Student outrage over the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s decision to end overnight access has been loud, unambiguous, and completely warranted. It is a decision that kills an essential part of a proper art school education, and you can expect SAIC’s administration to make more like it.
In a school-wide email sent out on Aug. 15, Delinda Collier, Dean of Graduate Studies; Dawn Gavin, Dean of Undergraduate Studies; Camille Martin-Thomsen, Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs, rationalized this cost cutting measure as a way of coping with the “significant challenges” brought on by the One Big Beautiful Bill, which include a higher endowment tax and new “institutional eligibility requirements for federal aid.” The measures laid out in the OBBB are going to hurt colleges and universities nationwide, but they are especially debilitating to private non-profit schools like SAIC, whose finances depend greatly on wealthy donors, and whose fine arts graduates tend to be less employable than high school dropouts.
But SAIC has been slowly tightening the screws on its students long before Trump’s targeted attacks on higher education. For those of you reading who are not fourth-year undergrads like me, you might be surprised to learn that pre-pandemic studio classes used to run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You might be surprised to learn that SAIC students used to have exclusive access to an indoor walkway that connected 280 to the Art Institute (this was taken away as a result of “new security protocols” implemented by the AIC, possibly to punish students for the May 4 encampment last year.) You might not be surprised to learn that tuition has only gone up since these measures changed. It seems that each year, the school has a little less to offer and a little more to charge.
And now this, no overnight access. The administration has made the “difficult decision” to take away what we most took for granted. But how difficult was it, really? Because if there’s any fat to be trimmed at SAIC, it lies squarely in the administrative payroll. As recently as the 1970s, the senior teaching staff of colleges and universities took the top administrative positions (usually for a semester or two before returning to academic duties), and lower managerial tasks were divided between professors. As such, decisions were largely informed by the concerns and ideas of the faculty, who understood and contributed to student culture. Since then, a professional managerial class — more likely to boast business rather than academic backgrounds — has assumed control. Legions of vice presidents, deans, associate deans, provosts, coordinators, and supervisors have proliferated like microbial colonies and usurped nearly all influence on decision-making away from faculty.
Sure, student enrollments, faculty size, and demands for new administrative resources like career advising and mental health services have all increased, but not nearly in proportion to the vast number of administrators employed by higher learning institutions. According to Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60% from 1993 to 2009, ten times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Yale, another nonprofit private school, has more administrators than undergraduate students, and they are not alone in that distinction.
Not only are academic administrators well-staffed, they are grossly well-compensated. Upper admin at SAIC are paid salaries comparable to those of corporate business executives, with sizable bonuses to boot. Each of these administrators commands their own bloated team of assistants and staffers who earn less lucrative though still generous salaries. Yet paying night shifts for security guards so that students can make art in an art school is not “fiscally responsible.”
Big picture time: as young people looking to further their education now have to face a federal government that is trying to undermine, if not outright eradicate, higher education, and they have to navigate administrative juntas that are sure to act in their own self-interest when times get tough. As administration devours more resources, charges more in tuition, and allows their school’s core educational mission to recede into the background, more and more parents will figure that sending their kids to a place like SAIC is just not worth the burden. Then enrollment will fall off a cliff, and programs will be cut, and faculty will be laid off until the institution has its last wobble and collapses. Look no further than our neighbors at Columbia College Chicago to see this happening in real time. Everybody thinks it won’t happen to them until it does.
But it doesn’t have to. Students have a voice. Faculty have a voice. We can course correct. There’s a petition to reinstate overnight access going around that’s been steadily gaining traction, but we have to be louder than a list of names. Since my first day on campus, the air at SAIC has been charged with excitement and ambition and frustration and pretension, and it nourishes me. I learned how to think for myself here. SAIC risks becoming stiff and static without overnight access and whatever other institutional amputations the administration has in store for us. In that contemptible Aug. 15 email, they say they “remain committed to helping you make the most of your time on campus.” Make them honor that commitment. Bring back overnight access.
