As millions of teenagers leave their childhood homes for college this August, illustrator Brittney Mallon will be sharing a modest Monmouth County, N.J., house with her parents and two older siblings.
Mallon wears a pain-relieving brace on her right knee, a relic from her days as a hard-charging high school basketball point guard. She’ll be using that brace daily, on the long hikes that will make up much of her commute to Midtown Manhattan and back. And much of the money Mallon earns in the next school year will vanish an hour’s journey downstate, to a South Jersey apartment she may never see again.
“I’m hoping I’ll be better for it,” Mallon said.
She’s trying, hard, to be a good sport.
Better or not, Mallon is still picking up the pieces from the University of the Arts’ abrupt closure in early June. UArts’ students, faculty and all but 30 staffers find themselves in the same boat — having instantly lost income and years of study when their school shuttered amid a foggy “financial crisis.”
UArts’ money problems came into sharper focus July 18, as school attorney Kristine Grady Derewicz faced lawyers for their institution’s former workforce in a federal class-action case. The plaintiffs, led by members of the United Academics of Philadelphia labor union, accused their former employer of violating the WARN Act, a 1988 federal statute regulating the closures of large workplaces.
Derewicz told U.S. district judge Chad Kenney that the school wanted to give former employees 60 days’ pay, as required by the statute under which faculty and staff filed suit. But the private creatives’ academy wasn’t yet sure how — or if it had enough money to do so, Derewicz said.
Kenney and attorneys from both sides agreed to return to the courtroom in mid-August. Not that UArts officials won’t lay eyes on a judge’s bench beforehand: Labor representatives accused officials of more violations on July 15, opening the door to more lawsuits in the weeks to come.
Nearly every area institution has taken an interest in the newly-scattered student body. Several schools opened transfer portals to quickly move pupils into their own ranks, and Bennington College in Vermont raised $1.3 million to absorb UArts’ dance conservatory — a deal that could bring five professors and as many as 50 students into the fold, according to The New York Times.
But Temple is trying, publicly, to salvage the rest of what remains. A university spokesperson told The Temple News in June that the officials are “exploring all options,” and Board of Trustees Chair Mitch Morgan said that included a possible merger that would give UArts’ buildings south of City Hall to Temple and perhaps even absorb some school programs and employees.
Conversations are ongoing, and officials from Temple’s fire marshal’s office are said by former faculty to have inspected parts of UArts’ campus in early July. But Bradley Philbert, a former UArts professor who negotiated UAP’s contract with the school as the union’s executive vice president, has long warned against any agreement that only absorbs a part of what he views as a singular community.
“Any real merger is going to entail keeping the university together,” Philbert said.
In that case, Philbert said, UAP would have the right to take part in talks between Temple and UArts.
Tyler School of Art and Architecture urban planning professor Jeffrey Doshna, who serves as president of Temple’s Association of University Professionals, offered a stark warning: Not everyone was privy to merger talks at the start, which he said mirrored the dynamic surrounding UArts’ collapse.
“I know it’s summertime,” Doshna said. “I know some people are checked out. But if you were to send out a note and say, ‘These are the meetings, these are the conversations that are happening,’ I think we would have been here for it.”
Doshna also said that a successful unification would mean an open process, one that featured Temple’s neighbors in North Philadelphia — and its prospective neighbors further south — as much as any administrator or trustee.
Non-disclosure agreements, a normal precaution in mergers and acquisitions, mean that many details of the merger remain unavailable, Philbert noted outside the courthouse. Nevertheless, Doshna believes both school’s communities should be apprised of developments in merger talks.
“It can’t just be about the real estate in Center City and the students there,” Doshna said. “The faculty and staff also need to be part of that conversation.”
A Temple spokesperson referred to past press releases on its evolving relationship with UArts in a request for comment. For now, Temple remains focused on the students — specifically, ensuring they can finish their education without delaying or derailing their path to graduation.
Tyler dean Susan Cahan detailed the new transfer process in an early July conversation with The Temple News. Cahan explained the workings of a teach-out agreement designed to allow as many UArts students to complete their coursework on schedule.
Admissions officers reviewed individual students’ records to see which classes they had taken, and whether parallel courses and majors existed at Tyler. If a student’s past studies lined up enough with Tyler’s programs to let them graduate on time, the admissions team said so, and welcomed them in, Cahan said. But she added that Temple refrained from making promises it couldn’t keep.
“There were actually quite a number of programs that some schools of art and architecture offer that we don’t,” Cahan said. “If that was the case, we didn’t raise our hands and say, ‘Come here.’”
As examples, Cahan listed animation and game design — degrees students could earn at UArts with no equivalent at Temple.
Tyler isn’t alone among Temple’s constitutive colleges in welcoming many of UArts’ transferring students, Cahan said. The College of Liberal Arts, for example, might take in creative writing majors, and Temple’s in-house film school might serve as a refuge for their counterparts on South Broad.
Tyler even managed to accelerate the creation of a new degree program when they became aware that some students had done similar coursework at UArts, Cahan said. During the summer, the school announced its plan to offer a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration and Emerging Media.
Mallon, the undergraduate from North Jersey, considered transferring to Temple when she saw she could finish studying illustration there. But she needed to know more about Tyler’s version of the program — its facilities and the kinds of work she’d be able to do on arrival. A trip to the school’s website proved unfruitful.
“I couldn’t find any information about it, because it was so new,” Mallon said.
Mallon’s parents stretched their budget to help her through her first three years, she said. It still took scholarships, grants, extra jobs and debt to pay her expenses, and much of the extra help she received vanished when UArts closed.
Without those lifelines, Mallon worried more than ever about finding steady work once she got her cap and gown.
“I really need to have a productive senior year to ensure that I can get a job after I graduate, because I have so much in loans,” she said.
Touring Manhattan’s School for the Visual Arts and seeing what they offered gave Mallon confidence she could finish her degree. More importantly, she believed a year among the artists of New York at SVA could open her horizons past graduation.
“I’m trying to make the best of the opportunities that are coming out of this,” Mallon said.
Historian Tara Westover, whose own foray into higher education from the hills of Idaho produced the bestselling memoir “Educated,” once wrote of college’s financial stressors in a New York Times essay. Financial aid checks, Westover said, transformed her life — from what kinds of jobs she worked near Brigham Young University to the classes she selected and her sleep schedule.
Sorting out her finances allowed Westover to feel “the most powerful advantage of money, which is the ability to think of things besides money.”
Mallon’s post-UArts journey might feel extraordinary, too. The loss of her institution set off a chain reaction that threatens her financial income, physical comfort and personal privacy. She’s not alone: Music production instructor Rick Rein spoke of “saying yes to literally everything” to make ends meet. And Philbert had to put planning for his upcoming wedding on ice.
So Cahan found herself pondering loss, even as she held forth on Temple’s gain. What would she say, specifically, to those wondering if their community was forever destroyed? The dean fell silent for a moment, then crossed her legs in one of the conference room’s big-backed swiveling chairs.
“I wouldn’t try to talk them out of that feeling,” she said, gently puncturing the silence. “The students have lost something — and Philadelphia has lost something important — with UArts’ closure.”
Be the first to comment