University of the Arts closes
A canary in the coal mine for higher education?
The higher education world is reeling from the sudden closure of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts after its accreditation was yanked. This is highly unusual as struggling institutions are usually acquired by larger ones and thus don’t have to face such a public humiliation.
Why is this on our radar? It’s because the University of the Arts was completely captured by gender ideology. So much so, that its students bullied a prominent lesbian faculty member into going emeritus for, among other thought crimes, her gender-critical views.
It turns out parents don’t want to pay an obscene amount of money to an institution that enforces the group-think of a cult. It also turns out that an institution that would only welcome one kind of student, with one set of values, and reject all diversity of thought might not attract a wide pool of applicants. It also indicates that the administrators, who were no doubt hired to enforce ideology rather than operate a university, were out of their depth.
It’s a shame because the world needs art. The world needs humanities. The world needs places for young people to think and explore ideas and be challenged. They need to learn to work alongside those who think differently than themselves. That was supposed to be the University of Arts’s mission, but it abandoned that mission.
Its fate should be a wake-up call to every institute of higher learning that has lost sight of its core mission.