Art Initiative in talks after hit with 30 percent budget cut

The Columbia University Arts Initiative is currently in talks with the Graduate School of Arts and the Office of the President to determine how it will scale back its program budgets to meet a requested 30 percent requested budget cut.

The Office of the President asked for the budget reduction this week.

Formed by President Lee Bollinger in 2004 to increase student and alumni access to the arts, CUArts includes programs like Ticket and Information Center, ArtsLink, Passport to New York, Columbia Alumni Arts League, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Student Arts Support Fund, and the Lunch with the Arts Initiative series.

CUArts Events and Outreach Coordinator Chad Miller said at an Engineering Student Council meeting earlier this week that the price of tickets purchased at the TIC kiosk will not increase as a result. Still, TIC will have to make cuts with the requested budget decrease.

He said that it is still unclear how other CUArts programs will be affected.

Diana Levy, CC ’12 and a member of the King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe, said she is concerned about the cuts, since her group receives funding from CUArts. “I really hope that the arts groups on campus will still have enough funding to go around,” Levy said.

Last November, CUArts was integrated into the School of the Arts from under the Office of the President, but the School of the Arts was not responsible for the request that these cuts be made.

After CUArts moved into the School of the Arts, students and alumni formed a group, “Advocates of the Arts Initiative” to protest the change. But so far, there has been no official word from the administrators of that group.

Columbia College Student Council 2010 President Cliff Massey was on the advisory board in November for the Advocates of the Arts Initiative, and said that he was concerned about how the budget cuts would affect the staff of the Arts Initiative.

“These people have worked very hard to build this program from scratch and have been behind many of the campus events that have happened in the past few years,” he said. “I would hate to see them lose their jobs due to mandatory budget cuts.”