The Best, And Perhaps Only, Response To An Article About One’s Family That Opens With “Black Arts: The $800 Million Family Selling False Hopes”

by Mallory Ortberg · August 20, 2015

Kustodiev_The_BolshevikNo, she’s a monster, obviously; Frank Norris’ The Octopus might as well have her on the cover. Forbes ran one of the neatest, soundest, trimmest little hit pieces I’ve ever sen on Elisa Stephens & co. and their dreadful, exploitative Academy of Art University racket this week. It’s a wretched Rube-Goldberg machine designed to match up human beings with vast quantities of debt and everyone in San Francisco has at least one friend who’s lost something to it. (A friend of mine once dated a guy who’d gone to a prestigious, genuine art school, then taken a job at AAU pushing massive student loans at under-qualified and unprepared applicants; I felt mildly uncomfortable at their dinner parties until they broke up, which was hardly making a stand for The People on my part.)

At any rate, if one is going to be featured in an article profiling one’s family with lines like “the illusion is starting to unravel,” “serious code violations,” “abysmal graduation rates,” and “a business model based on underperformers,” one has two options: make a lot of explanations and cavils and excuses, or thrust one’s chin up toward God, wrap oneself in a fur coat, and deny nothing. Elisa Stephens chose the latter, and it’s rather wonderful to watch.

Stephens sounds baffled by the groundswell of negative attention: “I don’t know what prompted somebody to wake up and see us finally,” she says. “We’ve been here, and we haven’t been hiding out.”

Not three paragraphs earlier, the planning commissioner of San Francisco referred to AAU as “an operation of lawlessness never seen in an otherwise reasonably operating city.” Pretty bold claim! What does Elisa Stephens have to say about that? “Uh, yeah. Are you…have you recently moved to the area?” “Yes, we take their money and give them nothing in exchange. Did you…did you not read the quarterly reports?”

She then presumably swanked off in one of her “250 classic cars worth around $70 million, which Elisa often drives in city parades, to the opera or when heading to lunch.”

It’s awful, and capitalism is mostly a vampire, and she is a genuine drain on society, but a small part of me wants to applaud her, like the way a revolutionary salutes the enemy he begrudgingly respects just before signaling the firing squad.

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71 Comments

  2. ofTrebond +83

    I read the headline and byline and for a moment thought that someone had written a shocking hit piece on the Ortbergs. I just… could not imagine the trolling that was going to happen to that person.

    1. Rillquiet +38

      Ask Steve. Ol’ Stevarino knows what happens. That’s him over there, waving feebly from under a pile of cheery “Steve-o! Stevey boy! My man STEVE!” emails.

      1. ofTrebond +16

        That was the “shocking” part!

        I mean, I guess finding out that you were all part of some major scheme involving black arts and false hopes would have also been surprising, if I had not already realized this was not what the post was about.

  3. catweazlol +74

    I love when people double down on their own shittiness. Sure, she may belong in garbage jail, but I respect that she is being her truest self.

  4. threatqualitypress +114

    Is capitalism a vampire…or is it a family of art deco space-vampires?

    Think about it.

    3. Alli525 +31

      If capitalism were Eddie Redmayne all tarted up in a cape and with no shirt on, I would gladly hop in bed with capitalism!

      1. threatqualitypress +41

        Too bad, captialism is actually David Koch with a spray tan and fake teeth, putting his name on ballet stages.

  5. fishesinthetwee +62

    Man, what I wouldn’t give for a bestselling trilogy about a charmingly-naive student who takes down the big bigger & biggest bads of a for-profit college system. I’d read like, all the fanfic where she takes down student debt afterwards, too. What a satisfying bit of fantasy!!

    1. threatqualitypress +30

      yeah, like what if they set up a huge class action suit and won like $400 million dollars, then used it as part of the Rolling Jubilee to just buy up cheap student debt and throw it away.

      1. fishesinthetwee +8

        I got kinda excited for a sec and had to do a quick round of googling, see if the Rolling Jubilee had hit that level of success and I just hadn’t heard about it! It would be such good Robin Hooding. What an exciting story to pass down to future generations.

  6. ramina +12

    I have more than a few friends and acquaintances that got fucked over by AAU. I’ve all but lost touch with the one friend who was in for at least $40k after two years, when she couldn’t afford any more and left. It soured her to higher education as a whole and though I had a vastly different experience, I can’t blame her.

  7. gefthetalkingmongoose +97

    Mmmm, I love me a good hit piece. Loading up one’s pen with the finest vitriol really encourages writers to bring their A-game.

    Incidentally, the latest issue of Harper’s contains possibly the best hit-piece I’ve read all month : Tanya Gold’s review of four of New York’s most fashionable and high-priced restaurants (Per Se, Eleven Madison Park, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, and Masa). http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/a-goose-in-a-d…

    From the bit about Eleven Madison Park :
    The Finger Lakes Duck (“Dry-Aged with Pear, Mushroom, and Duck Jus”) … has lavender flying out of its bum like a fragrant mauve comet and is now a duck/garden on a plate because a duck by itself — well, that is not good enough. These men didn’t make a billion dollars to eat duck the way other people do.

    It is not, to me, food, because it owes more to obsession than to love. It is not, psychologically, nourishing. It is weaponized food, food tortured and contorted beyond what is reasonable; food taken to its illogical conclusion; food not to feed yourself but to thwart other people.

    A good hit-piece heals in ways I can’t even explain. Go on, tell me that’s not great art.

    1. gefthetalkingmongoose +79

      Of course, I love the brickbat as well as the scalpel. From the same piece :

      If you want an experience like the one on offer at Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, put a dead fish on your kitchen table and punch yourself repeatedly in the face, then write yourself a bill for $425.29 (including wine). That should do it.

      If I smoked, I’d need a cigarette now.

      1. threatqualitypress +22

        I just read that whole piece it is amazing.

        Also A 1700 DOLLAR SUSHI BILL WHAT THE SHIT

    2. nbdgy +66

      “We are, for some reason, invited into the kitchen. It is immensely clean, large, and busy, and motivational words line a wall: cool; endless reinvention; inspired; forward moving; fresh; collaborative; spontaneous; vibrant; adventurous; light; innovative. Similar words were written on the walls of the McDonald’s in Olympic Park in London in 2012, but I do not mention this. ”
      I’m dying

    3. builtahouse +57

      “Generally, the food is so overtended and overdressed I am amazed it has not developed the ability to scream in your face, walk off by itself, and sulk in its room.”

      Utter, toe-curling, delight. Soul-healing indeed. (please start a tumblr of recs of exquisitely phrased articles like this, so I can *sign up immediately*.)

        2. gefthetalkingmongoose +11

          Pete Wells’s review in the Times of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square gets a solid 65% of a full Cintra Wilson. It knows which ribs to slide the knife between (the “House Smoked St. Louis ‘Motley Que’ Ribs,” of course), but the conceit overstays its welcome a bit.

          GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?

          Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?
          http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/…

      2. Unreadaethel +7

        Oh my goodness. I want every word of this stamped in gold, framed, and hung upon the wall of every luxe-tacky restaurant catering to the obnoxiously wealthy.

    4. alicia +24

      In the very first sentence she points out that Per Se is essentially located in a shopping mall. I can already tell I am going to love this, thank you.

      edit: I was right, it is beautiful.

    6. sorrycassandra +14

      That is sublime beyond words. I think I’m going to make vegetarian sloppy joes and eat them in my pajamas this evening and enjoy them on a totally bourgeois level, because that seems like the best way of celebrating this piece of art.

    7. Jill T +16

      “The hotel could have been worse. It could have been on fire.” One of my favorite pieces of writing, from the undeservedly obscure novel Timbuktu, by David Smith.

    8. bookwormV +10

      I’m so torn; I love scathing reviews of things, but have never managed to forgive Tanya Gold for the Guardian article she wrote that was published a week before I started university (Oxford, from a state school background; I was very nervous as it was). It was about how the college I was going to was terrible and soul-destroying and everyone she knew from it had gone mad and become alcoholics; reading it did not help my mental state one bit. I’m still bitter.

        1. bookwormV +7

          It is true that I was diagnosed with depression while at university and have been on antidepressants ever since. But that would almost certainly have happened anyway! (And my boyfriend, who was at the same college, is absolutely fine.) No alcoholism, and my soul is in pretty much the same state as before, I think.

          1. pairofbuttons +13

            I wouldn’t call depression madness. So (carries the two) adding up anecdotal evidence it looks like everybody Tanya Gold knows went mad but everybody I know (you and boyfriend) DIDN’T go mad, so it’s a wash. SCIENCE.

            Your soul looks fine from here.

      2. shonagon +3

        If it’s any consolation, everyone I knew who went to Oxford (three people) turned out quite happy. It was the Cambridge students I met who turned out to be mad alcoholics.

  9. Frumiosa +42

    Thing is, all Stephens is guilty of is perfecting the model that so many other private colleges are striving for and which is the logical conclusion of (liberal) arts education + capitalism. She’s like the Donald Trump of art school owners – she’s not doing anything different than the rest of them, she’s just doing it louder.
    I remember when I was looking into colleges and visited NYU, where tuition + room and board was $40k a year (I’m dating myself, I know), and they boasted that their graduates made an average of $35k a year.

    1. merrite +10

      oh man, I go to NYU (did my undergrad here and am now finishing my MA) and this school has given me so many opportunities but it is so inexcusably bloated and poorly-managed. I know this is a private university, but charging $70k a year for room and board without much hope of serious financial aid is absolutely criminal.

  10. thewhelk +20

    I dropped out of an art school that was recommended to me by teachers because I realized it was one of these massive scams.

    Actually I can count on my hand the number of art schools I know that aren’t vampiric leeches coolly and constantly draining money out of the people in exchange for debt, and th and mode, is so’s profitable that we’re already set for every school to become that.

    I saw an Insitute of higher learning collapse from the inside into a neutron bomb of grift and crime, the only thing I learned is that the Children Are Doomed.

    2. shucksmahoney +2

      Put a ? before the URL, and check the drop-down ‘Cached’ tab on the Google result, that’ll take you to a recent version of a page.

    1. Sunshine +6

      There’s a good line in Fable III where Reaver, a huge egotist and massive bellend says “My ship, the Narcissist, is waiting at the shore. I would have called it the Reaver, but the name was taken.”

  13. alicia +14

    Every time a takedown of this family/school is posted or charges filed I rub my hands in glee, and every time it ends up not hurting them at all. I remember a few years ago when the real estate market was suffering and they went on a buying spree, illegally evicting a whole bunch of people in the process. I really thought they’d get shut down then, but no.

  14. anninyn +60

    I’ve always had a grudging… not respect, but appalled admiration for people like this. Like, you’re monsters. But you’re not like the monsters who try to pretend it was just all a huge mistake or misunderstandin. You are an unashamed monster. You’re evil and when the world says ‘wait, hold up, this is dreadful’ you grin back and say ‘yeah, what are you gonna do?’

    I mean, I still hope her empire crumbles and she loses everything, insert ‘first up against the wall when the revolution comes’ feelings here, blah blah, but a dusty, cobwebbed corner of myself can’t help but envy the sheer… self-posession of this.

    1. fakely_mctest +60

      I’m actually not 100% sure this isn’t some very elaborate Cruella de Vil AU cosplay.

    2. jenavira +14

      People like this always remind me of John Rogers talking about how, when they were writing villains for Leverage, they always had to tone them down because the real-life bad guys were too over the top to be believable in a TV show.

      2. Unreadaethel +5

        I’m still not sure Donald Trump is real. Or perhaps I just don’t want to believe he possibly could be.

  15. Haley +31

    More like Academy FART University, AMIRITE??

    (I am Elisa levels of not sorry about this.)

  17. mollyculetheory +54

    “on the strength of her J.D. she now asks to be called “Doctor””

    OF COURSE YOU DO. NOPE YOU ARE JUST MS. HUMAN MONSTER, ESQ. DEAL WITH IT THEN REPORT DIRECTLY TO THE TRASH.

  18. kellycatchpole +58

    was… was anyone else reading everything Elisa Stephens said in Jessica Walter As Lucille Bluth/Malory Archer Voice™?

  19. damanoid +17

    Ironically for a woman who owns so many classic cars, when the Feds finally came for her, she was forced to rely on her rocket pack to escape.

  20. johnwthompson +8

    Thought I recognized that school.* Raven Symone went there, according to the mostly-inessential profile of her on Broadly. Wonder how she ended up in such a place.

    * “school”

  21. pretty_monster +11

    you all know i’m not the same sort of monster as this woman, right?! i’m quite content to feed on my own young. your art student children are safe from me.

    (i might nibble an infant finger or toe now and then but that’s just harmless fun.)

  22. Jill T +10

    Must be time to leave the for-profit education business and start promoting dangerous weight-loss schemes.

  24. damanoid +9

    I wish to take this opportunity to announce the foundation of the University College Academy of All Things Ever. Here at UCAATE, degree-seeking students will receive the benefits of our uniquely success-affiliated training program which breaks down the boundaries of classroom learning with universalized tutoring in all things. Nuclear chemistry? UCAATE’s science department offers both nuclei and chemicals. Business economics? Sure, we do that thing. Occult thaumaturgy? UCAATE will physically put an owl on your face. Unlike some less scrupulous programs, UCAATE’s rigorous hands-on learning process guarantees that students will absolutely earn a degree-shaped wall enhancement. Tuition is, ohh let’s say 60,000 dollars. We think you will agree that this is practically a steal.

  25. spaghettiregretti +6

    she is a real-life disney villain. when she drives by in parades people actually hiss. i wish i were joking. i’m a student at this school, and i knew about six weeks in what it was (that didn’t stop them from tossing glitter into my eyes and dragging me into the school; three years of hounding phone calls when they learned i was interested in going there and then, as soon as i arrive, i’m pretty much abandoned until it comes time to pay up every semester). trust me, a lot of students know what’s going on. we don’t have a choice. we can’t leave, the credits don’t transfer. we’re trapped. only a six month grace period before the loans have to be paid back, many of them in the parent’s name.