The University of the Arts closed last June – giving faculty just a week to pack up their belongings and make other arrangements.
UArts filed for bankruptcy in September after a merger plan between UArts and Temple University failed. Since then, the school and its assets have been up for auction to repay creditors.
Three buildings were sold last month in auctions — The Philadelphia Art Alliance building, The Art Bank building and Terra Hall. The 60,000 items in the UArts’ Greenfield Library collection was recently sold to the Forman Arts Institute – a Philadelphia-based foundation. The contents will be relocated to Kensington, where the FAI is renovating a series of buildings to turn into an arts campus. There are currently bids on Anderson Hall, Hamilton Hall, Furness Hall and Spurce Hall that need to be approved by a bankruptcy court judge. Two other buildings — Gershman Hall and Juniper Hall — still don’t have bidders.
While the campus is being disassembled, the former staff and students continue to find their ways in the world, too. There are many stories to tell. In the first piece in a series, Billy Penn spoke with various deans and program directors earlier this month about their transition into new careers, creative pursuits or part-time gigs following the school’s closure.
For this article, we reached out to a variety of staff members – including adjunct staff, librarians and union members – to tell us about their transition experience.
So – where are these staff members now?
Charis Duke
WAS Former UArts Music Theater Coach and Accompanist
NOW Side gigs, full-time job hunting
Charis Duke was elated when she began her career at UArts in 2016. She felt the role was an irreplaceable opportunity.
“It’s the only job I’ve ever had that used my entire skillset,” she said. “Us musicians and artists, too, we get used to kind of sectioning off our life – over here I teach, and over here I do my art, and over here maybe I perform or something. But at UArts, I was able to do it all.”
Duke started as an accompanist for the music theater performing classes, and her role grew over time.
“I had the sophomore class, and I would play for their classes where they were performing in class, and then each week, they had a private coaching [session] with me,” she said. “Every one of those sophomores would come to me for private coaching, where I would help them learn their music and interpret their music correctly, and also apply their acting skills to their music.”
Duke enjoyed using all talents — she was able to use her composition skills to help students gain a “deeper understanding and knowledge” of music and taught a piano lab for music teacher majors. There was a lot of teaching, she said, and they also took time to celebrate and enjoy.
“Every winter semester or spring semester, I would have them compose a song,” she said. “We would have a little concert day where they would perform their own 16-bar pop songs or whatever. It was just really fun.”
Duke said hearing about the UArts closure felt like a moment of cultural significance.
“Well, it was Friday night, just after 6 p.m.,” she said. “We all talk about it. It’s like the generation before is considered — they know where they were when [President John F.] Kennedy died. We all know where we were and what we were doing when UArts died.”
She said a colleague texted her about the news, and that students read it online in an article from the Inquirer.
“It was the most unsympathetic, just terrible business,” she said. “Like, this is not how you treat people ever, right? But I just sat on my bed and cried for hours because I was losing a job.”
She and colleagues from her program were left without guidance or prospects after this announcement, she said.
“There were four of us, coaches – coach accompanists – in the music theater program, there were four of us,” she said. “And we’re all scrambling a little bit, simply because there’s no other university in the area that has that position for their music theater students. And so we’re looking at relocating, which some of us aren’t in a position to do, or just finding other things to do.”
Duke has applied for several other positions, but said the job market is difficult right now. In the meantime, she has been playing for a voice class at Temple University for one hour a week. It offers a way to stay connected, she said.
“I’m doing it for the students,” she said. “Because we had 41 theater students go there, music theater students, and I’m playing mostly for them. So it was a way for me to help them transition and stay in touch.”
Because of this job, she is unable to apply for unemployment — which is frustrating, as it doesn’t pay well and is only once per week.
Beyond her Temple role, she is also pursuing various opportunities on the side – including music directing a show for a private high school in New Jersey and conducting and playing for several shows in Philly. However, she said these opportunities come with downsides.
“I’m grateful for the gigging work,” she said. “But of course, gigging work is no benefits, right? They don’t take out your taxes, so I have to pay all the Social Security tax and everything, and it’s all at night, so it’s late. I really like having a day job.”
She said she is fortunate to have the financial support of her husband’s income. However, she said, she is frustrated with not having found full-time employment and feels “in limbo.”
Leaning on former colleagues and friends has been important during this time, she said.
“We talk about how it feels like a death,” she said. “We’re all in mourning. It really feels like something important to us died, and that’s one of the reasons it’s taking so long to reorganize or pull out of it or find something new, because we all have to go through this morning process.”
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Laura Grutzeck
WAS Special, Archival & Digital Collections Librarian at UArts
NOW Director of Digital Services, Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Laura Grutzeck said her journey as a librarian began during her time at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.
“I was a work-study student in the library the whole time, and so when I graduated, I wasn’t sure what to do for a living and I ended up getting a library degree,” she said.
She was at UArts for a little over 20 years. While her title and responsibilities changed over time, she was in charge of archives and special collections.
“So, I helped students and faculty that were using any of those collections and also with kind of maintaining the archives and trying to increase access to them,” she said.
Grutzeck said her initial reaction to the UArts news was disbelief.
“I saw some news clip, not the original Inquirer story, but something referring to that, and I said, ‘Oh, what is this, fake news? This is why it’s so important to check your sources,” she said. “Then I found out shortly after I got an email from the director of the library, who said it was true.”
It quickly sunk in that there was only one week to gather belongings before she would be leaving the university, she said. It was a tough transition for everyone – especially students.
“The last time I saw a lot of the [students], their parents were coming to pick them up, and they were crying and had all their things in boxes and I just didn’t know if I’d ever see any of them again or what would happen to any of them,” she said.
She said she is relieved to see many students found other schools and are working toward graduation.
As for her own path, Grutzeck said she is grateful she was able to find another position soon after the school’s closure.
“I think the week after we closed or maybe during that week, I was sort of hysterically looking online for jobs and saw that the Historical Society was actually looking for somebody with my qualifications and I applied,” she said. “And they were very kind and hired me pretty quickly after.”
She emphasized she is still very sad about the situation and that the closure is not something people get over right away. And she has a specific concerns for the records and history of the school.
“The archives, all the collections – the library collections – I think everything owned by the university has been sold to pay the bankruptcy,” she said. “But, the archives are still in the buildings and are supposed to come to the Historical Society, which would be great, but they still haven’t been legally signed over. And so that’s like one more thing that we’re uncertain about and I hope the 150 years’ worth of history doesn’t end up getting thrown out by whoever buys the building.”
Rick Rein
WAS Adjunct Professor – Music Business, Entrepreneurship & Technology Program at UArts
NOW Audio-Visual and Events Technician at Moore College of Art and Design
Rick Rein was a student at UArts himself. He came to Philly in 2010 to go to UArts as a trumpet major.
“[I] graduated from there, I was working around town as a musician, and got into sound engineering and started working concert venues, like Underground Arts,” he said.
He began at UArts in 2021 as an adjunct professor, teaching classes revolving around sound engineering. Several years into his time at UArts, Rein got more involved with the UArts staff union.
“I was a member already, but they needed someone to come on and help bring people on board and all that good stuff,” he said. “So I joined and ended up becoming part of the table team. So I was in the meetings negotiating a new contract, which was a long and fraught experience.”
Despite the extended timeline, Rein said he felt very encouraged when contract negotiations wrapped up.
“We had been told so many times in the negotiation process, ‘The school has actually got some financial issues and enrollment and yada yada,’ ” he said. “But the mood was always that, we’re gonna find a compromise, even though it took way longer than it should have to get the contract done. The mood was always, we’re gonna find a solution together. We’re gonna find a compromise. We’re gonna keep going.”
Rein said he was walking to get food on the Friday night when he heard news that UArts was closing. While he didn’t question the school’s financial troubles, he felt “blindsided” by the sudden nature of the announcement.
“Even knowing that the school had been on kind of shaky ground, no one expected it to happen so suddenly like that,” he said. “I think if they had told us a year before that, ‘Hey, this is going to be the last year, the numbers just aren’t there, we can’t keep it open,’ there would have been a conversation,” he said. “There would have been pushback on that, but I think it would have been a lot easier to swallow, and I think no one would have questioned the fact that the numbers weren’t great.”
He emphasized the following week was “powerful” on campus.
“Everybody, the whole community, came together in a visceral way,” he said. “And there were concerts happening on the steps of Hamilton Hall, which was really cool to see. Big rallies, meetings with colleagues and students in the hallways, just kind of talking about ‘what’s going on?’ and ‘what are we going to do?’ and ‘how’s this going to play out?’ ”
Rein said he felt lucky to be a part-time employee once the news broke. He said he was able to rely on other side gigs to move forward, and was eventually offered a position as an Audio-Visual and Events Technician at Moore College of Art and Design.
“When that news broke, I kind of put the word out to the place, the people that I normally work with and said, ‘Hey, I have a lot of time on my hands now,’ ” he said. “I’ve said yes to everything that came my way for a couple of months. So I got really busy freelancing over the summer, did some plays and a lot of concerts and a lot of random stuff.”
He said a lot of faculty at UArts already had outside side gigs, work surrounding what they were teaching, and other income sources. However, he still saw a lot of his colleagues struggling – especially students.
“If you look outside of the city, you start to find there are other schools out there, certainly that are similar, but Philly is just a unique ecosystem for being an artist,” he said.
He said UArts provided a “unique combination” of different creative disciplines and provided a good foundation for students, along with the relative affordability of Philadelphia.
While Rein is grateful for the timeline of his transition, he said he is still saddened by the loss of UArts to the community, and for the various educators and artists employed by the school.
“It’s a big loss for the Philadelphia creative community,” he said. “The people who were the pillars of that place, who were working there, teaching like full-time for decades, are excellent at their craft and were excellent educators.”
Elisa Seeherman
WAS Director of Career Services at UArts
NOW Associate Director of Career Services at Penn State Great Valley campus
Elisa Seeherman has a strong background working in various career counseling roles. She received her Master’s in Counseling from Villanova University and worked at other universities in the Philly area. In 1998, she arrived at UArts.
“The woman who had been [the director of career services] at University of the Arts sent out an email to all of her colleagues saying, ‘Hey, I’m retiring, if anyone knows anyone who might be interested,’ ” she said. “And I decided that it was time to look for something new.”
Seeherman did not come from an arts background, and working with students at UArts had a “learning curve.” Over time, she learned to enjoy it.
“I’ve always joked that I sing off key,” she said. “I used to get dizzy playing the flute when I was a kid, and I draw stick figures. So a lot of what I brought to the table there is really the knowledge of and the ability to support any student with their career path, with exploring their options, making sure that they have the skillset and the toolkit to be successful and the understanding of how to do self-promotion.”
She spent 26 years in her role, forming strong bonds to many students.
“A lot of the really meaningful conversations happened in one-on-one appointments with the students and alumni, because they’re all unique, and even two students in the same major have different aspirations and goals,” she said.
Seeherman said that although she offered advice and guidance, it was the students who put in the hard work to navigate career placements.
The closure of UArts came to her as a shock – especially because of the nature of her role.
“I was in the car with my family on the way to Ocean City, New Jersey to visit some friends who had invited us for the weekend,” she said. “And my mother called me and she said, ‘You’re not going to believe this. There’s an article in the Inquirer and it says, ‘UArts is closing in a week.’ ”
It took a few hours after that before the news was confirmed and communicated by the university. Seeherman still went on vacation that weekend, then returned to what she described as “chaos” at UArts the next week.
“There was no communication on what we were supposed to be doing with data and archives and physical files and equipment and office supplies,” she said. “And we were still working. Like, I had 45 students who were scheduled to do internships for the summer and were registered to get credit for those internships.”
Seeherman said she was dismissed and expected to leave UArts by June 7 – one week after the university’s closure was announced. During this time, she worked closely with the registrar and other students intending to do internships in her office to find alternate placements at other universities and ensuring students were on track.
She said in the aftermath of this, she tried to process her emotions.
“It’s like a death,” she said. “It was like the stages of grief – the shock, the disbelief, the denial, the anger – it was all there. And it comes and goes, you don’t know which emotions are going to surface at what time.”
Seeherman filed for unemployment right away. She began networking with professionals in her field and explored other options; however, she explained she also wanted to prioritize self-care and finding a job opportunity that would be the right fit.
“Being the person at UArts who was the career expert, there’s an extra dimension to my now being laid off and unemployed and having to practice what I preach,” she said.
During her job search, she noticed some former colleagues finding new positions and others still searching.
“When an entire institution closes and there were too many staff and faculty put out in the market, in a tight and competitive job market, and even with a lot of colleges and universities in the Philly region, it’s a tight market, there’s not always opportunities,” she said.
Seeherman said her continued involvement and connections with UArts colleagues, alumni and former students gave her motivation during this time. She began posting LinkedIn resources for former coworkers – including job opportunities, application tips and other resources.
She recently started in a new role.
“I am the sole person at Penn State Great Valley, doing career services for their students,” she said. “My title is Associate Director of Career Services.”
Seeherman said she has struggled with moving on from UArts. She explained an experience heading into work on her first day that made her new role feel more validating.
“UArts had a tradition of a vocal performance at commencement every year, where the senior voice majors would sing, ‘With a Little Help From My Friends,’ the Joe Cocker version,” she said. “And that song came on on the radio as I was pulling into the parking lot at Penn State, and I got really emotional and I saw it as a sign, because I did get by with help from my friends, who are my community.”
She is grateful for the robust network at the school that helped her in getting by, and said that UArts will always be a piece of her journey.
This article is part of a continuing series on how the closure of the University of the Arts affected employees, staff and faculty.
