‘It feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under us’: PAFA students react to degree program cancellation

Students, staff, and alumni of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts reacted with a mixture of frustration, confusion, and hope to the news that the school would eliminate its bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts programs at the end of the 2024-25 school year.

Juniors, seniors, and MFA students expecting to graduate from PAFA in 2024 or 2025 will still be able to do so, the school said. Freshmen and sophomores will have to enroll elsewhere at the end of the current academic year. Those students — PAFA says there are 37 — will receive “personalized transfer plans” to nearby institutions, according to a statement by PAFA president Eric G. Pryor.

The statement said agreements are in place with the University of the Arts, Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Moore College of Art & Design, Arcadia University, and Pennsylvania College of Art and Design.

The campus was buzzing with unanswered questions about logistics, including international students on temporary visas, upcoming student exhibits, and the future of the building’s studios and arts equipment. Some students expressed outrage at the abrupt announcement, which came the day before spring classes started on Thursday.

“I’m just really shocked and upset. I feel like I just got here and I’m really confused about where I’m supposed to go. I got a full ride scholarship and I haven’t gotten any answers on what’s going to happen yet. It’s all very new and it’s all very scary,” said first-year student Aubrie Testa, 18, who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia and studies printmaking. “PAFA was really the perfect school for me…and I’m being forced to transfer.”

The school organized various meetings to answer questions and quell students’ concerns, but Testa said it has been “a mess.”

“In an effort to clear things up, I think everyone got more confused and frustrated,” Testa said.

Lily Tucker, 21, a sculpture major from northern Virginia, said on Thursday that students were “gathering in rage, to sit together in collective grief” on campus. Many students are scrambling to confirm their credits or trying to take summer classes so that they can move up their timelines and stay at the school.

For the students who are forced to transfer, Tucker said the experience will be vastly different.

“We have studios here and do private work, as well as six-hour-long rigorous studio painting classes or printmaking or sculpting from the figure,” she said. “We’re able to focus that hard on art and not be interrupted by other classes — other universities are set up more as universities, and less as academies.”

Other students, unsure of where they might end up and not wanting to muddle future applications, declined to give their names while passing through Lenfest Plaza on Wednesday.

”It feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under us,” said a 25-year-old third-year student who transferred to the school last year and did not want to be identified by name.

”There’s no other school that’s going to allow us to do what we were doing here. We’re gonna have to restart,” said a 21-year-old second-year sculpture student who asked to not be identified. “The small school was a strong community. Everyone has almost a spiritual connection to art.”

Angel, 19, a first-year who moved from New York and didn’t want to use her last name, was “heartbroken.” “PAFA was the only school I wanted to go to…other schools’ artwork didn’t live up to what PAFA has,” she said.

Some students were also furious with the PAFA board and president Pryor.

“These are all people who are making decisions, but don’t do art. They don’t understand the world that we exist in. So it’s like, why are you making any financial decisions for us?” said a 21-year-old senior who is on a scholarship and wished to not be identified.

The Academy — founded in 1805, and said to be the oldest American institution that is both a museum and a school — will retain classes in continuing education and its K-12 arts programs, school officials said. PAFA also intends to restore its comprehensive three- or four-year certificate program this fall. The program, from which many prominent artists graduated, was dropped in 2017.

Some current faculty expressed their own frustrations with the institution, while praising the certificate program.

“The school has been in a slow, steady state of deterioration,” said Stuart Shils, a painter and adjunct professor at PAFA for the past 15 years. He graduated with a certificate from PAFA in 1982, and said in recent years, with a new administration and plunging enrollment, “there’s been no obvious concern or care for either the faculty or the students.”

Peter Van Dyck, 45, who has taught drawing and studio art at the school since 2003, wasn’t surprised by the news, either. Returning to the certificate program “is probably the best thing that could happen,” he said. “Hopefully, [the program would] come in at a much lower cost, which I think makes it possible for people to then actually be practicing artists, when they finish.”

He’s unsure of what will happen to his job, but he said he refuses to see the school die. “I’ll keep coming till they throw me out,” he said.

PAFA currently has 21 full-time and 21 part-time faculty members, a spokesperson said, and although they will be retained for now, no firm plan exists yet for their employment after the degree programs are phased out. The number of faculty who will be retained will depend on how many students enroll in the restored certificate program, Pryor said.

“I was taken aback upon learning the news, still in the process of digesting it, much like many people in Philadelphia,” said Jonathan Lyndon Chase, a Philadelphia-based artist who received an MFA from PAFA in 2016 and is now a visiting critic at the school. “This decision is a significant setback for the Philadelphia arts community and evokes a sense of sorrow.”

Some alumni, however, believed the move would bring the school back to its roots, a position shared by school leaders.

“I think the place got too big, I don’t think it ever should have had degree programs,” said Philadelphia artist Bill Scott, who was a PAFA student from 1974 to 1979. “Because the certificate program was something that didn’t really exist anywhere else in the world. It was a great education. Not everyone stayed in the visual arts, but the art stayed with them throughout their lives.”

As a teenager in suburban Philadelphia, artist Jane Irish used to attend PAFA parties in the 1970s. She most recently taught students there just before the pandemic. She wondered whether the certificate program would make it possible for graduates to teach, a job that these days typically requires an MFA.

“Even though they’re known as ‘The Academy,’ to me, they represent an artistic vision that is more hands-on and more personal,” said Irish, whose first solo exhibit took place at PAFA in 2000.

Jan Baltzell, who taught in both the certificate and graduate programs for 30 years before retiring in 2020, said she thought the move to eliminate the degree programs made sense. PAFA’s focus on a studio-based education is what made it unique; the degree programs diluted that.

“Parents have a hard time spending money and not getting a degree,” Baltzell said. “I hope this will help the school, not hinder it — but it may take a little time.”