The Art Institutes, 1921-2023
Some recollections, and further thoughts about art education from a grizzled, wounded veteran of the system.
Last Friday, the Art Institutes announced, with one week of notice, that they would be closing the remainder of their campuses. I taught at the Miami campus from 2000 to 2006 and saw from the inside how the school was being managed. While I was there, we were running one of the best fine art programs in the city, in my estimation. The talent on faculty was considerable, and I adored (and remain friends with) my immediate supervisor.
But screwy administrative forces were at work. I had been an employee of International Fine Arts College in Miami when the Education Management Corporation, better known as EDMC, gobbled up every such little art school it could get its maw around in the early 2000s. IFAC was managed by an absurd team, one member of which was finally jailed for financial impropriety. EDMC leadership was an improvement in some respects, though it brought in some hilarious characters, including one oily son of a bitch who had studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming and deployed it indiscriminately in the workplace.
The school labored to achieve university status, which mostly necessitated window dressing; for instance, perfectly capable computer animation instructors were shuttled through an in-house MFA program to satisfy a requirement that a certain percentage of program faculty must hold terminal degrees. With that accomplished the school was renamed, ridiculously, the Art Institute/Miami International University of Art & Design. A friend of mine in the Graphic Design department joked that its acronym was pronounced “aim wad.” Our department was also renamed to “Visual and Scenic Arts.” No one was entirely sure what “scenic art” was. But departments were required justify themselves, both to EDMC and the Department of Education, by professional placements, and it was thought that students employed to paint backdrops for stage and screen could be made to count toward placement numbers.
We had some great students during that time, and I’m proud that some of my own continue to make art in a serious way. But a significant and ever-increasing portion of the student body was uneducable. As I got to know employees in the admissions department, and watched some astonishing behavioral and cognitive cases matriculate through our program, I figured out the business model of the school: get any kid with a pulse on the hook for a federal student loan and milk the system dry.
That AI/MIUAD (I still can’t type it without smirking) finally foundered seems natural, though it persisted for an impressive amount of time considering that in the early 20-teens, the Department of Education, via the Department of Justice, essentially held a gun to its head and demanded the return of 11 billion ill-gotten dollars. Legal troubles and failed attempts at reorganization plagued it thereafter.
I have now survived three such schools, four if you double-count the Center for Digital Imaging Arts in Waltham, Massachusetts, which was terminated and revived as the Center for Digital Arts at the same location. That too came to grief, and I helped “teach out” the remaining students at Boston University, which it was obligated to do because CDA had worked out a complicated arrangement in which student loans were administered under the aegis of BU.
The other school was the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, which finally couldn’t provide me with enough classes to justify the commute from Boston when I still lived there. Within a couple of years NHIA was acquired by New England College in somewhat nearby Henniker, which rechristened it the Institute of Art and Design at NEC. The Manchester campus proved unsustainable, and NEC had been planning to shut it down entirely this fall when the closure was confounded by a contractual agreement to maintain one of its several former NHIA buildings, the Emma B. French Hall, for artistic purposes. So it’s hanging onto that one, and running a program of non-credit and community art classes there under the heading of Art at French, which is implementing registration out of a Shopify instance.
These schools are characterized, often pejoratively, as “for-profit.” Hostility to such programs traces to the Obama administration, but the category of programs that promise the moon while delivering outlandish student debt is sufficiently blurry that even Harvard Extension School had to shutter its celebrated A.R.T. Institute in 2017. For a Master of Liberal Arts Degree in Extension Studies, whatever that was, institute graduates were averaging $78,000 in debt. Finally the Department of Education had enough, and Harvard announced a three-year hiatus on institute admissions which is now in its sixth year.
One might notice that the common thread here is not profit per se, but the Department of Education. The peculiarities of the American federal loan system for financing college has driven up tuition costs faster than inflation for four decades and counting. This debt is the financial equivalent of nuclear waste. It is the byproduct of a wealth transfer from the taxpayers to the universities. The debt holders can’t get rid of it. The debt issuer, the DoE, has neither the means nor incentive to collect it. So instead it shuts down the worst of the contamination sites, which range from relatively legitimate operations like the A.R.T. Institute to relatively predatory institutions like AI/MIUAD.
I say relatively because it’s not clear to me that any part of this system—the for-profits, the non-profits, the certificate programs, the degree programs, you name it—is either wholly legitimate or entirely free of predation. It seems that the DoE could and should shut down every graduate program in the humanities tomorrow morning, for the same reason that it deemed necessary to take AI/MIUAD to court and read the Riot Act to Harvard: students are going into debt that can’t be justified by the resulting career prospects.
Even without DoE intervention, the market seems to be figuring out that a lot of these schools are becoming prohibitively expensive to run, the degrees may as well be printed on facial tissue, and the ensuing debt to the government is a millstone. That the Art Institutes closed is expected. That the (unaffiliated) San Francisco Art Institute closed last summer was not. SFAI was founded during the Ulysses Grant administration. Eadweard Muybridge, Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Ansel Adams, Minor White, and Robert Colescott taught there. Yet it couldn’t be sustained on contemporary premises, either economic or philosophical.1
In theory a school might forswear to work with the federal loan system and charge less money for the credentials, but in fact the aforementioned Center for Digital Imaging Arts tried precisely that. It found that it couldn’t compete with other programs offering equivalent certificates that could be bought with easy debt. That’s what motivated the reorganization and partnership with BU, which didn’t work out either.
I am now teaching out of my studio as The School of Shape and Form. Its first student was in residence for the month of July. I’m pleased with her progress, she’s pleased with her progress, and I’m regarding our first steps as a success. More steps are to come. When I’ve had too much coffee I think that I ought to found a campus on the Black Mountain College model, in which teachers and students get together to do art projects and farm turnips. Whatever happens, two things are apparent: the federal student loan system is a river of poison, and the art degree needs to disappear.
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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in.
An exhibition of my work is up at the Fuller Public Library in southern New Hampshire through September 30.
Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.
I have a friend who testifies that SFAI in the 1990s ran a terrible, exploitative fine art program and that the school finally got what it deserved. A month after SFAI produced its last graduating class, an alumna wrote a blistering essay characterizing the campaigns to save the school as “idiotic.”
When eccentric, fiercely independent Marlboro College, my alma mater, was finally shuttered four years ago after being beaten to a pulp with wokeism for the preceding decade, many of us hoped it or at least its campus, Potash Hill, an historic farm on a mountain in Southern Vermont, would re-emerge as a sort of Black Mountain College, complete with turnip farming. The arts and crafts programs are quietly coming to life. No hints of return to farming yet -- although were I eighteen again, I wouldn't turnip my nose at an intensive summer program called Eat and Dye where one grows food and vegetable dyestuffs and alternates between time in the kitchen, the kitchen garden, and the fibre studio . . . check it out, perhaps you'll have ideas. Not too far from where you're based. https://www.potashhill.org/programs/
But Franklin, one way or another, the taxpayers are there to be exploited and abused, meaning their money is there to be misused or wasted at will, so what difference does it make how that's done? It's going to happen anyway. Anything primarily run by politicians and bureaucrats just works that way.