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A Philadelphia arts school gave 7 days' notice it was closing. Now its students and faculty want answers.
Students and staff members from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia are scrambling to figure out their next steps after the school’s abrupt closure last week and are calling on the university to answer questions about why it shut down so quickly.
The university announced it would be shutting its doors in a statement on May 31, after news had already begun to leak about an hour and a half earlier, saying in part that it “has been in a fragile financial state, with many years of declining enrollments, declining revenues, and increasing expenses.”
The nearly 150-year-old university, a longtime home for artists of all kinds, shut down a week later on June 7, leaving its more than 1,000 students and hundreds of faculty and staff confused and anxious.
Among them is Owen Spaloss, who walked across the stage at the university’s graduation in May, but still needs to complete a three-credit summer internship to receive his degree in creative writing. The unexpected shutdown has put his once imminent degree completion at least temporarily out of reach.
“A lot of these universities don’t have a creative writing major, and even if they do, there’s no guarantee that they would accept all of my credits or that they would accept scholarships,” Spaloss said.
“The only reason I can afford to go to the University of the Arts is because of the donors and the scholarships that I’ve gotten. I couldn’t financially afford this on my own.”
News of the University of the Arts’ closure has led to protests on campus by students and staffers alike who question why the university didn’t alert its community sooner or better prepare for its financial failure. The university did not respond to requests for comment.
Krista Apple, who has worked at the university for more than 10 years and was serving as the director of the bachelor of fine arts in acting program, said she didn’t initially believe the school was closing after learning about it first in a Philadelphia Inquirer article.
“I thought it was a joke, or I thought the Inquirer had gotten something wrong. I thought maybe somebody was pranking me,” Apple said.
Students and staff said the Inquirer article made the rounds on social media, group texts and emails before the university released a statement. Some community members said they first heard about the closure on TikTok.
“It continues to be disorienting and heartbreaking. This is a massive loss of community for all of us who taught and worked together for many years. It’s also a massive loss for the city of Philadelphia,” Apple said. “Our students really were one of a kind, both in terms of the cohort of humans that they were, but also individually.”
The university said in the statement announcing its closure that it had “worked hard this year alongside many of you to take steps that would secure the University’s sustainability. The progress we made together has been impressive.”
“Unfortunately, however, we could not overcome the ultimate challenge we faced: with a cash position that has steadily weakened, we could not cover significant, unanticipated expenses. The situation came to light very suddenly. Despite swift action, we were unable to bridge the necessary gaps.”
The university’s accreditation was withdrawn June 1, three days after the school notified its accrediting body that it would close, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education said in a news release on May 31.
The Philadelphia City Council voted June 6 to hold hearings to examine the university’s sudden closure and its impact on the city’s higher education system and the school’s current students and staff.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry’s office confirmed to NBC News that it is “reviewing the circumstances of the closure and any transfer or loss of assets.”
DJay Jean, a rising sophomore who was studying vocal performance at the University of the Arts, said attending college has been a personal milestone.
“I’m a first-generation American, let alone I’m a first-generation student. My dad did not finish high school. My mom didn’t go to college,” Jean said.
“I grew up with just my father and it wasn’t a great upbringing. I eventually ended up in foster care at 16,” Jean said. “College never felt like an option to me financially.”
Jean was able to attend the university after receiving several scholarships, taking out loans and working part-time jobs. But now, they are unsure of what’s next and said they feel trapped after signing an apartment lease in Philadelphia.
“I spent so much money to go to this school, and I put so much trust in the faculty and the board. It’s an investment,” Jean said.
“You would think that after putting so much more money into something when it’s going away, the people responsible would want to inform you, and they’d want to let you know, ‘Here’s what’s going on.’ But they weren’t interested in that. And it made me feel very disrespected and made me feel like I wasted my money,” they added.
The university is facing criticism from students and staff about what they say has been a lack of communication and transparency from the administration.
Several students sent videos to NBC News showing demonstrations, performances and marches at the school.
They also said community members had been locked out of Hamilton Hall, one of the main buildings on campus, at one point during the demonstrations.
“They shut off the power to Hamilton Hall. … They didn’t want us to demonstrate. They closed their bathrooms to us and they shut off the power,” Jean said.
The university scheduled a virtual town hall on June 3 with a cap of 500 attendees, but it was canceled minutes before it was scheduled to start, according to several students. The university’s president, Kerry Walk, resigned the next day.
On the university’s official last day, June 7, campus community members who had been protesting and camping out in front of Hamilton Hall organized a “Last Jam” event to show their frustration and process the shocking news together.
Apple said staff were also called into a virtual meeting on the school’s final day.
“We were effectively fired en masse via Zoom by a member of the management team that had been hired, someone we had never met before,” she said.
“Based on the brief information they shared, I have reason to believe that I will receive at least my next paycheck, which is due at the end of June. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath,” Apple said.
Apple said she wants those who had been charged with making decisions about the university’s fate to face consequences for its closure.
“I would like to see some accountability, not just from the most recent administration, but also from the board of directors and also from the previous administration too, that was working really closely with this budget,” Apple said. “Because I just keep wondering at what point was it clear that this university’s finances were not salient, and I can’t fathom the notion that it was just two weeks ago, on May 29, that someone looked at our books and went, ‘Oh, no, we can’t keep going.’”
The board’s chair did not respond to a request for comment.
This week, the university announced a call center and support email for the campus community.
Students have also received an email confirming that any payments made for the summer or fall semesters will be refunded. Meanwhile, a Temple spokesperson said the university is exploring a potential merger with the school.
“The amount of support and care from our education and arts community across the country is one of the things that gives me hope. And it just proves to me that artists are incredibly resilient. And no matter how much funding we don’t have, we are not going away,” Apple said.
Originally founded in 1876, the University of the Arts is just the latest arts institution to shut down in Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts closed its doors in January, with some of its students enrolling in the University of the Arts.
Last year, at least 14 colleges and universities shut down or merged according to Inside Higher Ed, amid lower college enrollment rates and the pressure of inflation.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, college enrollment fell from about 18 million in 2010 to about 15.8 million in 2023.
Despite the chaos and confusion, several students have found solace with those in the extended arts community.
“If nothing else, we are showing that we are committed to each other in our community. We’re showing that we are not willing to just go quietly into the night. We are going to stand strong and show what we stand for, because as artists it’s already hard enough to make it in the world,” Spaloss said.
“Our schools are closing down, but that doesn’t mean our community shuts down, too,” Jean added.
A massive 826,780-square-foot warehouse sits illuminated Feb. 12, 2026, in the El Paso suburb of Socorro, Texas, that was recently purchased by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for $122.8 million.
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Morgan Lee/AP
A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume carrying out speedy deportations of undocumented migrants throughout the United States, not just near the border.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a lower court decision that temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s expanded use of expedited removal. The ruling was a big victory for the Republican administration, which views the expansion of so-called expedited removal as a key tool for carrying out its mass deportation policy.
Expedited removal — quick deportation without a chance to appear before a judge — has previously been applied to migrants arriving by sea or caught at or near the border shortly after crossing.
In January, Trump expanded its use to undocumented migrants all over the United States. Immigration agents began whisking migrants away from courthouses where they had gone for immigration proceedings and then removing them from the country within days.
“The Trump administration’s push for fast-track deportations will subject people to an unfair and error-prone system,” Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.
Balakrishnan represented plaintiffs in arguments before the appellate panel and said its ruling “undermines the fundamental principle that people receive due process when the government seeks to deport them.”
DC Circuit Judge Justin R. Walker, one of the judges on the panel, said the plaintiffs had not shown the expanded use of expedited removal violated due process rights. Immigrants received notice of removal proceedings and were given a chance to respond, he wrote in his opinion.
Walker and the second judge in the majority, Neomi Rao, were appointed by Trump. The third judge on the panel was appointed by President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
Walker said there was no requirement that the administration inform immigrants that they can avoid expedited removal if they can show they have been in the United States for more than two years.
“The constitutional requirement is notice of the action the government is taking and the grounds for it, plus an opportunity to respond,” he wrote, adding that the plaintiffs’ “contrary reasoning would require immigration officers to provide what amounts to legal advice.”
Walker and Rao vacated an order by U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb that put the expanded use of expedited removal on hold. Cobb, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, a Democrat, ruled in August that the administration had not developed procedures to ensure migrants were not wrongly deported under the expedited process.
The plaintiffs had put forward “substantial evidence” that the expedited removal process, on the contrary, carried a high risk of error when applied more broadly, Cobb said. The ruling cited examples of people who had lived in the U.S. for far longer than two years but were still ordered to be removed in expedited proceedings.
In his opinion, Walker acknowledged evidence of such errors, but said they resulted from “individual officers’ failure to follow the law — not defects in the written directives under review or the procedures they incorporate.”
The Trump administration has argued that its expansion of expedited removal includes protections to prevent arbitrary removal. In a court filing in October, Justice Department attorneys said Cobb’s ruling was an “egregious error” that was depriving the administration of an “essential tool to combat the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration over the past few years” and efficiently deport potentially millions of people.
Just over 50 career and political intelligence staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have been removed from their roles since Bill Pulte became the agency’s acting director, Friday.
Six career and political intelligence staff were terminated and 45 were sent back to their home agencies, according to three sources familiar with the personnel moves.
Pulte has been asking deputies and other directors for suggestions about cuts. Some of the ODNI deputies pushed for more cuts, but Pulte said that the 51 was enough for now, one of the sources said.
One source characterized the cuts as thoughtful and methodical. No staffers have been removed from the counterterrorism group.
No further firings are planned for now, two of the sources said.
The cuts follow hundreds of staff reductions last year by former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who stepped down last week. Last year’s planned downsizing sought to bring the office’s headcount from 2,000 to around 1,300.
President Trump has pushed for further cuts, directing Pulte to “execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office” in a Truth Social post earlier this month.
The office is charged with overseeing the country’s intelligence agencies and helping them coordinate with each other. It was created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which investigators widely believe was preceded by a failure of intelligence agencies to share information.
Since then, Gabbard and some lawmakers have argued the ODNI has become bloated and has added more bureaucracy to the intelligence community — worsening a problem it was created in part to resolve.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said earlier this month the office has “grown far beyond its original mandate.” Many of the office’s staff hail from other intelligence agencies but have been detailed to ODNI, and Cotton argued large numbers of them should be returned to their “home agencies.”
Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence panels, warned Pulte against making large-scale staff cuts, calling it an inappropriate course of action for an acting official without national security experience.
“While there is room to consider responsible reductions to ODNI’s workforce, any large cuts would follow on a substantial downsizing that has already occurred in 2025 and risk jeopardizing the mission of an organization explicitly created after 9/11 to prevent any future such terrorist attack,” the two Democrats wrote in a joint statement.
After Gabbard announced in May that she would resign from the post, Mr. Trump said he would install Pulte, a housing finance official, as acting director of national intelligence. He later nominated Jay Clayton, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, to serve as Senate-confirmed director.
Mr. Trump’s pick for acting director of national intelligence, who assumed the role on Friday, has sparked intense pushback in Congress. Democrats, and some Republicans, questioned the selection due to his lack of national security experience.
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado said Sunday he’s worried that “Americans are at risk” with Pulte serving as DNI “because we have someone who’s incompetent at the head of this agency,” in an interview on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
In addition to Pulte’s lack of national security experience, Democrats have railed against the pick for his role in investigations into Mr. Trump’s political foes. Crow, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said he’s “obviously concerned that this is somebody who’s a political attack dog, and his single biggest qualification is that he’s loyal to Donald Trump and is willing to go after Donald Trump’s enemies.” But he said more immediately, he’s concerned about Americans’ safety.
“This is a really important position. This sits atop our intelligence agencies, and by law, Congress mandated that this person have significant intelligence experience because they have to make sure that we’re keeping Americans safe, which is not what Bill Pulte is capable of doing,” Crow said.
Since Pulte’s selection, Democrats have declined to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which grants intelligence agencies broad authority to spy on overseas targets, causing the legal provision to expire earlier this month.
And as Senate GOP leaders tried to bring an end to the impasse by moving to quickly confirm Clayton as permanent director of national intelligence, the president abruptly called for Clayton’s confirmation hearing to be canceled last week.
Talks on extending FISA Section 702 were already strained, with some members of both parties pushing for stricter guardrails and arguing the program can scoop up Americans’ communications without a warrant. Intelligence officials say the program is essential to national security.
Asked whether Democrats have miscalculated, Crow said “not at all.”
“I know how important it is, but I’m unwilling to trade Americans’ constitutional rights, privacy and essential civil liberties for temporary extension to this program,” Crow said.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on “Face the Nation” that “any Democrat that shuts down FISA at a time of great peril for the United States is making a huge mistake.”
“We’re playing with fire here, no matter what side does it,” Graham said. “America needs FISA up and running.”
Andrea (left), Pablo (center), and Martin Langesfeld (right) hold a photograph of their daughter and sister, Nicky Langesfeld and her husband Luis Sadovnic, at a park in Doral, Fla., where the city named a street Nicky Langesfeld Place to honor her memory, Martin says, “as a reminder that she’ll be here with us forever.” Nicole “Nicky” and Luis were two of the 98 people killed when the Champlain Towers South condominium building collapsed in Surfside on June 24, 2021.
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SURFSIDE, Fla. — Just around the corner from where a beachfront condominium collapsed five years ago, there’s a makeshift memorial: a plastic banner strung up on a wood frame, with the names of the 98 victims, ranging in age from a year-old infant to a 92-year-old grandmother.
“It’s an unfortunate reminder of how big this tragedy was,” says Martin Langesfeld, locating the name of his sister Nicky, 26, and her husband Luis Sadovnik, 28. “It’s more than just names. It’s stories. It’s families.”
Two-thirds of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building collapsed just after 1 a.m. on June 24, 2021. It started when the pool deck caved in. Seven minutes later, as many of the occupants were sleeping, the tower began to fall.
Five escaped, and three were rescued from the rubble with severe injuries by first responders. Search teams evacuated residents in the remaining part of the building, which was demolished 10 days later for safety reasons.
Search and rescue personnel work in the rubble of the 12-story, beachfront Champlain Towers South condominium that crumbled to the ground on June 24, 2021 in Surfside.
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Hundreds were left without a home and belongings, and the state was forced to grapple with how it regulates structural safety.
Langesfeld is among those who’ve been pushing to improve what they consider a lax system of building oversight. His sister and brother-in-law were newlyweds, who had moved into the condo together just a few months earlier.
“A dream place, home, where you feel you’re safest is where they were killed,” he says.
He’s also frustrated there is no permanent memorial honoring the victims, while a new luxury condo is going up on the land where Champlain Towers once stood.
“It’s been almost five years and there’s no development for the memorial,” he says. “And the development for the new building is very well underway.”
The North Tower of the Champlain Towers condominium complex stands on April 27, overlooking the vacant site where its sister building, Champlain Towers South, collapsed on June 24, 2021. The collapse resulted in 98 deaths and remains one of the largest structural failures in U.S. history. A new luxury condominium complex, the Delmore, is slated for construction on the empty lot.
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Technical findings released Monday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded the problem started about three weeks before the collapse when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed, causing cracks to grow and loads to shift to connections that were not strong enough to support them.
Investigators found “severe and widespread deviations in the building’s original structural design from the codes and standards of the day,” and that the building’s construction in 1981 deviated from the design drawings. Investigators will issue a final report later that includes recommendations for changes to standards, codes and practices to improve building safety.
To date, no one has been held criminally responsible.
But in a complex civil lawsuit, more than 30 defendants contributed to a $1.2 billion class action settlement reached just a year after the collapse to address wrongful death, personal injury and property loss claims.
“I think what was apparent to all parties, legal parties, is that it was an enormous loss,” says Coral Gables attorney Rachel Wagner Furst, co-lead counsel representing the Surfside victims.
None of the settling parties admitted liability or wrongdoing, but Wagner Furst says the litigation pointed to many factors that contributed to the scope of the disaster beyond the condo board, which was singled out in the initial lawsuit for not heeding warning signs and deferring repairs on the 40-year-old building.
She notes, “Companies and individuals who had serviced the Champlain Towers South condominium building in the years before the collapse that had arguably or allegedly failed in some way to provide proper maintenance advice or counsel, including the security company that had staffed the front desk of the building and was on duty at the time that the alarm ought to have sounded.”
Attorney Rachel Wagner Furst served as co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for the victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, which resulted in a $1.2 billion settlement.
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The Surfside collapse was a wake-up call for condo associations and regulators around the country.
In the immediate aftermath in South Florida, some two dozen properties were evacuated for safety concerns. Most eventually were able to return after repairs.
The state responded by passing more stringent regulations, including new mandates for structural inspections and requiring condo associations to maintain a minimum level of reserve funding for structural upkeep.
“The Florida legislature pushed the burden to create safe housing stock in Florida onto the people who are least able to bear it, which is the Florida consumer,” says Ft. Lauderdale attorney Donna DiMaggio Berger who specializes in condominium law, and founded a group that lobbies on behalf of the more than 50,000 community associations in Florida.
She says developers also should share in the burden.
“If we wind up with the safest housing stock in the country. Bravo, well done,” she says. But “safe buildings start with the people who build them and repair them.”
Construction cranes line the skyline along the beach in Surfside, Fla., on April 27.
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No matter how well-intentioned, the building reforms could have unintended consequences, says Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
She says some buildings have been taken over by people who want to turn them into more expensive, luxurious developments.
“There’s tremendous pressure that people can’t afford these things and so they’re forced to sell,” she says. “We call it ‘condo vultures,’ and it is at our peril.”
Levine Cava says she understands that people want to live “the good life” in South Florida, but there must be balance.
“We know we live in paradise,” she says. “We also know that we need to have people of all means in our community.”
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava says her community was severely changed by this tragedy, “the pain is still very real. Many people have moved on with their lives and others are still suffering greatly.”
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That’s long been the conundrum in Florida, a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when people flocked to the Sunshine State.
And it’s evident in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, which is becoming an ultra-wealthy enclave with a wall of condos lining the Atlantic, and more under construction. The area is adjacent to swanky shopping malls and private islands where tech titans have waterfront estates.
The Champlain Towers South property itself is soon to be home to the community’s latest luxury development, The Delmore. Billed as “expansive mansions in the sky,” the sales price of the units starts at $15 million; penthouses go for more than $150 million.
“Each penthouse has its own private pool, and that’s a glass-fronted pool that gets the view to the ocean,” says developer Jeffery Rossely, pointing to the layout on a scale model in a posh sales gallery.
Jeffery Rossely, a developer at the Dubai-based firm Damac Properties, points to a model of a luxury property called The Delmore.
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Rossely is with Damac Properties, a Dubai-based firm. This is the company’s first residential project in the U.S. Damac was the only bidder with a $120 million cash offer for the property.
“It was obviously at the time a tragic opportunity, but the courts had already ordered sale of the property,” Rossely says. “The money was required to compensate the victims.”
But the project has not received a warm welcome in Surfside. At town meetings he says his company has been accused of having blood on its hands.
A sign welcoming visitors to Surfside, Fla., stands directly across the street from the former site of the Champlain Towers South condominium. Today, a new luxury residential development called The Delmore is under construction on the empty lot where the tower once stood.
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“I didn’t understand why there would be angst for someone coming in and paying that money upfront,” says Rossely.
But in retrospect, he concedes, the project needed a different approach.
“We should have spent a bit more time on due diligence, on community reaction, rather than on the physical property itself,” Rossely says. “We went through what I would call the traditional due diligence. Maybe we should have gone through emotional due diligence, as well.”
The question now is whether people will want to live in the new building. There are no buyers yet in the pre-sale phase.
Meanwhile, the town of Surfside will light a torch at 1:15 a.m. on Wednesday, just outside the development’s fence, to remember the Champlain Towers South victims five years after the collapse.
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