NYU Arts School offers students a dance video during coronavirus rather than a refund

Some students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts were startled to find the school respond to their request for partial refunds with a video of the dean dancing to a nearly 30-year-old pop hit.

For the spring semester of 2020, NYU like most universities has gone to what it calls “remote instruction,” meaning classes and other materials are now only available online.

Some students felt this sort of “virtual NYU” was not the same experience they would get in a normal semester and requested some refund of their tuition and fees, which are north of $58,000.

NYU Dean Allyson Green, in response, said there would be no money returned. But she did send along a video of her dancing in an apartment to REM’s 1991 song “Losing My Religion.”

The Dean of Tisch sent this as an attachment to the email saying they won’t give us our money back. Embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/Q63x5GqsJm

— Breitbart is Racist Filth! (@michale_price) March 23, 2020

Among the students appalled by this response was Michale Price, who tweets under the moniker “Breitbart is Racist Filth!”

“The Dean of Tisch sent this as an attachment to the email saying they won’t give us our money back,” Breitbart is Racist Filth! Tweeted Friday. “Embarrassing.”

Ms. Green provided the following statement to NBC News’ New York affiliate:

“The focus of my career as a performer, choreographer, and dance educator and my most authentic mode of expression has always been dance,” it read. “In the video, I shared the song with which I have welcomed first-year students to the Tisch School of the Arts for the past eight years. It is a piece that - as I explained in the accompanying email - speaks to frustration and disappointment, and that helped see me through the loss of 30 friends to AIDS - another difficult period for artists.

“What I mean to demonstrate is my certainty that even with the unprecedented hardships of social distancing and remotely held classes, it is still possible for the Tisch community to make art together, and that all the artists in our school will find ways to remain closely connected even as circumstances challenge us,” she continued. “I regret it if my email left the reasons for my dancing misunderstood - although I will note that I have also received many positive acknowledgments - but its intent was surely neither frivolous nor disrespectful.”