The sudden collapse of University of the Arts in the last week and a half shook Philadelphia, resulting in the resignation of the college president, three lawsuits with more possibly to come, city hearings, and a days-long student sit-in on the college steps.

But beyond the headlines and the public outcry are the quiet, continuing emergencies, the personal and professional fallout of the loss of an institution that traces its roots back 150 years, and employed about 700 people in the city.

Here are a few of those stories.

‘We don’t even know if we have a place to live’

Anisha Sampson, 23, has lived on her own for six years, since her mother died when Sampson was 17. By this spring, she was working 40 hours a week and attending University of the Arts full time as an acting major. Then, her living situation became untenable.

Sampson appealed directly to now former university president Kerry Walk, whom Sampson met walking down the street a few months ago, and was granted emergency housing on campus, guaranteed at least through Aug. 10. She had hoped to save money to get her own place.

When the closure news came May 31, Sampson panicked: Would she be kicked out? Her brother, who had also worked for University of the Arts, had planned to help her pay for stable housing, but he was now out of a job and unable to help. Answers were in short supply, even as helpful staff tried to assist amid their own losses.

“They told me, ‘I don’t even know if you can stay on campus. We may have to move you somewhere else,’” Sampson said. “We don’t even know if we have a place to live.’”

Robin Barthelemy is in a similar boat: The illustration major and screenwriting minor — who has no family to stay with — moved into emergency housing last month, after losing her job and struggling to find another one.

Barthelemy and Sampson may have a lead on a place to live in West Philadelphia after they are forced to leave their UArts emergency housing, but that’s subject to an interview, and they have to prove enrollment in another school. Neither is sure where they’ll land.

Bathelemy said she’s had to beg for financial and academic help from the university in the past, and now?

“I’m having a huge crisis, and they’re saying, ‘Suck it up, you have to figure it out,’” said Barthelemy. “It’s a slap in the face, and they keep slapping me.”

For Joey Miller, who just finished his second year at University of the Arts, emergency housing for the summer was a lifeline.

“I just can’t crash on my friends’ couches for the rest of my life,” said Miller, a film and animation major. “My plan is that I have no plan. I’m just hoping that someone will step up to reopen the university.”

Like Miller, Barthelemy and Sampson, Kyla Klein has also been living in emergency university housing. (She also lost her job at the university library, and her free mental health help.)

Worried about how long emergency housing will remain viable, Klein left Friday for Florida; she’s moving into her father’s bedroom while he temporarily bunks with his girlfriend. Moving more than 1,000 miles away from the city she has grown to love and from her partner was excruciating, but she had no other option, Klein said.

Klein hopes to come back to Philadelphia eventually, but isn’t sure what that will look like.

“I haven’t been able to fill even out one application,” Klein said.

All of the students said they were both sad and furious.

“All I’ve done is trust this school’s word, and said, ‘Here’s my money and I trust that you’re going to put it back in the school,” Miller said. “But where the hell are all these millions of dollars?”

‘No one knows what’s going to happen to anything’

A degree in music business entrepreneurship and technology was well within reach for Jade Gilliam: She had just 18 credits to complete before collecting her University of the Arts diploma.

When her school imploded, she said, “enough.” She’s taking a break from school.

“I feel very exhausted,” said Gilliam. “I need a break from institutions and schools and administration in general. I just feel like I don’t trust it anymore, even though I love to learn.”

This isn’t Gilliam’s first go-round with institutional disappointment; in 2019-20, she was a senior in high school, at Science Leadership Academy in the Philadelphia School District, a school that closed for months because of asbestos and renovations handled so poorly the district’s inspector general ultimately investigated, finding a process rife with errors and danger.

Gilliam was one of the students who spoke out against the district’s handling of the situation. She wasn’t happy with the way district officials handled the situation then, Gillam said, “but at least they sat there and listened to us, and at least we knew who was in charge.”

Now, at University of the Arts, there’s a leadership vacuum and no one has any answers, Gilliam said. Just before the closure announcement, her father received a tuition bill for a summer-session class that met exactly once.

Midweek, Gilliam felt adrift.

“We’re moving equipment and trying to organize and figure out what’s here,” said Gilliam. “No one knows what’s going to happen to anything; they completely closed lines of communication, and everyone resigned.”

At 22, Gilliam said she’s “jaded. The world has shown me nothing but the fact that administration doesn’t care for its students, its teachers.”

‘The bottom of the academic totem pole’

When Doria Wohler heard about the University of the Arts’ impending closure on June 1, her first thoughts were of her students.

Wohler, an adjunct faculty member teaching creative writing, had long misgivings about the university where she taught — she said she thought the university’s price tag was “exorbitant” and often graduated students with “no idea of what they should do next,” but the bright, funny, quirky, often neurodiverse students she taught were enough to keep her coming back.

So, soon after Walk and trustees president Judson Aaron messaged about the school’s catastrophic collapse, Wohler reached out to the young people she had taught in the prior semester. She offered to help them figure out where and how to transfer to other universities. She told them she believed in them. And she had choice words for the school that had let them down.

“I believe the administration of this school has, for a very long time, enabled predatory practices that leave many students drowning in debt with little preparation for postgraduate life,” Wohler wrote. “I believe this school has depended heavily, for a very long time, on the positive intentions of its underpaid faculty and overcharged students to facilitate the sort of community and resource connecting that, at such an insanely high tuition price, should be included in the cost of attendance. I am disgusted by the careless, insidious actions of this university, and you should be, too.”

The messages that came back to Wohler broke her heart, she said.

“You’re actually the first person (aside from the first, mass message from the university) to reach out to me,” one student wrote. “I appreciate this show of support a lot, as we’ve been very much abandoned by the university at this point. … It really sucks that no one cared enough to inform us all of this earlier, and I’m sending you support as well, since UArts doesn’t give much of a (redacted) about faculty either.”

Another asked for advice about another Philadelphia university.

“I am just still trying to wrap my head around this. I just literally can’t do it. I have ONE semester left ... I am being so real right now but you’re the only one that reached out and I haven’t heard anymore information. Like, this just isn’t real???? I’m also a first gen college student and I have no idea what to do or like what should my next steps be, if there are any?!”'

Even as she figures out her own next steps, Wohler said she’ll assist her students in whatever way she can.

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