More on the Closure of UofA

There's a lot to unpack here.

We’re still thinking of the closure of the University of the Arts, a once respected institution that charged $78,000 a year for students to be trained to never question its cultish ideology rather than teaching them how to be artists and artisans in the twenty-first century.

And if the public’s distain and/or indifference to the mass marketing of AI has taught us anything, there is a market for human creations when it comes to art and design.

Here’s some food for thought.

1. Philadelphia is not a wealthy city, though it has pockets of wealth. The average household income is $57, 537. It has a large percentage of working-class and working poor people. We’d argue that training young people from those populations to create things - arts, crafts, design - that can’t be outsourced or mass manufactured would be a good idea. The city’s Mural Arts Project has been a smashing success. However, the exorbitant tuition coupled with the mandatory enforcement of crackpot luxury beliefs like gender ideology disconnected UofA from its own community.

2. Anecdotally, many young women, even creative ones, are souring on gender ideology. Those who don’t want to be a Trumpy Trad Wife or a Nonbinary Poly Kinkster feel isolated, unsupported and like they must stay silent. This population of young women would not feel comfortable at the UofA as they would be expected to not only shower in the company of men, but affirm those men’s gender identity in multiple creepy ways.

3. There was a time when becoming an artist offered independence and a way up the social ladder for talented young men. (Sorry ladies, you weren’t invited.) Many of the most famous artists in history came from humble backgrounds. When high-tuition art schools replaced apprentice programs, being an artist became a luxury profession.

4. The incompetence of the University of Arts’s administration appears breathtaking and extreme. Apparently, the school did not file paperwork requested by Middle States, their accreditation body. The president has resigned, the town hall meeting for students and parents has been canceled and chaos is ensuing. The is also speculation among alumni that financial shenanigans will be uncovered. One alum we know thinks it will be similar to Red Lobster, a seafood chain owned by a seafood distributor, introducing an endless shrimp deal in anticipation of an inevitable bankruptcy. Cults and corruption go hand in hand, after all, and if we were in charge we’d be looking into any connections between trustees and administrators at UofA and local real estate developers. The campus is prime real estate.

5. Remember that there are hundreds of people who work at the university who will be out of work now. This includes faculty who tried to stand up for academic freedom and staff who had nothing to do with such debates. Students will have to scramble to find places to finish their degrees, and the buildings will, for now, sit empty. This is what happens when you hire administrators to enforce ideology and not operate the institution, and it’s bad for the city.

6. We have no data to support this, but we suspect that belief in gender ideology has little or no relation to or correlation with artistic talent.