After UArts closure, Pig Iron School finds new MFA partner in Rowan University

After months of uncertainty following the University of the Arts’ abrupt closure in June, the Pig Iron School has partnered with Glassboro-based Rowan University to resume its master of fine arts program.

The theater school, which ran its MFA through UArts, had paused the fall 2024 semester as it scrambled to find a new accredited university partner. On Wednesday, Pig Iron announced that Rowan’s College of Performing Arts will serve as the program’s institutional home and the spring 2025 semester will begin in January, pending final approval from Pennsylvania and New Jersey’s Boards of Education.

While some logistics are still being finalized, Pig Iron cofounder and coartistic director Quinn Bauriedel hopes to welcome 35 incoming and current MFA students back to the Olde Kensington school, where they will primarily take classes in devised theater while paying tuition to Rowan, which will confer their graduate degrees. Of that number, 21 are returning students whose tuition costs will not increase with this transition.

General tuition costs for Pig Iron’s program will not increase, either. “We’re going to make sure that it’s not any more expensive than it had been at UArts,” said Bauriedel. “UArts had a very, very expensive published tuition, and actually, the good news is that Rowan’s published tuition is extraordinarily less expensive.”

Bauriedel spoke with several universities, both near (Temple, Villanova, Penn, and Drexel) and far (Cal Arts, the New School, Prescott College in Arizona) in his search for a new partner, but he said Rowan was the best fit, partially because they could move forward faster.

“We wanted to really get it right, and, in some way, we both knew that time was of the essence,” said Bauriedel. “There were other wonderful places that seemed like it might be just a much longer process, maybe even multiple years … we were really looking for something to help us sooner than that.”

Within 48 hours of the UArts closure announcement, Melanie Stewart, associate dean of Rowan’s College of Performing Arts, contacted Bauriedel, a longtime friend through Philadelphia’s dance-theater scene, to initiate conversations about how Rowan could help. She connected him with Rick Dammers, the dean of the performing arts college, and they began meeting regularly to develop a plan.

“We have a movement-driven approach to theater, which fits really nicely with some of the approaches they take in Pig Iron,” said Dammers. “Many of my colleagues here in theater and dance already know the people at Pig Iron, so I think there’s going to be a lot of artistic synergies from connecting our programs that are already of a similar mind.”

Amid a nationwide decline in higher education enrollment, Rowan’s performing arts college is going strong: Dammers said the college saw its “largest incoming class of performing arts students ever” this year, even before welcoming an influx of transfer students across UArts. A total of 21 UArts students have transferred to the College of Performing Arts and the Ric Edelman College of Communications and Creative Arts.

Rowan’s College of Performing Arts currently offers two graduate programs, a master of arts in arts administration and a master of music education. While Dammers said adding another master’s program in the dance and theater department had long been a hope, creating a new program from scratch was unlikely in the near future. Partnering with the internationally recognized Pig Iron School will expand their offerings without requiring as much start-up work.

“It’s a unique opportunity — it’s an established program that has its own facilities — so a lot of the problems, from our perspective, of establishing a graduate program came already solved for us,” said Dammers.

The goal is to keep the program as intact as possible in this transition to minimize further disruption for the students, and to ensure stability for Pig Iron’s future. Full-time Pig Iron faculty members Bauriedel and Sarah Sanford will now join the faculty at Rowan.

“It doesn’t feel like anyone is getting more or less out of this partnership. There’s a lot of mutuality,” said Bauriedel.

Despite what Bauriedel described as a “roller-coaster summer,” he’s hopeful that the school will get back on track — even as it’s still owed about $300,000 in expenses that UArts has yet to pay.

While that sum represents a significant portion of Pig Iron’s typical budget of $1.3 to $1.8 million, it’s a small fraction of UArts’ enormous outstanding debt of $72.2 million overall. In September, UArts filed for bankruptcy; it may be years before Pig Iron and others, including staff, vendors, and students, are repaid. The university faces a number of class-action lawsuits, and Pig Iron is also considering legal action.

Still, the Pig Iron Theatre Company has forged on, successfully mounting two productions this year, including the world premiere of Poor Judge, Dito van Reigersberg’s eccentric and electric ode to Aimee Mann, that was a darling of the Fringe Festival.

“I was glad that the piece was so well-received, because it also suggested that in this moment where it looks like a lot of things are falling apart, there’s actually still a strong center,” said Bauriedel.

Up next: Pig Iron’s nationwide tour of theater workshops willshare the good news that its school doors will open once more.