The school, founded in New York in 1875 by artists seeking to break free from the academic, restrictive conventions of the National Academy of Design, offered a more
liberal approach sympathetic to the new modern spirit in American art.
Dr. Marie Bountrogianni, the provincial
Liberal opposition party's postsecondary education critic and a former faculty member at McMaster University, is
sympathetic to the universities but does not agree with their
approach.