When Jasmin Darznik signed on to her Zoom meeting one morning in January, it seemed like a normal day. Darznik’s calls with her fellow department chairs at the California College of the Arts (CCA) usually involved a mix of administrative updates and small talk. But then the college provost greeted her with an ominous question: “Have you read it yet?”
Digging into her inbox, Darznik’s stomach dropped as she learned that her employer, the California College of the Arts, had sold its San Francisco campus to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and would close permanently in spring 2027, leaving the school’s approximately thirteen hundred students, seventy-five full-time faculty, and two hundred fifty adjuncts adrift. A press conference announcing the news was already in progress across town.
“With declining enrollment, CCA’s tuition-driven business model is not sustainable,” the college, which declined to comment further for this article, wrote in a letter posted to its website. “Recognizing that lasting financial independence is out of reach given our current constraints, we have pursued conversations with potential partners over the last year.”
For Darznik, who chairs CCA’s two-year writing MFA program, the sudden news came as a profound shock and deep betrayal. “We’re writers; we’re very sensitive to language,” she says. “The language of ‘agreement’ and ‘transition’ and all these phony, false words has been especially egregious. We were sold out.” In the weeks since the announcement, she and her colleagues have pushed through their own anger and grief to support their students while wondering: What’s next?
CCA’s writing program offerings, which also include an undergraduate major and minor, have benefitted greatly from their unique proximity to the swirl of artmaking on campus—from weaving to printmaking, animation to comics. “Every time I’m at a table with somebody in a different field, I learn so much about how to see the world,” says Faith Adiele, chair of the undergraduate Writing & Literature program.
Once upon a time, decades ago, the MFA program alone was home to a hundred students; today it has only fifteen. That decrease reflects a broader trend across departments. The COVID-19 pandemic hit enrollment especially hard, with numbers decreasing almost 30 percent in the past seven years. In 2022 the school closed its Oakland campus, hoping for a buyer that did not come. At the same time, it invested huge sums in new campus facilities and dorms in San Francisco that would sit mostly empty, leading to spiraling debt.
CCA appealed to California for help, and the state took the unusual step of offering a private college a $20 million bailout, later matched by a similar-sized gift from Jensen Huang, the CEO of tech company Nvidia. “I figured we had three to five years to make a long-term plan,” Adiele says. The administration invited faculty to propose new programs. A group traveled to China to recruit students. It seemed like the crisis had passed.
That made January’s surprise announcement all the more painful. Although the announcement letter references a “CCA Institute” that will live within Vanderbilt, “no one feels that the writing program is going to be preserved in whatever minimal, tiny way,” Darznik says.
In the weeks following the news, college leadership declined to offer further meaningful details, creating an information vacuum slowly filling with hearsay and bitterness. The lack of clarity for both students and faculty stings. “We really cinched in our belts because we believe in this place,” Adiele says. Darznik left a tenure-track job on the East Coast, and later delayed a promotion to full professor, so she could lead both the writing and the visual and critical studies master’s programs with no administrative support. Somewhere along the way, according to Darznik and Adiele, CCA stopped contributing to faculty retirement accounts.
Word of mouth indicates the closure might have come sooner, but the college managed to secure an extra twelve months at the last minute. Those details remain unclear. Regardless, for CCA’s writing MFA cohort, this final year is a blessing. “We haven’t been as proactive; we haven’t needed to be,” says first-year grad student and teacher Forrest Nguyen.
In contrast the undergraduate students Nguyen teaches are already channeling their outrage into action. Some quickly began the process of transferring, although messaging to students about how to navigate a potential transfer to Vanderbilt has been inconsistent, and CCA is the last independent art school in the Bay Area. Adiele spent early February in constant consultation with students and their parents desperate for advice on next steps. Though juniors and seniors may stay on, she says, “Everyone else is saying, ‘This place ain’t loyal; we don’t know what they’re going to do, and we can’t get any guarantee.’”
Of course, CCA’s shuttering must be understood in the context of a bleak regional and national arts landscape. “Tech has been eating [San Francisco] alive for a long time,” Darznik says. “So many of us have just barely been making it work here. I feel like the city is expelling me as a writer.”
The closure will only further weaken an already threatened literary ecosystem. CCA acted as a hub for writers in the Bay Area. Figures such as Rita Bullwinkel, Tracy K. Smith, and Justin Torres spoke or taught on campus, along with up-and-coming writers from the surrounding community. With so many local scribes teaching a class here or there, Adiele says, “It’s going to have a huge chilling effect on the ability of artists and writers to stay in the Bay Area.”
Still, Darznik has resolved not to grieve too early and miss the thing itself. “Every week I want to teach them everything I know, and the next week I want to come back and teach them again,” she says. She’s approaching her workshops this semester differently, taking more risks and breaking convention.
As a student and teacher, Nguyen has found that rebellious dynamism inspiring. “I’m not going to say we’re undaunted; the narrative doesn’t write itself that tidily,” he says. “But here we are making art.”
Alissa Greenberg is an independent journalist based in Boston and Berkeley, California, who reports at the intersection of culture, history, and science. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Smithsonian, National Geographic, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.
