The Last Days of the Art Degree

PAFA shuts down its Bachelors and Masters programs. SAIC struggles with antisemitism. Is the college model for art training falling apart?

PAFA. (source)

Two years ago, WHYY ran a story with the headline “PAFA names its first Black president for a time of significant transition.” In contrast to Crystal Williams, a lifelong diversity bureaucrat with no substantive connection to visual art or design who was installed as president of RISD last year, there was every reason to think that Eric Pryor was superlatively qualified to run the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. He had come from the presidency of the Harlem School of the Arts and holds an MFA in Painting from nearby Temple University. Said Anne E. McCollum, who the previous summer had been named the first woman to chair the board of PAFA:

“At this point in our collective history, I think we’re all transitioning. We are getting to this stage of being post-pandemic that has created a whole new world,” she said. “[Pryor is] a transformational leader. That could be the artist in him not willing to just accept the status quo. He wants to dive deeper, find out how we should be proceeding and make that happen.”

Last week, a headline at WHYY read “Citing rising costs and dwindling enrollment, PAFA cuts degree programs.”

PAFA’s leadership and the Board of Trustees determined it was “no longer strategically or financially in the best long-term interests” to continue offering degrees, according to a letter from President Eric Pryor.… Going forward, PAFA said it will put a “renewed focus” on expanding its certificate programs and leasing out unused space.

In September I wrote Woke Programming as Terminal Rally, which proposed that the institutional demonstrations of what is cynically called “diversity” (they mainly consist of promoting black bureaucrats and showcasing black artists with identical progressive ideological premises, though other conformists benefit as well) were in fact the final acts of organizations that have no idea how to continue in their current forms. Again, while I’m no expert on the man, Eric Pryor seems as suited as anyone for his position, which is not something that one can say in all such cases. That is beside the point. Even if he was selected in part for the moral gratification of Anne “Our Collective History” McCollum, cratering enrollment and exploding costs are colorblind.

A new Future of PAFA page asserts that “Our renewed focus on expanding our certificate programs and continuing education opportunities, leasing out unused space to new partners, and nurturing the support of our benefactors and patrons, will put us on the path to financial sustainability.” “Unused space” refers to that within the eleven-story Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, purchased in the flush pre-crash 2000s for the purpose of expanding the school beyond the confines of its original building next door (pictured above).

The nearly 220-year-old academy—it was established during the Jefferson administration—has long incorporated certificate curricula, one version of which was devised by Thomas Eakins. A three- to four-year certificate program used to be a staple of the institution until it was eliminated in 2017. You could look at the dispensing of the degree tracks and a revival of the comprehensive certification as a return to form. But a PAFA insider who spoke to me on condition of anonymity doubts that the leadership will make good on the stated intentions. “I'm skeptical that they'll actually bring it back as professed,” he says. “PAFA was always ashamed of what it was. It seemed desperately to want to be important, with-it, and cutting-edge. But it already was important. It was always on the cusp of becoming as great as people thought it could be, but it managed to become worse and worse.”

The school has shed more than half of its enrollment since 2019. It is currently losing $7,000 per annum on each of its remaining 126 students.

---

Ten days after the vile atrocities that Hamas committed against Israeli civilians on October 7, a transgender professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago named Mika Tosca posted on Instagram to say, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very bad people. Irredeemable excrement…. After the past week, if your eyes aren’t open to the crimes against humanity that Israel is committing and has committed for decades, and will continue to commit, then I suggest you open them. It’s disgusting and grotesque. May they all rot in hell.” Tosca later removed the post and apologized, saying, “I allowed my reaction to the violence in Israel and Palestine to take an inappropriate and offensive form, and I am taking proactive steps to learn how I can do better and be better.” Her contrition didn’t last long. When she announced in December that she would not be working at the school as of 2024, she ended her statement with “PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.”

In the meantime, an Israeli and Jewish student at SAIC whose full name is being withheld had become the target of so much harassment that she is now suing the school for alleged Title IX violations.¹ SAIC itself previously found that she had been unfairly rejected from its art therapy program, noting that the evaluation process “did not follow SAIC policy or expectations” and “fell far short of [the school’s] standards.” Once enrolled, the school subjected her to numerous indignities, culminating in this:

This harassment reached a new level when a professor in the Art Therapy and Counseling program announced a revision to the final assignment for the “Materials and Media in Art Therapy” course. The new assignment required Shiran and her classmates to respond to a collection of images allegedly drawn by Palestinian children (though this fact is unverified and disputed) that depicted Israeli soldiers engaged in brutal violence. It also required the students to answer a second prompt about child sexual assault that involved artwork using Hebrew-language text bubbles (thereby suggesting the sex offenders were Israeli subjects). The new final assignment gratuitously incorporated inflammatory content uniquely targeted at Shiran in apparent retaliation for previous complaints she raised about persistent and severe antisemitism.

The teacher retracted the assignment when SAIC found out that Shiran intended to file a restraining order in federal court, but harassment continued, including “changes to the course’s grading and rubric that would uniquely harm Shiran’s grade.”

As should be obvious after October 7, this too is woke programming. I have been pointing out for years that race hatred is the inexorable outcome of designating something as superficial as skin color as the bedrock of political reality. They’re acting like Nazis at SAIC for a reason.

Is SAIC in a terminal rally? There is no news to that effect. When Inside Higher Ed reported in 2019 on an Art School Shakeout, it noted:

The art school market is bifurcating based on institution size. Although enrollment remains strong across a core group of institutions, those with more than 500 students are much more likely to see their fortunes rise than are those with smaller enrollments, observers say. Some of the best known larger institutions, like the Rhode Island School of Design and California Institute of the Arts, are considered to be doing quite well, even though they are not huge, with reported enrollments of about 2,500 and 1,500, respectively.

SAIC is in that range as well. But enrollment numbers aren’t everything. In certain respects SAIC resembles PAFA more than it does RISD.

The table indicates that at SAIC you pay RISD prices to surround yourself with PAFA academic ambition. I include the row about women because, as Heather Mac Donald put it, “Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood.”² “Unsafety,” again, is soi-disant. The rhetoric in practice walls off the possibility of intellectual or creative discomfort. The aforementioned retaliatory assignment directed at Shiran was prompted by her prior complaint that a professor “had previously granted a Muslim student permission to discontinue collaboration with Shiran on an assigned joint presentation solely because Shiran ‘denies the genocide so clearly taking place.’” While I know of no such Jew-hatred at PAFA, my insider told me that its administration “willingly stopped offering Materials & Techniques classes, the springboard for an art education, because the students weren’t interested in learning something they didn’t already know.”³

A school would rather be choosy, but it’s a luxury. Acceptance rates indicate levels of financial desperation. As they go up, graduation rates trend conversely because the schools are admitting students of decreasing competitiveness. That harms the reputation of the school, making applicants even less numerous and competitive, and exacerbating the cycle. This phenomenon tanked the Art Institutes—admission rates were nearly 1, graduation rates were prone, and the administration finally saw no path to viability. The venerable San Francisco Art Institute, prior to its closure in 2022 after 151 years of operation, purportedly had an acceptance rate of 95%. It would be unsurprising if SAIC, established 1866, met the same fate, particularly after national publicity about a fall term that recalls a semester at the University of Heidelberg circa 1933.

---

In 2009, James Elkins edited a book titled Artists With PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art. His premise was that by 2012 there would be 127 such programs and it behooved the field to give the supposedly inevitable some thought beforehand. I said at the time that the degree was a patently bad idea and something was suspicious about Elkins’s math.

The PhD in studio art caught on a little, mostly in Europe, where they take titles seriously and you will put Frau Doktor Doktor in front of your name at any opportunity if you’ve earned the right to do so. Here in America, not only were there not 127 studio art PhD programs by 2012, there may in fact be no more than two presently, one at UC San Diego, and another nonresident program based in Portland, Maine called the IDSVA.

The trend went in the other direction, toward fewer and lesser credentials and doubt about academia in general. Harvard is a synecdoche for higher education, and they who pilot Harvard’s reputation just steered it into the side of a cliff. PAFA’s MFA-holding president has concluded that his school ought no longer grant such degrees, or even the BFAs that lead to them. Winning the privilege to offer baccalaureate and graduate degrees requires compliance with an immense regulatory and accreditation regime. Given the effort that went into the establishment of studio art programs in the universities in the first place, PAFA’s is an extraordinary concession.

Offering a certificate, in comparison, requires nearly nothing. My own School of Shape and Form could offer a certificate. You will only know whether it’s as worthy as PAFA’s if you look at the entailed coursework and the fruits of the labor.

I stay out of the kind of trouble that Elkins got himself into in 2009 by not extrapolating too much about the future based on a couple of notable examples. One should never underestimate the power of inertia to stop progress, particularly in a system as sclerotic as academia. But PAFA’s BFA and MFA were such institutional burdens that jettisoning them puts the school in the black by 2028, according to the board. If PAFA rights their ship, other schools may be similarly tempted as the economic environment worsens, which is expected. Higher education is shrinking but postsecondary education is growing.⁴ That sounds contradictory but the latter category would include PAFA’s certificate, and similar programs that don’t result in a Bachelors or Masters. PAFA’s gamble seems prescient, and will look even more so if the situation at schools like SAIC are as bad as they appear and succumb to what probably are inevitable: economic contraction, declines in both student population and student quality, and increasing impatience with quarter-million-dollar art degrees.

Everyone who stopped to ponder it for a moment knows that studio art had to twist itself into grotesque forms in order to fit the academic mold. Leaving aside the important question of whether the revived PAFA certificate will be an attractive academic product, one gets the sense that PAFA has liberated itself from a collegiate monoculture that is prone to diseases like the one we’re seeing at SAIC. The academy can finally stop trying to be something that it is not. One also suspects that an art training ecosystem in which certifications were available through a wide variety programs would be far healthier than the current arrangement. Let a thousand certificates bloom.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

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.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard, to be published by Allworth Press on January 23, in a mere eight days. More information is available at the site for the book.

1. Neither this nor the Tosca story was ever covered at Hyperallergic, which is striking, given how they would have undoubtedly responded if the targets of abuse were any minority besides Jews. It is worth noting for the sake of evaluating Hyperallergic’s journalism that SAIC is a regular Hyperallergic advertiser.

2. Obviously (or maybe not) the percentages tell you nothing about any individual student. PAFA regularly produces crackerjack artists.

3. Whether Mika Tosca counted towards the women at SAIC who were using their academic power to enforce the boundaries of allowable opinion, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

4. See page 36 of this PDF.