Wow. We need laws that make this sort of shit illegal. Cops need to be going to prison for this sort of purposeful injustice. 1 year for every year the person that they falsely accused was charged for. Like for like.
The Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia is one of the most brutally obvious signs of America’s public health crisis. The so-called “open air drug market” in the middle of the country’s sixth most populous city is where hundreds of people use drugs, some of whom are unhoused, usually without being arrested by the police. It is a failure of our health care system, our cities, and our drug enforcement policies on public display.
For some, it’s also a content farm, where they turn other people’s misery into engagement and profit.
As I am writing this, 675 people are watching a YouTube livestream from a channel called USALIVESTREAM of a camera that is panning back and forth over the corner of Kensington Avenue and East Allegheny, where there’s a SEPTA train station that people congregate around. As is normal on YouTube, to the right of the video is a chat where viewers can talk to each other, and pay to post stickers and “super chats,” highlighted messages that cost as much as $500. The revenue generated from this chat is split between YouTube and the YouTube channel owner. YouTube and the channel owner also make money via pre-roll ads viewers have to watch before the video starts. It is a live version of a growing trend, mostly on YouTube and TikTok, where people make videos of people in distress, specifically in Kensington.
The dire situation at Kensington is such that the live feed is always capturing multiple people who are clearly in distress, slumped over while they’re standing, asleep in camping chairs, or using drugs. None appear to be aware they are being filmed and exploited as a form of entertainment.
Supervised injection sites prevent overdose deaths, needle related infections, and give addicts access to help if they want to quit. It is 100% the sane and humane thing to do.
The article is about someone who studied that and while they found it holds true in Denmark, it’s associated with increased drug deaths in Philadelpia.
I only read the article, which had limited details, so I don’t know what the study may have corrected for or even if there was an actual study, but Philadelpia’s approach may need some adjustment. The basic idea might not even hold true in the US, given other factors, such as lack of healthcare, and demonization of those addicted
The article is about someone who studied that and while they found it holds true in Denmark, it’s associated with increased drug deaths in Philadelpia.
What? Where in the article is that even suggested? What data is there that could suggest it–How could it possibly be known that supervised injection sites are associated with increased drug deaths in Philadelphia, when Philadelphia has never had them?
“And the officer is suspended with pay for 3 years and will then move to a different jurisdiction to do the same again.”
(Not an actual quote, but unless this ends up being their token under-the-bus-because-we-can’t-defend-this case, we all know how it plays out already, and even if it is one of their token under-the-bus cases, it’s shielding so so much of the same that isn’t caught on camera.)
Sounds a lot like they made the most of an opportunity to live out their sick murder fantasies. Fucking pieces of shit. Cops need to be disarmed. Nobody is safe around these thugs.
It would have taken roughly $40 million to stave off the catastrophic financial crisis that ultimately forced University of the Arts officials to announce the school will close June 7, one trustee said Monday.
The news came as hundreds of students, faculty, parents, and supporters protested the stunning closure outside the university’s administrative building on South Broad Street in a lively memorial and performance.
“Our administration has failed us,” said Sarah MacLeod, a rising junior from Northwest Philly and a fine arts major who helped organize the demonstration.
Around her, students chalked the sidewalk, performed choreographed dances, blew bubbles, and painted signs. Passing cars beeped in support.
MacLeod’s mother, Concetta Mattioni, an art teacher in Conshohocken, said she received a fall tuition bill on Friday, hours before she learned her daughter’s school was closing. Like many in the university community, she found out from an article in The Inquirer as the administration had not given any warning of the abrupt shutdown just days away — a breach in higher education norms with no clear precedents nationally.
Kerry Walk, who has served as the university’s president for less than a year, said Friday the school would be forced to shut because of declining enrollment and diminishing cash flow. Her public comments came after the Middle States Commission on Higher Education stripped the school of its accreditation, saying it was out of compliance in all areas. The commission declined to comment Monday but unexpected university closures are exceedingly rare and observers could not readily point to another Pennsylvania college that had closed so abruptly.
University trustee Laurie Wagman said she did not know what exactly caused the closure decision, but said “something like $40 million would solve the problem so they could move forward.” While other members of the board declined comment, signs of financial distress go back at least one year.
There had been significant turnover at the top of the organization, and according to financial documents, the school’s endowment was worth $10 million less than it had been five years before, despite the university’s first-ever capital campaign.
A school spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for university leadership to explain what brought the venerable institution to this point. And a 4 p.m. town hall that was scheduled for faculty and staff was canceled minutes before it was supposed to start.
“We know you are heartbroken and frustrated about our impending closure on Friday, June 7. As the situation continues to unfold, we cannot adequately answer your questions today,” university officials wrote in an email sent to staff. “We want everyone to know that we exhausted every option to address the urgent crisis and find a pathway to keep the institution open. However, we could not identify a viable path for UArts to remain open and serve its mission.”
Money pledged but never given
Beyond the president’s office, UArts has seen turnover in another key position in the last 15 months.
Eric Leal took over as chief financial officer in February. His predecessor, Stephen J. Lightcap, left in April 2023, and is now chief financial officer at La Salle University. Prior to working at University of the Arts, he held a similar position at Cabrini University, which is also closing.
La Salle said Lightcap was not available for an interview about his former employer.
Lightcap’s departure from UArts came just a few months before the end of David Yager’s tenure as president. A hallmark of Yager’s presidency starting in 2016 was the university’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign.
That campaign raised $67 million, including a $25 million kickoff gift from the estate of Dorrance “Dodo” Hill Hamilton, the late Campbell Soup heiress, Yager said in 2022. It’s not clear how much of that money was pledged and remained to be given to the school.
In an interview Friday, current president Kerry Walk said an unspecified amount of gifts, grants, and other revenues the school was counting on had not materialized.
Yager said in 2022 that $24 million of the $67 million in fundraising was to become part of the school’s permanent endowment.
But on June 30, 2023, the UArts endowment was worth $62.44 million — $10 million less than on June 30, 2017, before the fundraising campaign started, according to the school’s tax returns.
Yager did not respond to Inquirer requests for comment Monday.
UArts has not said how it will wind down its business and repay the $45 million in municipal bond debt it owes.
It’s possible that the school could turn its real estate over to the trustee who manages the bond; the trustee would then have to sell the real estate to repay bondholders. That could happen without bankruptcy. U.S. bankruptcy law does not allow creditors to force a nonprofit into bankruptcy, according to Lawrence G. McMichael, a bankruptcy attorney and chairman at Dilworth Paxson LLP in Philadelphia.
Aaron Blanford, an illustration major from Moorestown, just finished her freshman year at University of the Arts and found out the news through an Inquirer article, not from the school. And the news made her wonder how a school she had planned to commit four years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to could simply vanish in a week.
“While I really enjoyed my time there, I absolutely saw a lot of the holes that were present in the program,” Blanford said.
She was shocked, disgusted, and worried about what’s next, Blanford said.
The closure has made her wary of investing time and money in an expensive school, she said. A number of schools, including Temple and Drexel, have offered seamless transfer processes for University of the Arts students.
But Blanford said she is exploring what else is out there, too.
“To be completely honest, I’m not sure if I’m going to be interested in any of those. I’m prioritizing affordability in schools,” Blanford said.
Liz O’Donnell, a former University of the Arts staffer, said she knew the university wasn’t doing well, but the closure still caught her off guard.
“Anyone who’s gone there or worked there in the past few years has seen the blood in the water, but it’s insane how fumbled it was,” O’Donnell said.
Some staffers have said they’ve already signed onto a class-action lawsuit that could be filed this week, and at least one lawmaker has called for an independent investigation into how things went wrong so quickly and terribly at the school.
Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, said he wasn’t aware of any other nonprofit college closing with such short notice, though he knew of cases in which for-profits abruptly shuttered.
“Typically, it’s weeks if not months,” he said. “It’s just rare to see one handled like this.”
He called it “the absolute worst case scenario” for a college closure, noting that students would likely face significant challenges transferring and faculty and staff would likely struggle to find jobs.
Closures can be devastating to students’ educational progress.
More than half of students at 467 colleges that closed between** **July 1, 2004, and June 30, 2020, did not reenroll elsewhere, according to a 2022 report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Of those who did, only 36.8% earned a degree; and 10% more were still enrolled when the study ended. The majority of those colleges were for-profit institutions and many of the closures were abrupt. The study showed that when closures were handled in an orderly way with support for students, about 70% of students reenrolled.
Hundreds of University of the Arts students and supporters gathered in protest outside of Hamilton Hall in Philadelphia on Monday. The University of the Arts announced on May 31 that it would be closing.<a href="">Read more</a>Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
‘I’m just baffled’
Helen Drinan, president of Cabrini University, which will officially close later this month — after having given students, faculty, and alumni a year’s notice — said she wasn’t aware of any other college that gave such a short window of notice as University of the Arts did. The closest she could think of was Mount Ida College in Massachusetts, but even that school gave a month’s notice.
The Mount Ida closure, which left students scrambling to find alternative education paths, prompted Massachusetts to pass a law to require its education department to annually review the financial health of the state’s private colleges to determine whether they face imminent closure.
“Massachusetts said we can never let this happen again,” said Drinan, a Boston native who was president of Simmons University in Boston for 12 years until 2020.
Drinan said she can’t understand how University of the Arts could only give a week’s notice.
“You should never ever find out in seven days you have to close,” she said. “I just can’t imagine a scenario in which that is defensible.”
Kelchen said the only “silver lining” was the school’s valuable real estate, referring to its holdings of real estate along South Broad Street and nearby blocks in Center City. A 2022 city tax assessment estimated the combined market value of these structures was about $162 million, although the university maintained their actual value was much lower — a combined $94 million according to a 2023 nonprofit disclosure form.
“They will be able to liquidate their assets and people should probably be able to get their final paychecks,” Kelchen said.
But Kelchen said he** **still couldn’t understand what would have forced such a swift, unplanned closure.
“The only reason I can think of is they had no idea where they sat financially,” he said. “Either they didn’t have a finance team in place or the finance team wasn’t talking with leadership or someone just made a big mistake. I’m just baffled by this.”
Robert M. Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education whose 2020 book TheCollege Stress Testpredicts a coming wave of closures among small institutions, said though the public timeline of University of the Arts’ closure was short, the pressures on institutions like it have been bearing down for some time.
”Too few of these institutions were very efficient to begin with,” Zemsky said. “They run very small classes, they don’t pay their faculty very well, but they have more faculty than they can really afford. As long as they were getting an outside subsidy, they were OK, sort of. But when the outside subsidy dried up, they were down the tubes.”
University of the Arts administrators did not give any warning of the school’s impending closure and many students protesting the shutdown Monday only found out when the news became public Friday. <a href="">Read more</a>Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
‘A lot of people are in mourning’
Wagman, a university trustee and patron for whom the school’s recording studio is named, said she was “heartbroken” by the announcement of the university’s imminent closure.
”It’s tragic,” she said. “I feel like, not only myself, but a lot of people are in mourning. It’s just a shame. The school has been wonderful — the faculty is so skilled, and what has come out of the institution over the years in the arts — these are prominent people. I don’t know why money can’t be found in the government sector.”
Wagman — whose late husband was Philadelphia publisher and philanthropist Irvin J. Borowsky — said that “the arts are the cornerstone of civilization and such a vital part of Philadelphia. Someone called me and asked what has happened to their beloved alma mater, and that’s really the way a lot of people thought of it.”
Asked about the possibility that a plan might emerge to save the University of the Arts, Wagman said: ”I think in the back of everyone’s mind they’re hoping something comes forth.”
MK Prophett found herself in a mind-boggling situation as of Monday afternoon: $150,000 in debt and one class short of a degree at a school that no longer exists. She had planned to take her final course this summer, and in fact had already attended the first day of class.
Despite walking in graduation two weeks ago, Prophett now had no idea how she would complete her double Bachelors of Fine Arts.
”Our entire future basically rests on this 4 p.m. town hall meeting,” Prophett, 22, said outside Hamilton Hall. She estimated roughly 20 other students were in a similar position.
Ten minutes before the town hall was supposed to start, Prophett learned the university canceled the meeting.
Makes me wonder what will happen - where will their students transfer to? Who will take possession of their academic records? What happens to the university’s real estate & other assets?
Makes me wonder what will happen - where will their students transfer to?
From the article:
“The university says it will be helping current students by developing “seamless transfer pathways” to other Philadelphia schools, including Temple University, Drexel University, and Moore College of Art and Design.”
So they would rather have loose addicts roaming the streets regardless of a desire to improve their lives or situations, but lacking the help. How fascinating that they don’t realize that this will likely lead to increases in crime in their area instead.
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