[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

When the news hit in late May that Philadelphia’s esteemed University of the Arts would be closing its doors permanently on June 7, 2024, I wasn’t all that surprised.

The University of the Arts (UArts) was created in 1987 after the merger of two century-old institutions, the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA)—established in 1876 as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art– and the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts (PCPA).

UArts has been dying a slow, agonizing death for at least ten years. The first hint of trouble surfaced in 2018, the peak year of the excesses of the #MeToo movement, when UArts photography Professor Harris Fogel—an award-winning international photographer who had been with the school for over 20 years—was accused of an unwanted kiss by a female professor from California when they both attended a Las Vegas photography conference.

The California professor was somebody Fogel (pictured above) knew well, so when they met in a hotel lobby at the beginning of the conference, Fogel thought nothing of greeting his west coast friend with a kiss. That kiss—so Fogel later told Philadelphia Magazine— was a standard UArts form of greeting among professors and colleagues.

The kiss was accepted by University of the Pacific, Professor Jennifer Little as a nothing burger, yet twenty months later Little wrote a letter to UArts administration claiming that Fogel had greeted her with an unwelcome and forced kiss in the lobby of the hotel.

Ironically, the professor’s letter was followed one day later by another allegation against Fogel, this one from a female photography student who claimed that when Fogel went to hand her his business card at a photography conference in Houston, he offered her his hotel room key instead.

Fogel later admitted that he was embarrassed about the mix-up—life was easier when hotel keys looked like hotel keys—and that the young Annie Leibovitz wannabe—Anne- Laurie Autin– laughed the mistake off as a joke.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but apparently when nothing happens in Vegas (or Houston) it’s your duty to make something up.

When UArts received the California professor’s complaint almost two years after the fact, as well as the additional complaint from the student photographer who now saw the mistaken hotel room key exchange in a sinister light—it was later revalued that Little and Autin were in fact chums—the school initiated a Title IX investigation that determined that the kiss between Fogel and Little was not consensual at all but forced in the manner of a date rape prelude or a noir horror film.

As a result of the investigation, on March 8, 2018 Professor Fogel was terminated by Dean Mark Campbell. In August of the same year, the University Board of Trustees upheld the termination.

Fogel then sued UArts—Harris Fogel v. University of the Arts, et al—claiming that the university’s investigator failed to interview his exculpatory witnesses and did not investigate leads on possible collusion. Fogel charged that UArts violated his civil rights in terminating him based on “an erroneous outcome theory.”

Fogel suspected collusion between Ms. Autin and Professor Little and stated that the “University failed to obtain the emails between the women to investigate his collusion defense.”

The UArts Title IX Coordinator, Fogel said, failed to investigate all available evidence, including an unwillingness to objectively evaluate Professor Little’s credibility, and UArts failed to “provide adequate notice of the charges against him, including the date, time, and location of the incidents alleged.”

Fogel said the Title IX Coordinator also failed to interview groups of women from the Las Vegas FotoFest conference to whom Professor Little reported the kiss. The coordinator also failed to consider Ms. Autin’s confession to a Houston conference representative that she thought it entirely possible that Fogel’s room key remark was a ‘joke’ and not intentionally malicious.

Fogel filed a lawsuit against UArts in federal court in Philadelphia—and won.

According to a friend of mine who worked in UArts administration at the time, Fogel won a lot of money, so much money in fact that my friend asked me then to be very careful about writing about the settlement, which as far as she knew was not made public because it was such an embarrassment to the school. Apparently only those in UArts administration knew about the settlement and the amount.

This friend, whom I’ll call RR, lived in my neighborhood so she was somebody I saw her frequently on local buses. As an avid 2016 Trump supporter– and someone who had issues with woke trends consuming colleges and universities–she always had an update about how UArts was changing.

She talked about school policies regarding sexual harassment, the forced use of pronouns, racial identity hiring practices, and more. The school was becoming more “Stalinesque” than the University of Pennsylvania, and as a conservative she said she had to keep quiet about her political beliefs because the staff and students were not tolerant of divergent political views. The scandalous new policies at the school became an ongoing joke between us: “What when down this week?” I’d ask her. Nine out of ten times, RR had a depressing story.

When UArts announced its closure, it blamed it on financial reasons. One official termed it, “an unexpected budget crunch,” despite the school’s endowment which is worth upwards of $61 million.

Did the Fogel case play a part in the school’s closure because of financial reasons? Was it a case of “get woke, go broke”?

2019 was a big year for UArts because another story was making the rounds at that time.

This was the attempted firing of noted UArts professor and author Camille Paglia who writes about contemporary culture, art and archaeology and who describes herself as “queer and trans” although she’s enough of a real intellectual and historian to know that transgenderism—when it is adopted and celebrated by a culture en masse—leads to the destruction of that culture or nation.

Paglia pointed out this fact in a video that went viral and then promised to expand on her views on gender in a speech set to be delivered at the school, which aroused the ire of some students who began a fierce campaign to fire her.

The “fire Camille Paglia” petition garnered over 1,300 signatures, at that time pretty much the population of the entire student body.

“Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color,” the petition stated. “If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.”

Paglia registered her disapproval of women who waited months to report a sexual assault. She also let it be known that any female student who agrees to go to a man’s dorm room at 2 AM—especially after a night of drinking and heavy partying– pretty much knows what that “invite” is all about. It’s certainly not about playing chess or reading Susan Sontag.

Unlike the persecution that Fogel experienced, Paglia had the support of President and CEO David Yager, so student protesters were relegated to catcalling and setting off fire alarms and generally behaving like spoiled liberal brats who believe they have a right to have a say in who the university should hire or fire. But they were not successful in their efforts to either fire Paglia or cancel her talk.

The fact that a good portion of the student body ganged up on Paglia suggested to me that the education offered at UArts has been sub-par and riddled with woke bulletholes all along.

This fact does not exactly inspire an excess of sorrow over the school’s closing.