Students at NYU’s Art School Are Demanding Refunds of Their Tuition. The Dean Just Responded With This Astonishing Homemade Dance Video

Last week, the dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts emailed students
to let them know that the school would not be issuing any tuition
refunds, despite the fact that courses are now being conducted
online.

Attached to the message was a video of the dean—choreographer,
artist, and curator Allyson Green—dancing by
herself to REM’s “Losing My Religion.” The video was also published
on the official Tisch Vimeo account on
Sunday.

“This is was not an accident,” Tisch student Michael Price
told NBC News. “This was her
sort of way of trying to reach out to the student body.”

He described the video, which has over 5,500 likes and 1,400
shares on his Twitter post, as “tone
deaf.”

A year’s tuition for full-time Tisch students is $60,994 for
commuters and $77,236 for students living in NYU housing, according
to the university’s website.

Tisch is NYU’s performing, cinematic, and media-arts school, and
offers courses in photography as well as filmmaking, dance,
performance studies, acting, and other disciplines. (The
university’s studio art program is run out of the Steinhardt School
of Culture, Education, and Human Development.)

An online petition calling
for a partial tuition refund attracted nearly 2,500 signatures
by Friday afternoon.

Other art students across the country have also wondered how their studies would continue now that
universities are closed indefinitely. Students at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut,
the School of Visual
Arts in New York, and
the Maryland Institute College
of Art in Baltimore have
all started similar petitions.

The Savannah School of Art and
Design has announced that its Hong Kong location will not reopen, a
decision that has also launched a petition, even as
students there also demand partial
refunds. 

“All of us here at NYU are handling the pandemic differently,”
one person wrote on the NYU Local blog in an
open letter to the dean. “Some of us are becoming increasingly
angry at the establishment for their failure to adequately address
the problems we’re facing.”

The writer added: “How could you possibly think this would do anything but piss
everyone off?”

The post Students at NYU’s Art School Are Demanding Refunds
of Their Tuition. The Dean Just Responded With This Astonishing
Homemade Dance Video appeared first on artnet News.