The latest UArts hearing discusses red flags before closure, a failed move to save the school, and an accusation of ‘cowards’ on the board

High-level University of the Arts administrators tried to halt the university’s abrupt June closure, but were stonewalled and frozen out, one said Monday at a state hearing on the sudden shutdown.

Erin Elman, the veteran dean of the former arts college’s division of Graduate and Professional Studies, said that in a meeting with the university’s president and vice president shortly after the closure was announced, she and other deans asked for the specifics of the financial crisis that prompted the shutdown.

“I asked, I begged for an appeal to the imminent closure,” Elman told a panel of state House representatives convened by Rep. Ben Waxman (D., Philadelphia). She and the other deans spent the week between the closure announcement and June 7, the university’s final day of operation, speaking to lawyers, public officials and anyone else they thought might be able to help them stave off a shutdown. They formed a coalition of administrators that hoped to run the university themselves, or at least bridge the gap until a new administration could carry the school forward.

» READ MORE: A week after UArts closure, here are some questions answered and what comes next

“If we had more time, I believe wholeheartedly that we would have weathered this storm,” Elman said. “There’s no question in my mind. I believe that we could and would do much better for our students.”

Elman and other panelists — university students, staff and alumni — added more details to a troubling picture that has emerged since the closure was announced May 31. Even the deans had no idea that the school, where enrollment was up, was in grave trouble. Hundreds of lives have been upended since.

Here are some takeaways from the Monday hearing, held at the William Way LGBTQ Community Center in Center City.

Elman, who spent 16 years as a dean under three different presidents, typically participated in monthly meetings with the President’s Council — deans, the vice president for academic affairs, and the president. But after Kerry Walk became president in August, those opportunities ground nearly to a halt; Elman said only three council meetings were held over the past year.

“That was alarming for all of us,” Elman said. “That was a red flag.”

At a May meeting, enrollment concerns were discussed — no surprise, Elman said; schools’ enrollment nationwide took a hit during COVID, and small schools like University of the Arts were especially vulnerable. But the news seemed good that month — each of the university’s schools were meeting not just their enrollment targets to make their budget work, but the reach targets.

“We were told that it was being managed, and with the enrollment incline, we weren’t really alarmed,” Elman said. “If we were, we would have been looking for other jobs, probably.”

Elman has experience working with Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the school’s accreditation agency; she worked on accreditation panels for other arts colleges. And she led University of the Arts’ last accreditation, in 2019, when it passed with flying colors, Elman said.

It was troubling, Elman said, that Walk apparently made a “unilateral decision” to close the university — since the information was not shared with the President’s Council. Walk informed Middle States on May 29 that the school would close, but the board of trustees did not vote on the closure until June 1.

“That seems out of order, that’s out of governance for her to have made that call without the vote of the board of trustees,” Elman said. “But that to me seems that she … acted unilaterally.”

Walk resigned shortly after the closure was announced.

Kevin Mercer, a full-time faculty member and associate professor of illustration, said he also got a peek at dysfunction in the time before the closure. He was part of the negotiating team that helped settle the first union contract in the school’s history just months before the shutdown.

That contract took three years to achieve. And during negotiations, “the administration was regularly unprepared and late with the bargaining that they had to do,” Mercer said. “A lot of times, we thought it was just them pushing us off. But … it was also a bit of just them not having an idea how to handle the business.”

State Rep. Joseph Ciresi (D., Montgomery County), who has a background in the arts himself and is a board member of the Kimmel Center, was visibly angry with the university’s leaders.

“When you have a bunch of cowards who are on the board and administration, there’s no protection,” Ciresi said. “As a board member, you have an obligation to explain what went on, and they ran from it.”

State Rep. Paul Friel (D., Chester County), who had sent his daughter to University of the Arts precollege programs in the past, was similarly stunned.

“This is a tragedy,” Friel said. “I hope none of the members of this board are ever on a board again.”

State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D., Philadelphia) said that while he was not a lawyer, the timeline of the closure, and the lack of transparency and information led him to think “something is clearly rotten in Denmark. This feels like possible criminality to me.”

State Rep. Jordan Harris (D., Philadelphia), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, indicated that a formal investigation could soon be underway by state Attorney General Michelle Henry. Her office, Harris said, “has begun the process of what an investigation would look like … at the state level we are doing our best to look at what happened and to make sure it never happens again.”

Harris said more information would be forthcoming in the next few weeks, but “this is not something on the back burner for us.”

An official with the Pennsylvania Department of Education said at a Middle States town hall for students and parents on Friday that the department was investigating the closure.

Joey Miller, who was to be a rising UArts sophomore, said his college career is on pause because of the upheaval.

“I am not planning on attending higher ed, simply because of the amount of personal life adjustments that have to be made in response to this,” said Miller, who lives in emergency university housing that he’ll have to leave by August. “I can’t imagine I’m alone in this.”

Gehia Davenport, a UArts alum who was about to mark her 30th year of working for the university, stayed in large part because of the tuition benefits. Her oldest is in college now, and her youngest, who’s in high school, was planning on going to University of the Arts for free. Davenport planned to study for her master’s degree, too. Now, she’s not sure what she’ll do.

“In today’s economy, you need to have two incomes to get by,” Davenport said. “And I’m not sure how all my bills will get paid — school tuition, loans, credit cards are all in jeopardy of going into default.”