[Orig to FB]
I was surprised to see the new issue of October has a piece about the fate of California College of the Arts (a/k/a CCA) in San Franscisco (Julian Myers, “On San Francisco: Fake Estates,” October 196 [Spring 2026] pp. 129–141, DOI ~10.1162/OCTO.a.553). We’ve seen so many variations on this story — Mills, Columbia College Chicago, SAIC, UArts, Cooper Union, the New School (which for some purposes is a small university grafted onto Parsons) — that the essay might as well be a template: storied art school operating in urban core run into ground self-dealing trustees, carved up by hapless admins, then sold off in pieces.
I have no doubt that the story Myers tells is true, but here’s the thing: in all the cases I know of, the arts faculties were more or less completely out to lunch regarding academic governance. They just assumed everything would roll along, year after year, while they watched the most basic aspects of their environment exploding right in front of them: skyrocketing cost of living, seismic shifts in student demographics, facilities that went from scrappy and bare to glam and elaborate. And that’s the problem with Myers’s piece: there isn’t the slightest hint that CCA’s faculty were involved in governing or guiding the school at all. They relegated all the droll institutional matters on which the entire operation depended — operational, budgetary, legal, strategic, technological — to the administration. And after the school collapsed, they’re still doing it.
I saw this firsthand at Parsons, but instead of being all ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I got up the nose of the admin — about their exploitive disregard toward students, their naive assumption that (as Citi’s Chuck Prince famously put it in 2007) the music would never stop, their fantasyland real-estate development, and the obvious looming risks. Those risks included most speculatively a possible financial crisis (obvious after 2008), a respiratory pandemic (obvious after swine flu un 2009, MERS in 2012, etc), and/or the election of xenophobic rightist president who’d pick a trade fight with China.
But the core of my warnings weren’t at all speculative, they were concrete: the university’s math was ugly and would only get uglier. The cost of operating TNS in lower Manhattan would only climb, and the ability of US families to pay for their kids to study there would collapse, so the school would depend more and more on wealthy students from abroad — and that wasn’t a reliable strategy. The president, provost, and dean of Parsons scoffed it off. The president and provost moved on, and the Parsons dean is now university’s president — the one who’s butchering the university and purging the faculties to make up for his failed strategies.
There are lots of different ways to think about the relationship of art schools to the rest of higher ed, but the one that matters most in this context is that they’re leading indicators. What happens to art schools will spread to other schools and divisions. So if you want your institution to survive, or maybe even prosper, you’ll need to learn how it works and take an active hand in guiding it. But it’s too big, too ponderous, too complex, too immovable you say? Maybe so. Just don’t complain when things go sideways.