While many stakeholders are excited about the Southwest School of Art’s merger with the University of Texas at San Antonio, others remain concerned whether the longtime downtown campus’ culture will survive the transition.
The frustration some faculty and staff are feeling has apparently spilled over to students too. On Thursday, Margaret A. Craig, SSA’s chair and professor of printmaking and paper, shared a photo on Facebook of a T-shirt design she said was created by a SSA student.
The image on the shirt features Patches, one of the feral felines who calls the SSA campus home, with its tail up and the proverbial cat’s ass on full display. In place of the cat’s sphincter is the SSA logo.
“Awesome T-shirt design created by our students,” Craig wrote. “The butthole is the Southwest School of Art logo. And the cat is one of our campus cats Patches. Today on the final day of classes we are having a celebration of what the Southwest School of Art was.”
The “was” in that sentence is important because Craig is one of the faculty members who’s been open about her disappointment with the SSA-UTSA merger. She’s already stated that she won’t be returning to the school next semester after she received an offer from UTSA that she called “insulting.”
“The SSA faculty and staff have not been offered safe landing points with this merger,” Craig wrote in a letter to UTSA President Taylor Eighmy earlier this month. “UTSA is treating this as an acquisition, not a fair merger. The only people excited about this merger are the UTSA financial personnel who are reveling in the fact that they are getting millions in resources and reneging on their responsibilities in response.”
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This article appears in Apr 20 – May 3, 2022.