UArts staff, students continue discussions on closure causes, ways forward, and the human toll: 4 takeaways from a city hearing

Christina Mattei, an artist, music producer and single mom, sunk her life savings into moving to Philadelphia to accept a faculty position at University of the Arts last year. After the school’s sudden, unexpected closure, she’s left jobless and sleeping on a couch, unable to pay for childcare for her son.

Brynn Smith was 15 credits shy of graduation when the school suddenly shut, and now the musical theater major is in the midst of “the most stressful summer of my life” as she tries to piece together a way to finish out the college career she built and cherished at UArts.

And Jasmine Jiang and Quinn Bauriedel run the Pig Iron Theatre Company, an arts organization now “facing an existential threat,” they say, because of the closure and the $300,000 the university owed Pig Iron when the school folded.

Bereaved, incredulous, angry members of the UArts community discussed the fallout of the university’s June shutdown during a City Council hearing Thursday that yielded plenty of plaintive testimony, but also ideas for how the university might live on, as well as continued speculation about what went so wrong that school leaders closed UArts with a week’s notice.

» READ MORE: The University of the Arts is closing June 7, its president says

Here are four things to know from Thursday’s hearing:

Debora Carrera, Philadelphia’s chief education officer, stressed how blindsided the city was by the UArts closure.

“The lack of transparency around this decision was completely troubling,” Carrera said. “The sudden closure raised many questions.”

Mark Campbell, who was a full-time faculty member and the former dean of the College of Art, Media and Design, accused the administration of David Yager, the UArts president who retired in 2023, for the school’s downfall, which he described “like a catastrophic act of nature, an earthquake where suddenly everything has changed.”

During Yager’s presidency, “there was an elaborate shell game being played with university finances, all at the service of costly self-aggrandizing capital projects intended to support the narrative that David Yager was a successful president,” Campbell said. He suggested Yager insisted on capital improvements at the expense of the university’s financial health.

Yager, Campbell said, centralized decision making, and kept his decisions mostly secret.

“Apart from concealment, there was a counterfactual narrative propagated externally and internally of unprecedented financial solidity and fundraising success,” Campbell said. Campbell said the money pledged and communicated was not actually in the bank; Yager took credit for a gift pledged years before his tenure, he said.

Campbell and others said they had spoken to the state Attorney General’s office, which is investigating the UArts collapse.

Yager could not be reached for comment.

Councilmember Nina Ahmad said she wanted to “understand exactly what happened and why were there no eyes on it? Where are the board members? They were all watching this happen.”

Going forward, Ahmad suggested that all major institutions in the city “have representation from us,” like an ex officio city official on boards of trustees.

“It’s critical that we watch our assets,” Ahmad said, suggesting that the city “do an analysis of all institutions in our city, not just UArts. Are they following their fiduciary path? This is a wake-up call for us.”

Councilmember Mark Squilla, who convened the hearing, said the city was involved in discussions of ways to move the University of the Arts, or its legacy, forward. (Temple University has said it’s in talks to potentially merge with UArts, though the feasibility and timeline of such a link is unclear, and nothing is imminent.)

No university officials appeared at the hearing to answer questions. Still, Squilla said, both the city and governor’s office are still actively working on ways forward.

“We have philanthropists and other people who are interested,” Squilla said.

Alumni and Philadelphia arts professionals offered up possible ways to revive the university or at least replicate some of its functions. UArts served as a gathering place for artists, a convener, a source of stability, a clearinghouse for ideas.

David Timony, a UArts alum, professor and current head of Delaware Valley University’s teacher preparation program, said he’d like to see the appointment of an interim board and leadership panel “who can return to the offices and start solving the problems of this institution. Give us the keys so that competent and inspired problem-solvers may take the opportunity to make this right... let us get on with the good work of reopening UArts and getting this deserving institution back on its feet. There is plenty of work to do and guess what? We have lots of help.”

Much is at stake, said Jiang, managing director of the Pig Iron Theatre, which had partnered with UArts to offer a unique master’s of fine arts.

“Already, we have seen brilliant artists and educators, formerly employed by UArts, forced to take their families and their skills out of this city. We have seen potential students, employees, and partners hesitate to make Philadelphia their destination amidst this instability. We have seen the once bustling Avenue of the Arts, the heart of Center City, become a ghost town.”

The city, Jiang said, had the ability to “make sure this moment is a canary in the coal mine and not a harbinger of doom. This is our chance to talk about and invest in the future of the arts in Philadelphia.”

Zoe Hollander lost her final year of high school to COVID. Now she’s losing her final year of college to UArts’ collapse.

“As a rising senior, it’s hard to put into words just how big of a loss that this is,” said Hollander, who moved from Minneapolis to study musical theater at UArts.

Hollander had her last year mapped out: She was already cast in a fall show, had planned performances of the improv comedy troupe that she founded, had signed on to study at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London in the winter as part of a UArts program.

She’s going to finish her degree at Temple, but will be taking out more money in loans than she ever had at UArts — despite Temple’s lower tuition — because UArts hasn’t been helpful with sharing financial aid information. And there was no “seamless transfer” process like UArts promised.

“Truthfully, the fact that the UArts community has lost so much while not knowing what exactly happened is hard for me to stomach,” Hollander said. “Money does not just disappear, and information does not cease to exist, and to claim so is a slap on the face. Art is important, and devaluing it in favor of profit shows that we are disposable.”

Mattei, the UArts professor, said, “there’s a very real financial devastation happening right now.”

She can’t get grants funded “because all the grants that we were going to be applying for were partners with the university,” Mattei said. She’s sleeping on a couch in her studio, offering free help to her former students, and taking her 8-year-old child with her everywhere she goes because childcare is too expensive to afford in her current jobless state.

The city must work to regard artists as they’re regarded in Europe, she said.

“They consider artists, professors, like surgeons,” Mattei said. “We are surgeons of the soul, and you just took that from Philadelphia.”

Staff writer Susan Snyder contributed to this article.