Lyme Academy of Fine Arts

BFA degrees were first awarded in 1992, and between 2014 and 2019 the academy was affiliated with the University of New Haven.[2] Under that agreement, Lyme kept ownership of the campus and its own Board of Trustees; New Haven acquired the academic degree programs.[3] The business plan underlying that cooperation was that 200 students would enroll at the academy, a goal that was never reached; according the Michael Thomas Duffy, chair of the academy's board in 2021, the academy enrolled about 120 students at most.[2] In 2019, "the University of New Haven discontinued degree-granting academic offerings".[4] New Haven president Steven H. Kaplan said that at the time the affiliation with Lyme Academy would add a fine arts degree to the university, but the academy struggled to get enrollment figures up (with 139 students for the fall of 2017, and 122 in August 2018)[3]

After a few difficult years, the academy hired new staff and a new artistic director Jordan Sokol, and saw about 120 students enroll for the summer term of 2021. At the time it had a budget of $1.657 million.[5] The board planned to return to the earlier goals of the academy and adopted a manifesto for its reboot, including "adhering to the philosophy of Chandler, who believed artists needed to learn the fundamentals of figurative art ... in small classes with a high teacher to student ratio." They hoped to enroll 10 full-time students in the fall of 2021, and possibly 15 in the spring of 2022. Tuition for full-time core students was set at $9,600 per year. In addition, the academy planned to offer perhaps two dozen workshops annually, as well as four weekly part-time classes.[5]