Baking News #71

this one is about UArts

Last Friday, around 6pm, I saw one of my friends post a headline that the University of the Arts, the nearly 150-year-old institution from which I graduated (into a recession!) in 2007, had lost its accreditation and would be closing today. 700 people will be losing their jobs. Students who are currently enrolled will now have to scramble to find another school. The kids who had enrolled for the fall now had to spend the last weeks of their senior year of high school figuring out a whole new plan. And the board of trustees and now-former president of the school had very little to say about it.

I’m not an investigative journalist, I have a BFA in Writing for Film and Television from a now shuttered university in Philadelphia, but it seems to me there’s probably something to the fact that former president Kerry Walk, who resigned on Tuesday (apparently to avoid meeting with the union) recently left a college who announced a merger with another university, and the former CFO of UArts went on to work at Cabrini University, which recently closed, with some assets being sold to LaSalle, where he works now.

I didn’t have a good time in college. Before there was a Creative Writing program and the Writing for Film and TV program worked with the Film department, there was the original Writing for Film and Television program, run by a man with a few Daytime Emmys, who made a point of telling us at every opportunity that we were not and would never be artists. If there was infrastructure in place to help students navigate their college experience, no one told me about it. In many ways, being left to flounder in a hostile environment made sense to me.

I was surprised by how much this sudden closure upset me. I wasn’t under the impression that a place I often called “pretend college university” while sifting through job rejections in my twenties was anything more than an obstacle I unwittingly gave myself at 17. But then I got a message from Gina about how J † had been teaching there and I saw that my friend Cammy had been too, and I thought about the sheer volume of people in this city who have been able to give the gift of their time and wisdom (because they certainly weren’t paid enough) to the students who needed it. Despite the open disdain from the director of the program, I did manage to cobble together an education I felt I could use. There were people who I felt believed in me, who taught me a great deal. Larry Loebell, who taught a two-semester film course our freshman year and actually liked that I always had shit to say after a movie. My sophomore and senior thesis teacher Steve Saylor, who treated us like we knew our own minds and were capable of producing art from them. Sebastian Agudelo, who I would follow to any literature class that fit my schedule, from whom I probably learned the most. Christian TeBordo, who is now my friend, but was once the Western Literary Masterpieces teacher who refused to engage with his students socially until we graduated (appropriate boundaries king!) and introduced us all to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, who taught me how I wanted to be a writer in the world, and that there was, in fact, a world for a person like me. The late Albert Innaurato, who would let me spend an entire class arguing with someone instead of shutting it down (I can only assume because I was correct). I had a lot of bad teachers, too, like the woman who dozed during the movies she showed in the experimental film class she taught and got mad when I derailed her lessons on Warhol’s films by having seen more of them than she had, or the Modernism teacher we called “Thomas Jefferson.” But I don’t remember their names for the most part. They weren’t the ones worth holding onto.

I made friends, too, Deb and Casey and Alejandro most importantly, because for the first time in my entire life, I felt like I could talk to anyone. I certainly didn’t like or get along with everyone, but I was on equal footing. These fucking weirdos were, to some extent, my people. Philadelphia was where I belonged.

My experience at UArts didn’t necessarily offer me community in the way that it did to people in less antagonistic programs, but it taught me that if I wanted one, I would have to build it myself. And because of some of the people I met through UArts, I believed that was possible. And I did. So many of us did. And we will continue to do so, no matter what happens.  

***

Listening: Fellow graduate of the Writing for Film and Television program, Ryan Kattner’s band Man Man have a new record out today, Carrot on Strings. I have only listened to the whole record three times so far, but that’s pretty good for something that dropped today. It’s a good one!

Ryan is another person who taught me how to be a person who makes art in a world that requires you to pay your bills. I will always be grateful to him for that. I absorbed so much from so many people just by hanging out in The Last Drop instead of going all the way home.

Reading: The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going to Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez, and Fire Exit by Morgan Talty. I’ve been a listener of Chelsea’s podcast since it started, and the memoir didn’t disappoint. I think she handled the censorship of her domestic violence story as well as could be expected. I loved Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez so I’d been really excited to read this one, and it did not disappoint!

Watching: Still rewatching Scandal.