It would have taken $40M to save University of the Arts, a trustee says, as students protest the unprecedented closure

It would have taken roughly $40 million to stave off the catastrophic financial crisis that ultimately forced University of the Arts officials to announce the school will close June 7, one trustee said Monday.

The news came as hundreds of students, faculty, parents, and supporters protested the stunning closure outside the university’s administrative building on South Broad Street in a lively memorial and performance.

“Our administration has failed us,” said Sarah MacLeod, a rising junior from Northwest Philly and a fine arts major who helped organize the demonstration.

Around her, students chalked the sidewalk, performed choreographed dances, blew bubbles, and painted signs. Passing cars beeped in support.

MacLeod’s mother, Concetta Mattioni, an art teacher in Conshohocken, said she received a fall tuition bill on Friday, hours before she learned her daughter’s school was closing. Like many in the university community, she found out from an article in The Inquirer as the administration had not given any warning of the abrupt shutdown just days away — a breach in higher education norms with no clear precedents nationally.

Kerry Walk, who has served as the university’s president for less than a year, said Friday the school would be forced to shut because of declining enrollment and diminishing cash flow. Her public comments came after the Middle States Commission on Higher Education stripped the school of its accreditation, saying it was out of compliance in all areas. The commission declined to comment Monday but unexpected university closures are exceedingly rare and observers could not readily point to another Pennsylvania college that had closed so abruptly.

University trustee Laurie Wagman said she did not know what exactly caused the closure decision, but said “something like $40 million would solve the problem so they could move forward.” While other members of the board declined comment, signs of financial distress go back at least one year.

There had been significant turnover at the top of the organization, and according to financial documents, the school’s endowment was worth $10 million less than it had been five years before, despite the university’s first-ever capital campaign.

A school spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for university leadership to explain what brought the venerable institution to this point. And a 4 p.m. town hall that was scheduled for faculty and staff was canceled minutes before it was supposed to start.

“We know you are heartbroken and frustrated about our impending closure on Friday, June 7. As the situation continues to unfold, we cannot adequately answer your questions today,” university officials wrote in an email sent to staff. “We want everyone to know that we exhausted every option to address the urgent crisis and find a pathway to keep the institution open. However, we could not identify a viable path for UArts to remain open and serve its mission.”

Beyond the president’s office, UArts has seen turnover in another key position in the last 15 months.

Eric Leal took over as chief financial officer in February. His predecessor, Stephen J. Lightcap, left in April 2023, and is now chief financial officer at La Salle University. Prior to working at University of the Arts, he held a similar position at Cabrini University, which is also closing.

La Salle said Lightcap was not available for an interview about his former employer.

Lightcap’s departure from UArts came just a few months before the end of David Yager’s tenure as president. A hallmark of Yager’s presidency starting in 2016 was the university’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign.

That campaign raised $67 million, including a $25 million kickoff gift from the estate of Dorrance “Dodo” Hill Hamilton, the late Campbell Soup heiress, Yager said in 2022. It’s not clear how much of that money was pledged and remained to be given to the school.

In an interview Friday, current president Kerry Walk said an unspecified amount of gifts, grants, and other revenues the school was counting on had not materialized.

Yager said in 2022 that $24 million of the $67 million in fundraising was to become part of the school’s permanent endowment.

But on June 30, 2023, the UArts endowment was worth $62.44 million — $10 million less than on June 30, 2017, before the fundraising campaign started, according to the school’s tax returns.

Yager did not respond to Inquirer requests for comment Monday.

UArts has not said how it will wind down its business and repay the $45 million in municipal bond debt it owes.

It’s possible that the school could turn its real estate over to the trustee who manages the bond; the trustee would then have to sell the real estate to repay bondholders. That could happen without bankruptcy. U.S. bankruptcy law does not allow creditors to force a nonprofit into bankruptcy, according to Lawrence G. McMichael, a bankruptcy attorney and chairman at Dilworth Paxson LLP in Philadelphia.

Aaron Blanford, an illustration major from Moorestown, just finished her freshman year at University of the Arts and found out the news through an Inquirer article, not from the school. And the news made her wonder how a school she had planned to commit four years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to could simply vanish in a week.

“While I really enjoyed my time there, I absolutely saw a lot of the holes that were present in the program,” Blanford said.

She was shocked, disgusted, and worried about what’s next, Blanford said.

The closure has made her wary of investing time and money in an expensive school, she said. A number of schools, including Temple and Drexel, have offered seamless transfer processes for University of the Arts students.

But Blanford said she is exploring what else is out there, too.

“To be completely honest, I’m not sure if I’m going to be interested in any of those. I’m prioritizing affordability in schools,” Blanford said.

Liz O’Donnell, a former University of the Arts staffer, said she knew the university wasn’t doing well, but the closure still caught her off guard.

“Anyone who’s gone there or worked there in the past few years has seen the blood in the water, but it’s insane how fumbled it was,” O’Donnell said.

Some staffers have said they’ve already signed onto a class-action lawsuit that could be filed this week, and at least one lawmaker has called for an independent investigation into how things went wrong so quickly and terribly at the school.

Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, said he wasn’t aware of any other nonprofit college closing with such short notice, though he knew of cases in which for-profits abruptly shuttered.

“Typically, it’s weeks if not months,” he said. “It’s just rare to see one handled like this.”

He called it “the absolute worst case scenario” for a college closure, noting that students would likely face significant challenges transferring and faculty and staff would likely struggle to find jobs.

Closures can be devastating to students’ educational progress.

More than half of students at 467 colleges that closed between July 1, 2004, and June 30, 2020, did not reenroll elsewhere, according to a 2022 report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Of those who did, only 36.8% earned a degree; and 10% more were still enrolled when the study ended. The majority of those colleges were for-profit institutions and many of the closures were abrupt. The study showed that when closures were handled in an orderly way with support for students, about 70% of students reenrolled.

Helen Drinan, president of Cabrini University, which will officially close later this month — after having given students, faculty, and alumni a year’s notice — said she wasn’t aware of any other college that gave such a short window of notice as University of the Arts did. The closest she could think of was Mount Ida College in Massachusetts, but even that school gave a month’s notice.

The Mount Ida closure, which left students scrambling to find alternative education paths, prompted Massachusetts to pass a law to require its education department to annually review the financial health of the state’s private colleges to determine whether they face imminent closure.

“Massachusetts said we can never let this happen again,” said Drinan, a Boston native who was president of Simmons University in Boston for 12 years until 2020.

Drinan said she can’t understand how University of the Arts could only give a week’s notice.

“You should never ever find out in seven days you have to close,” she said. “I just can’t imagine a scenario in which that is defensible.”

Kelchen said the only “silver lining” was the school’s valuable real estate, referring to its holdings of real estate along South Broad Street and nearby blocks in Center City. A 2022 city tax assessment estimated the combined market value of these structures was about $162 million, although the university maintained their actual value was much lower — a combined $94 million according to a 2023 nonprofit disclosure form.

“They will be able to liquidate their assets and people should probably be able to get their final paychecks,” Kelchen said.

But Kelchen said he still couldn’t understand what would have forced such a swift, unplanned closure.

“The only reason I can think of is they had no idea where they sat financially,” he said. “Either they didn’t have a finance team in place or the finance team wasn’t talking with leadership or someone just made a big mistake. I’m just baffled by this.”

Robert M. Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education whose 2020 book The College Stress Test predicts a coming wave of closures among small institutions, said though the public timeline of University of the Arts’ closure was short, the pressures on institutions like it have been bearing down for some time.

”Too few of these institutions were very efficient to begin with,” Zemsky said. “They run very small classes, they don’t pay their faculty very well, but they have more faculty than they can really afford. As long as they were getting an outside subsidy, they were OK, sort of. But when the outside subsidy dried up, they were down the tubes.”

Wagman, a university trustee and patron for whom the school’s recording studio is named, said she was “heartbroken” by the announcement of the university’s imminent closure.

”It’s tragic,” she said. “I feel like, not only myself, but a lot of people are in mourning. It’s just a shame. The school has been wonderful — the faculty is so skilled, and what has come out of the institution over the years in the arts — these are prominent people. I don’t know why money can’t be found in the government sector.”

Wagman — whose late husband was Philadelphia publisher and philanthropist Irvin J. Borowsky — said that “the arts are the cornerstone of civilization and such a vital part of Philadelphia. Someone called me and asked what has happened to their beloved alma mater, and that’s really the way a lot of people thought of it.”

Asked about the possibility that a plan might emerge to save the University of the Arts, Wagman said: ”I think in the back of everyone’s mind they’re hoping something comes forth.”

MK Prophett found herself in a mind-boggling situation as of Monday afternoon: $150,000 in debt and one class short of a degree at a school that no longer exists. She had planned to take her final course this summer, and in fact had already attended the first day of class.

Despite walking in graduation two weeks ago, Prophett now had no idea how she would complete her double Bachelors of Fine Arts.

”Our entire future basically rests on this 4 p.m. town hall meeting,” Prophett, 22, said outside Hamilton Hall. She estimated roughly 20 other students were in a similar position.

Ten minutes before the town hall was supposed to start, Prophett learned the university canceled the meeting.

Staff writers Ryan W. Briggs and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.