Former faculty, students and staff are still grappling with the abrupt closure of University of the Arts nearly nine months ago.
UArts filed for bankruptcy in September after a merger plan between UArts and Temple University failed. Since then, the school and its assets have been up for auction to repay creditors. One remaining building – Gershman Hall – has a leading bidder, while all other eight UArts buildings have been sold.
Billy Penn has spoken with a wide variety of former staff. In the first piece in this series, Billy Penn spoke with various deans and program directors about their transition into new careers, creative pursuits or part-time gigs following the school’s closure. The second and third pieces of the series focused on staff members – with perspective from part-time faculty, adjunct professors and union members.
For this article, we reached out to the backbone of the university: its students. Billy Penn spoke to four of them about their experiences. While all the students featured here landed at other universities, the process wasn’t without turmoil, sadness and stress.
Samantha Aghassi
WAS – UArts Rising Senior
NOW – School of Visual Arts (New York City) Senior
Samantha Aghassi became interested in animation around her junior year of high school.
“I was always interested in art, and I was following people on Instagram, and I did see someone on Instagram who went to UArts, and that’s how that first came onto my radar,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Well, let me look into that.’ And so I decided to apply to it and they accepted me. It was pretty good.”
For animation majors at UArts, Aghassi said, there were multiple paths to choose from. She went through multiple classes and programs at the school for her first three years there.
Aghassi and her classmates often communicated through a Discord server. That was how she discovered UArts was closing.
“I found out through a Discord message about the article [in the Philadelphia Inquirer] and the school didn’t even send an email out,” she said. “And I remember thinking to myself that it was really crazy, because that same morning, they had just sent out the tuition statement bill for the next semester.”
In the midst of the school closing, Aghassi said she took time to look into other schools. She said she had already seen and been interested in SVA. Her situation was unique, Aghassi said, as she was able to leverage connections and use her existing interest to get her foot in the door.
“I started collecting my portfolio materials,” she said. “I started applying to SVA, FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] because they have sort of an animation program going on there, too. And my sister, she went to FIT for a different major, but she worked in admissions, so she knew some people there who were able to talk to SVA admissions to at least bump me up.”
For her friends and colleagues, Aghassi said the process of switching schools and finding resources was daunting. Some schools, like Moore College of Art and Design (where many UArts students ended up transferring to), sometimes applied pressure to potential students to decide on the transfer quickly.
“[The schools] were very immediate with like, ‘Hey, we have a teach-out plan,’ ” she said. “But they did it super quickly where it was like a two-week period to decide. And I think that made it worse for people who are like, ‘Well, should I stay in Pennsylvania or Philadelphia, or should I go somewhere else?’ And it was really that they had to make a decision.”
For Aghassi and her friends, it was all difficult to process. She explained the closure was multifaceted and there wasn’t much help from UArts itself.
“A lot of the staff, like the office staff, were laid off,” she said. “So even if there was more resources to be given, there aren’t a lot of people in the office to be dealing with hundreds of people calling and emailing all at the same time.”
Aghassi will be graduating from SVA in May. She is grateful to have landed on her feet, but disappointed with the way UArts handled things.
Mya Eisnor
WAS – UArts Freshman
NOW – MICA (Baltimore) Sophomore
Mya Eisnor was living in Las Vegas, Nevada when she was deciding on a college. UArts stood out to her for its arts focus, and proximity to her family.
“My mom is staying in Frederick, Maryland,” she said. “So Philadelphia was a little bit closer, but not too close.”
During her first year at UArts, she frequently hung out with students involved in other types of art. She was studying graphic design, she said, but her background in multidisciplinary arts led her to really enjoy plays and shows at UArts.
“Well, growing up, my brother worked for [the play] Annie, so he’s in performing arts and stuff like that,” she said. “He’s behind the scenes. So, I’m used to being around stuff like that, because he was always in the musicals in high school and everything. So I was really interested in going to the school that was gonna have musicals and plays that I could go see.”
UArts gave many opportunities to indulge in these kinds of activities, Eisnor said.
“UArts did a musical that had only been done once before,” she said. “I think it was Sweetwater and it was so good. I think about it all the time. And that’s just something I miss a lot, because we don’t have that here.”
“Here” is the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore. Being in the city provides the opportunity to attend local symphonies and orchestras, but Eisnor said it isn’t the same as free school events and the diversity of majors at UArts.
“There wasn’t really a school like yours that had all of those majors, and that was just a little bit disappointing, because you’re not really diving into like an art space,” she said. “You can’t like, go out and go see a [school-sponsored] show, or there’s not as many sculpture majors here. It’s very visual arts.”
Mya was home on break when she heard the news of UArts’ closure. She said she was already going through a tough time – and UArts’ lack of communication didn’t help.
“One of the main issues was that by the time we found out that school had closed a lot of scholarships and applications had already closed,” she said. “So I wish we had just known anything sooner — that’s my main wish. So then we weren’t all running around trying to pick whoever would take us instead of something that we actually wanted.”
The university did very little to assist students, Eisnor explained, and she felt like she was on her own.
“UArts didn’t really do anything at all to help us transfer,” she said. “It was mostly other schools reaching out to us through our UArts’ emails and telling us that we could apply to them.”
While the school proper was unhelpful, Eisnor said faculty and staff were, and provided good guidance. While upset, she also wasted no time planning her next steps.
“I was kind of coordinating with all my friends, and we kind of knew immediately that we weren’t going to the same schools because our majors are so different,” she said. “I was just looking around at what schools would take us, and it was stuff like Temple and just regular [local] colleges, like not an art college. And I was like, ‘That’s not what I want.’ ”
Eisnor did some research and discovered a school she already knew was accepting UArts students.
“My stepdad had gotten an email from MICA that was like, ‘We’re taking new art students,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, OK.’ I had originally applied to MICA and I didn’t get accepted the first year. So, it was a little bit of a happy moment, because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, maybe I’ll actually go to that school now.’ ”
There are a few other UArts students at her new school, Eisnor said, and she is grateful for the transition period that the school helped create for her.
“Here, the transfer students came a week early with the freshmen so that we could settle in the space,” she said. She says she is happy there — she likes her professors and has made good friends.
Lex Ford
WAS – UArts Rising Senior
NOW – Moore College Senior
Lex Ford felt an immediate connection to UArts when they toured its campus in 2019.
“I just really liked the vibe. I don’t live in a city back at home,” said Ford. “So it just really stood out to me, and I really saw it as a place where I could grow.”
They explained things were going well prior to the school closing. The day the news broke, Ford had just accepted a part-time retail job and was in a good mood.
“Someone sent a message breaking the news, and I’m just sitting there, like, ‘No, that’s not true,’” they said. “So I look up on Google and see the Inquirer article, and after that point, it was just like everyone was obviously concerned and confused, because we heard nothing from the school, yet we saw the news article.”
They said their first emotion was sadness, followed by a lot of stress knowing this was supposed to be the beginning of their senior year.
“The day of, I was very inconsolable,” they said. “I remember being on a call with my friends, and we were all in tears crying.”
Ford explained Moore College quickly reached out to UArts students – saying it would accept them. They said this felt like the right decision for them.
“Ultimately, a lot of my thought process with picking Moore was, ‘I’m going into my senior year. I really just need to finish this, and I want to stay in Philadelphia, ideally,’ ” they said.
While Ford is grateful for where they’re at now, they said the lack of time was difficult and there was “never any closure.”
“After the closure, they were supposed to have this Town Hall thing the following Monday after they announced the closure,” Ford said. “And 10 minutes before that was supposed to start, which was over Zoom, they just canceled it outright. So, we just never got any closure, and we still don’t really have that much closure.”
Ford said there was also a lot of pressure to make a decision right away.
“I just wish that I had more time to make a decision as to where I needed to go, because it really just kind of felt like I had to rush to get my foot in the door somewhere so I could just finish out,” they said.
They emphasized the outstanding UArts community that has “come together to support one another.”
“While the physical space of UArts might be gone, the community still persists, like the soul is still there, in a way,” they said.
Frankie Charap
WAS – UArts Rising Senior
NOW – Moore College of Art and Design Senior
Frankie Charap is passionate about animation. They said this is what initially drew them to UArts.
“I’d taken a summer class at UArts, and it just felt like a place that was familiar to me,” Charap said, of Bala Cynwyd. “It also seemed like a place that would help me with getting a job after college, so mostly just it being nearby and meeting the requirements that I wanted.”
Charap said the UArts animation program had lots of professors and staff members with practical experience in the industry. That helped a lot with networking and connections for students.
“I felt like it wasn’t like an afterthought of a major, which a lot of schools seem to do,” they said. “It was a part of the school in a way. I didn’t feel like I was doing some weird major that they made up five years ago.”
They said they found out about the school’s closure through a call with their dad. He had seen the Inquirer article before UArts send an official email.
“Then we got the email, and I was on a call with my friends,” Charap said. “All of us didn’t want to be alone figuring this out and getting there. It was devastating.”
The “signs were there,” Charap said, but that they didn’t expect UArts to close overnight. And the experience led to an unexpected emotion: gratitude.
“It wasn’t just that I lost a school that I really liked,” they said. “I lost a community that was incredibly important to me, and I’ve still got pieces of that that mean the world to me.
“But I feel like I took that time that we were all together under the same roof for granted.”
In terms of resources to help transfer schools, Charap explained there weren’t many.
“We were given a Google Form to air our grievances from the school,” they said. “All of our professors were just as caught off guard by this as we were. I feel awful for people who didn’t just lose a community and a school overnight, but their livelihoods.”
In retrospect, they feel “people at the top” were “running away from the situation” rather than being more helpful.
Charap is now finishing up senior year at Moore College of Art and Design. While they’re OK with the choice, they said more information from the school sooner could’ve changed the decision.
“More notification would have been vital,” they said. “And honestly, kind of life-changing. The school that I’m at now is OK, but it’s a decision that I made because I had three months to get my feet on the ground again, and I didn’t want to spend that time dawdling.”
Charap said the Moore College animation program is good, but the UArts program felt more established. UArts closing was a “major loss” for those in that niche.
“I hope that the improvements that they make to the program [at Moore] moving forward will create a better experience for other students,” they said, “because I think that we animators really lost something special with UArts.”
Charap urges caution to others evaluating their educational options.
“If there are any other college kids who are going to be listening to this — either in solidarity or confusion — check out how financially well your college is doing and keep a little backup plan under your belt, because you don’t want it to be a surprise.”
This article is part of a continuing series on how the closure of the University of the Arts affected employees, staff and faculty.