There isn’t a way to express how sudden the closure of The University of the Arts was. On the morning of May 31, 2024, tuition bills for the fall semester hit students’ inboxes. Many of us were already home for the summer. I was starting the process of apartment-hunting. That evening, it was announced that the school would cease operations in a week.
We didn’t even get the “privilege” of being told by our school. We had to find out through The Philadelphia Inquirer, which had noticed a published communication between UArts and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), the accrediting body that institutions in the region report to. The Inquirer’s story went live at 6:03 p.m. At 7:39, then-president Kerry Walk sent a communication to current students. “Today is a heartbreaking day,” she started. “We would have shared this news with you directly, but the Middle States Commission on Higher Education elected to withdraw UArts’ accreditation and announce before we could communicate with you.”
Evidently, this was not the case, as five days later, MSCHE released a statement clarifying that they revoked UArts’ accreditation after being notified by the school of its plans to imminently close. They further clarified that Kerry Walk and the rest of the administration had been warned of exactly when MSCHE would make these developments public. The administration was urged to notify their students, faculty, and staff beforehand, which they declined to do. Combined with the fact that the school had completely disregarded the norms and procedures for a university closure (which typically include months-long teach-out programs and off-ramps), it was another stab in the heart for everyone involved.
Programs were shattered, students going off on their own to find new communities of art. Many didn’t return to college at all—UArts’ financial aid was what had allowed them to attend in the first place. It wasn’t a large school, just over 1,100 students at the time of the closure. All the programs, small ones especially, were extremely tight-knit. They had to be: there were single-digit numbers of students per year. And now they were gone. Faculty, some of whom were alums of UArts and had been teaching for decades, were suddenly jobless. Many didn’t know if they’d receive their final paychecks or if their benefits would immediately stop.
I found my way to Bennington on my own, searching through approved teach-out partners to find somewhere with a degree comparable to the BFA in Creative Writing that I was halfway through at the time of the closure. Soon after I accepted my offer and began enrolling in classes, Bennington announced that UArts’ BFA in Dance would be coming to Vermont, albeit smaller, but still somewhat whole. It seemed like a miracle.
There were initial plans for the program to spend just a year at Bennington before returning to Philadelphia in a sort of satellite program, but more than a year after the partnership formed, it looks like the dancers are here to stay.
I sat down with Donna Faye Burchfield to reflect. Her office in the Barn looks out towards VAPA, her new hub of operations. It’s filled with books on art and writing and dance, flyers for exchange programs and performances tacked to the walls. Behind her desk, half-hidden behind other printouts, I can see a color-coded spreadsheet with the UArts logo. It’s a visualization of the recommended per-semester course load and progression for the Dance BFA. I’m familiar with a similar document that laid out the flow of my own creative writing coursework.
DFaye (as she goes by with her beloved dancers) truly thinks it was a miracle. The move was made possible with the support of individuals who wanted to help. When she initially called them, she didn’t know what she was asking for. She didn’t know what the program needed. “None of this would’ve been possible without a small group of people who said it could happen, which includes the Bennington faculty here who said they were okay with us coming,” she said.
In Philadelphia, the dance curriculum held 43 classes per day, working in 13 dance studios. They performed their final works at UPenn’s opera house and the Merriam Theater, which sat just across the street from Terra Hall, UArts’ main hub. The building, which sits just three blocks south of Philadelphia City Hall, has since been acquired by Temple University. DFaye showed me a photo of Temple executives standing together in one of the dance studio floors. Their shoes are still on, she noted with disgust.
South Broad Street, known as the Avenue of the Arts, was a haven for students. It was home. It was a utopia, nestled in the center of a city with a blossoming arts scene. There was always something to do, a concert or performance to see at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Franklin Institute, Magic Gardens, and Philadelphia Free Library were all within walking distance. It was normal to see students carrying canvases and portfolio totes down the street. Groups of dancers, fresh out of class, moved down the sidewalks in herds.
According to those still in Philadelphia, Center City is almost dead now.
There were over 200 students alone in UArts’ Dance BFA. Only 35 came to Bennington last fall. DFaye described the process of downsizing as the problem of fitting a ship in a bottle. The urban life of Philadelphia informed the “pedagogical frequency” of the program—how do you even begin to preserve that richness in a place like Bennington, Vermont? How do you stay aligned with the central thesis of the program and still pare down to fit in a smaller space, especially when so many essential components came from ethereal, “extra” additions to a regular class schedule?
Which is to say nothing of the feeling of intruding. Bennington already had a dance program, though it only grants a BA. “We came here with the clear intention of heading right back,” DFaye noted as we discussed the absurdity of the situation. “What were we thinking?” she asked. “That we were just going to try to put this school back brick by brick?” UArts vanished, and the city shifted to adjust. No one was waiting for them to return. DFaye’s home, blocks from the main UArts buildings, is on the market.
Still, the community the dance program formed persists. Faculty are still in contact with each other, as well as students who have graduated or found themselves at other programs across the country. Many students who graduated just weeks before the school’s closure have remained in Philadelphia. “They proved that they can collapse the school, but they can’t change that sort of beautiful thing that UArts did,” DFaye said, “which was to create a devotion to art-making.”
In Vermont, the program has taken on a new name: the BFA Dance Lab. Framed as an experiment, students and faculty are afforded the flexibility to be in a state of constant evolution. Bennington’s seven-week course offerings allow a continuous rotation of visiting faculty, letting students learn with a broad spectrum of working professionals, the same as they did in Philadelphia. One of the core tenets of the curriculum at UArts was the contributions of visiting faculty and artists, and the preservation of that structure helped to maintain the identity of the program. At its most basic, the BFA is, in DFaye’s words, “a way to understand study within a collective” through intense theory, practice, and movement.
As it’s settled into place, the program has seen proof of success and sustainability. They’ve accepted new students, now current freshmen and sophomores, and have received more applications for the fall 2026 term. Their numbers hold strong, around 35 students enrolled in the BFA program, as well as the healthy low-residency MFA that also made the transition to Bennington. They’re beginning to look outwards towards new opportunities.
A significant part of that growth is the effort to get students back into city life. Bennington is a beautiful place to be, creating a space for intimate, intense work. DFaye described it as “restorative,” gesturing to the sprawling blue skies and views of the mountains. Here, isolated on a campus where living and working are intertwined, there is a push to focus on practice, but it’s important to be out in the world. Our rural campus often feels like a bubble, a far cry from the setting that spawned a program which understood itself “in and through a relationship to urban life.”
The BFA program is in the process of exploring partnerships with other dance institutions, trying to give students a chance to circulate in urban environments, viewing Bennington as a home base. It’s a complex process that requires approval from many education boards and cross-institution collaboration, but DFaye believes that it’s possible and hopes that it could open the door for students outside the BFA program to enjoy greater flexibility. “If dance could get through that space,” she said, referring to the administrative roadblocks the program is facing in their effort to expand, “other students from Bennington could follow.”
The BFA Dance Lab isn’t going anywhere. It’s finding a permanent place in the Bennington ecosystem, settled after a traumatic upheaval, and looking to the future. “Dance is in and of the world,” DFaye noted, confident that the program has what it takes to survive. “We have to live up to what we need to do, now.”
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