University of the Arts students to protest their school’s stunning closure — a shutdown unprecedented in recent higher ed history
Temple and Drexel have offered a seamless transition, while students lament the loss of invested time and money.
Three days after the stunning announcement that their school would close June 7, University of the Arts students prepared to protest Monday.
Kerry Walk, the university’s president, said the school would be forced to shut because of declining enrollment and cash flow issues. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education has already stripped the school of its accreditation, saying it was out of compliance in all areas. The commission declined to comment Monday morning but unexpected university closures are exceedingly rare and observers could not readily point to another Pa. college that closed in this abrupt manner.
Some university students are expected to protest outside Hamilton Hall, the university’s administrative building on South Broad, at 12:00.
The university plans a town hall at 4 p.m.
Aaron Blanford, an illustration major from Moorestown, just finished her freshman year at University of the Arts and found out the news through an Inquirer article, not from the school. And the news made her wonder how a school she had planned to commit four years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to could simply vanish in a week.
“While I really enjoyed my time there, I absolutely saw a lot of the holes that were present in the program,” Blanford said.
She was shocked, disgusted, and worried about what’s next, Blanford said.
The closure has made her wary of investing time and money in an expensive school, she said. A number of schools, including Temple and Drexel, have offered seamless transfer processes for University of the Arts students.
But Blanford said she is exploring what else is out there, too. “To be completely honest, I’m not sure if I’m going to be interested in any of those. I’m prioritizing affordability in schools,” Blanford said.
Liz O’Donnell, a former University of the Arts staffer, said she knew the university wasn’t doing well, but was still caught off guard by the closure.
“Anyone who’s gone there or worked there in the past few years has seen the blood in the water, but it’s insane how fumbled it was,” O’Donnell said.
Some staffers have said they’ve already signed onto a class-action lawsuit that could be filed this week, and at least one lawmaker has called for an independent investigation into how thing went so catastrophically wrong at the school.
Helen Drinan, president of Cabrini University, which will officially close later this month — after having given students, faculty and alumni a year’s notice — said she wasn’t aware of any other college that gave such a short window of notice as University of the Arts did. The closest she could think of was Mount Ida College in Mass., but even that school gave a month’s notice. The closure which left students scrambling to find alternative education paths, prompted the state to pass a law to require its education department to annually review the financial health of the state’s private colleges to determine whether they face “imminent closure.”
“Massachusetts said we can never let this happen again,” said Drinan, a Boston native who was president of Simmons University in Boston for 12 years until 2020. Drinan said she can’t understand how University of the Arts could only give a week’s notice. ”You should never ever find out in seven days you have to close,” she said. “I just can’t imagine a scenario in which that is defensible.”
This is a developing story, and will be updated.
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