since I got here and I took a more than 50 percent salary cut to come here because I believed in this. It was a financial house of cards.”
The director of the fine arts department, Rebecca Saylor Sack, went so far as to call the sudden closing “disgraceful” and “criminal,” though she, like every other member of the community who weighed in, expressed her affection for the community.
About 350 faculty and staff are members of United Academics of Philadelphia, part of the American Federation of Teachers. “I’ve been trying to learn aspects of labor law that I’ve never had to think about before,” said the union president Daniel Pieczkolon. “We believe we’re legally entitled to bargain over closure. Some of our members have given 20 or 30 years to this institution, which has been foundational to the Philadelphia arts ecosystem.”
The union had just negotiated its first contract, he said, which involved a close look at the university’s books. “We were aware they were struggling financially but closure was never presented as a possibility. It’s incredibly confusing.”
Pieczkolon praised the faculty as “incredibly talented” but he took a realistic view of their job prospects, saying that “full-time positions are really hard to come by.”
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