THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION
GETTING SCHOOLED AT THE ACADEMY OF ART UNIVERSITY
BY CHRIS KIRKHAM AND AARON SANKIN • PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY DAN WINTERS
half-empty
shuttle bus rolls down a crowded
street in San Francisco. A tattooed 20-something art student
steps off and lights a cigarette.
She walks past a bus station, under a flag affixed to a streetlight
and into an unremarkable downtown building.
Everything in this picture —
from the side of the bus, to the emblem stitched onto her backpack,
to the advertisement on the back
of the bus stop, to the flag flying above her head, to the awning
above the building she just stepped
into — bears the same logo.
A crisp, stylized double “A” surrounded by a bright red circle, visible from almost every downtown
corner, marks the ever-expanding
footprint of the Academy of Art
University. The private, for-profit
college has become, over the past
century, the largest arts school in
the country and one of the big-
gest landholders in San Francisco
— only the Catholic Church owns
more buildings.
In the past two decades, the
Academy of Art has grown 10 times
in size to nearly 20,000 students.
And administrators are pushing
for more: a recent school master
plan projects a student population of nearly 25,000 within five
years, roughly the same number
of undergraduates who attend the
University of California at Berkeley. It is the only arts school in the
nation with both NCAA basketball
and baseball teams.
The university has opened recruiting offices in Taiwan, South
Korea and Thailand. It’s created a
massive online division, aimed at
beaming courses on classical sculpture and video game animation
taught by teachers located as far
away as Scotland to thousands of
virtual students across the world.
As the Academy of Art has expanded, so has the local prestige
of its owner, Elisa Stephens. The
52-year-old lawyer has become a
fixture in San Francisco high society, and is a regular attendee at
fundraisers thrown by the city’s