UArts was part of my family and history. Its closure feels like a death.

To me, the sudden news on May 31 that the University of the Arts would close within the week felt like a death in the family.

I taught writing and film at UArts for 15 years. I was a student in the renowned Saturday School as a teenager and worked at the college as an artist’s model while a student at Temple. My late wife, artist Maddy Gold, was an undergraduate at the school when it was still known as the Philadelphia College of Art, and then began teaching there while she was a graduate student at the Pratt Institute.

Maddy taught at UArts for 35 years. Her father, World War II combat artist and renowned social realist painter and illustrator Albert Gold, headed the illustration department for nearly 40 years. My mother-in-law, painter Aurora Gold, met Albert as a student at the college — their love story at the school preceded Maddy’s and mine. Aurora also taught there for nearly 20 years. My brother-in-law, composer and pianist Bob Gold, got his master’s in music education from UArts.

The University of the Arts was such a part of Maddy’s and my life that our wedding rings feature a carving of that famous Hamilton Hall facade.

Our wedding rings feature a carving of that famous Hamilton Hall facade.

When we were high school sweethearts, we would steal kisses in the studios in the basement of Hamilton Hall, the smell of modeling clay and linseed oil all around us.

There was nowhere in Center City Maddy and I went where we didn’t run into one of her UArts students. One night after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at St. Mark’s Church at 16th and Locust, we walked to Rittenhouse Square. It was snowing lightly and the scene was pure Currier and Ives. As we leaned in for the first kiss of Christmas, we heard, through the muffled snowy quiet, “Ms. Gold! Maddy Gold!” One of her students ran up to us in the park, wishing her a Merry Christmas.

For so many years, UArts was the locus of our lives. We spent New Year’s Day standing on Hamilton Hall’s steps watching the Mummers Parade in our teens and college years. Faculty art shows, film festivals, student events, holiday parties, graduations — on our calendar, UArts was always present.

Because more than anything, UArts was a community, a small liberal arts college in a big city that catered to the fine and performing arts. Its students were immensely talented and eager to be part of that camaraderie and closeness one rarely associates with big-city schools.

That tight-knit, artistic community cannot be replicated elsewhere. It was distinct to UArts. Sometimes in my writing classes, we could hear music students performing. UArts had the atmosphere of a small New England college in a big city where music students could leave their classes and head to the jazz clubs on the Avenue of the Arts, or theater students could get cheap seats at the Wilma or the Merriam. UArts was a center for Philly’s independent film scene and festival circuit.

So many artists and entertainers began their careers at that school, and we all felt the light of promise emanating from it.

I loved teaching at UArts — the students, the school. I loved sharing a connection with both my wife and in-laws.

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We all knew there were issues with enrollment and funding even before the pandemic. Maddy left in 2012 and went to teach at Drexel after the school shut down the department in which she’d taught for over three decades.

Still, none of us were prepared for the abrupt announcement that it would close entirely. The subsequent days brought little clarity. The administration announced a meeting with students, faculty, and media for late Monday afternoon, but canceled it minutes before it was scheduled to begin, with only a cursory statement that it wasn’t possible to address the issues and the university simply had no option but to close.

The school’s president, Kerry Walk, resigned on Tuesday, wreaking further havoc by causing the cancellation of a bargaining session on the terms of the closure, leaving faculty and staff in limbo over payments, benefits, and severance. On Wednesday, the faculty filed lawsuits against the school.

What a mess.

And a totally avoidable one. When the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced it was closing at the end of the 2024-25 school year back in January, it provided a plan in which juniors, seniors, and Master of Fine Arts students on track to graduate in 2024 or 2025 would still be able to do so.

Why didn’t current UArts students get this level of respect? And what about incoming first years, now high schoolers from all over the country, who had chosen UArts as their college? What about them? Imagine how this news hit them — their sense of loss and betrayal. Where will they go now? Where will current students go now?

While Temple has said it is exploring a merger, Temple is a vast campus of more than 30,000 students, hardly that compact campus Maddy and I taught at where everyone knew everyone. Not the campus that angry, wounded community members have been protesting over outside Hamilton Hall since the news of the closing first hit.

I’m angry that so little care was given to that community Maddy and I were so deeply invested in for so many years. I can’t imagine how painful this would be for my wife to witness, and how devastated she would be for our friends and for the students.

The UArts community — both past and present — deserved better than last week. Most importantly, we deserve a chance to keep the doors open. We deserve, somehow, to let the legacy continue.

Victoria A. Brownworth is a local writer and reporter. She is the recipient of the 2023 Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for Journalist of the Year from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists and the 2023 Curve Foundation Award for Excellence in Lesbian Coverage.