In Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” a drifting handyman named Tom Shiftlet declares that every person is two parts, body and spirit. The body, he says, “is like a house: it don’t go anywhere.” But the soul is a car—unrestrained by obligations, material circumstances and physical realities. In a sense, Shiftlet says, the human spirit can go everywhere, “Always on the move.”
The University of the Arts’ sudden closure at the start of summer scattered students’ bodies. They sought soft landings at Moore College of Art and Design, at Drexel, at Arcadia and at far-flung academies in other corners of the country.
Many landed at Temple, of course. But they’ve kept a kind of kinship, even in exile — erupting in applause and raising heart hands when a stage designer from their old school’s faculty spoke to Temple’s theater program, for example, or congregating in the cavernous common spaces of Annenberg Hall and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
That spiritual architecture of camaraderie was the core of the UArts floors of Hardwick Hall, one-half of the sweeping, brutalist brick towers at the northern end of Main Campus.
Incoming freshman Julia Callahan had once adored the University of the Arts’ campus. While walking its buildings in the thick of downtown Philadelphia, Callahan still somehow sensed its snugness.
“I remember checking out the campus, and I really, really liked how close-knit it was,” Callahan said. “It felt like a little community.” To Callahan, its Center City South environs presented a sharp contrast to Temple’s teeming largesse.
As newly minted, newly matriculated transfer students reworked their living situations, Temple’s Office of Residential Life set aside rooms for them in Hardwick Hall. Temple President Richard Englert acknowledged the existence of such a space in a Aug. 29 email announcing the two schools would not merge. By the time The Temple News visited Monday, it had been home to several UArts students and recruits for weeks.
The number of UArts students transferring to Temple made it easier to form some connections and keep others alive, said junior vocal performance major Laela Brown. Parts of the UArts campus were more intimate, she said — dormitories that looked more like personal apartments, for example. People who looked where they were going on the sidewalks. But that coziness didn’t completely vanish when she had to leave her old haunts behind, Brown said.
“[There’s] just a lot of familiarity coming here, versus going somewhere else where I probably wouldn’t know anybody,” said Brown, who spent her first two years of college at UArts.
Students left bereft by UArts’ ruin found their questions routed through a labyrinth of fill-out forms and call centers. By summer’s end, the consulting firm hired to oversee the closure, Alvarez & Marsal, was signing emails on administrators’ behalf, according to Zoe Hollander, a musical theater major who transferred from UArts to Temple this summer.
“There were so many layers between the students and the people responsible,” Hollander said.
College bonds aren’t easy to keep in the best of times, with their four-year terms and late-teenage evolutions. With its home collapsing around it Matrix-style, the UArts community of creatives that had long-spread roots in Center City South faced the task of staying whole in a hurricane of inhumanity.
Parts of that community have come together, piece by piece, at Temple. Two UArts transfers took jobs as RAs in Johnson and Hardwick Halls, with one of them in the UArts-designated space, according to resident director Matt Caruso. And multiple laid-off faculty are now teaching at Tyler School of Art and Architecture as adjunct professors, according to dean Susan Cahan.
Much of the post-UArts story remains unresolved. Students who initially planned to attend UArts will walk Temple’s halls for at least the next two years, Cahan acknowledged.
Epperson and Hollander noted that UArts’ in-house financial resources couldn’t follow them up Broad Street, dulling a provision in area schools’ teach-out agreement that prevented former students from being upcharged on tuition. But the relationship many newcomers had already forged with Temple left Cahan feeling confident.
“They’re here,” Cahan said. “And there’s very much a sense of being in a communal space.”
Oliver Economidis contributed reporting.
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