The sudden closure of the University of the Arts (UArts), a 150-year-old institution in Philadelphia that on 31 May announced it would close on 7 June, will be investigated by municipal and state officials. In the meantime, on 7 June around 600 adjunct and faculty staff at the university learned on a conference call that they were being laid off, effective immediately.
“I got on the call. They let us know that everyone on this call is going to be terminated and today is our last day,” Gehia Davenport, an alumna of UArts who had been teaching there for decades, told WPVI. Students, faculty and their supporters rallied at the university’s facilities in Philadelphia’s Center City on 7 June.
The office of Michelle A. Henry, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, is planning to investigate the circumstances that led UArts to close and leadership’s plans for the university’s properties and assets. “We are very concerned by the sudden closure of the University of the Arts,” Brett Hambright, a spokesperson for Henry, told The New York Times. “We are reviewing the circumstances of the closure and any transfer or loss of assets.”
The university’s properties in Center City were recently valued at around $162m, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to one estimate, UArts needed as much as $40m to right its finances.
Philadelphia’s city council passed a measure the day before UArts closed to hold hearings about what went wrong, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The city council will also examine the circumstances of the closure in light of a hard-won collective bargaining agreement the university’s administrators reached with unionised staff in February after more than two years of negotiations and just hours before a vote to authorise a strike. Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, also weighed in, telling WPVI he was “angry and disappointed in the leadership” at the university, adding: “UArts sprung this on all of us.”
Meanwhile, more than a dozen students and more than 20 staffers have filed class action lawsuits over UArts’ closure. The university’s president, Kerry Walk, resigned on 4 June.
At the time of UArts’s closing it had fewer than 1,500 students enrolled in around 40 undergraduate and graduate degree programmes. Its alumni include notable visual artists such as the painters Charles Sheeler, Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Bo Bartlett, the conceptual artists Alex da Corte and Jayson Musson, the curator Ruth Fine, the photographers Deborah Willis and Irving Penn, and the graffiti artist and muralist Steve Powers.
News of UArts’ closure comes after the nearby Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts revealed early this year that it will discontinue its degree-granting programmes to focus solely on its museum activities.