Good Art is A Process

I’m an unlikely advocate for the Arts Initiative. I have no discernible musical or artistic talent. I have not played a role in a student play. But like many Columbia students, I believe that CUarts is so important to my experience here at Columbia that I must speak out against the gutting of the greatest program to impact student life at Columbia since the dining hall started offering Wilma’s omelets.

Since the administration’s move of the Arts Initiative from the president’s office to the graduate School of the Arts over election break, its next budget has been cut by 30 percent. We might know more, but administrators (Dean Becker of the School of the Arts in particular) have been outrageously uncooperative even by Columbia’s standards.
I have a feeling that much of this may be a simple misunderstanding. Like a person who just doesn’t see anything more than a bunch of dots in a Seurat, the problem with Dean Becker’s vision of the Arts Initiative’s value has been one of an uninitiated perspective. While it’s easy to justify a 30 percent budget cut to a program you view as a glorified ticket booth for New York theaters, it’s much harder to take a step back to view the whole of the Initiative and how it impacts student life both on and off campus. Since 2004, CUarts has provided $230,000 in support of student projects, as well as supplying tickets to on-campus programming, constituting 60 percent of the ticket booth’s sales. Each year, there have been 38,000 visits to museums via Passport to New York. Its work has even reached our syllabi, with professors now assigning MoMA exhibits, operas at the Met, and other cultural events in addition to traditional coursework. The beneficiaries represent every Columbia school and affiliate, making the Initiative a vital element of student life across schools and disciplines. It’s certainly not meant solely to benefit the School of the Arts.

What allows the Arts Initiative to be a program of such extraordinary and dynamic content is the process in which it was created. When President Bollinger conceived of the program in 2004, he deliberately solicited a wide range of student input on how the arts at Columbia could play a more meaningful role. Bollinger’s prescience ensured that CUarts would grow to become the rarest of all Columbia specimens: an entity loved across every division in the University. It’s not enough that a particular administrator created a good program by listening to students. Administrators come and go, but the good programs they create shouldn’t come and go with them. With this in mind, CUarts was moved to the School of the Arts to protect it from the drastic changes a new president might make. Student oversight in the Arts Initiative must be similarly institutionalized, or else CUarts could be reduced in a few years to a ticket stand and cheap entry to museums. A student advisory board, representative of all of the university’s constituent schools, is needed to ensure that CUarts remains a program dedicated to the needs of all students, not just the goals of a single graduate school within the University. The first cut has already come, with the elimination of the class of 2014’s cultural orientation event, traditionally a reception for new students held at a museum.

Dean Becker is relatively new to Columbia, arriving in 2007 after 20 years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is likely unfamiliar with the depth of student governance in all aspects of Columbia. Ever since the 1968 protests, we’ve traditionally provided input through institutional channels ranging in scope from the University Senate to the allocation of student funding through the various student governing boards. As students within a residential Ivy League institution, we are rightly concerned with oversight of the institutions that impact our daily lives.

On April 14, a group of students are meeting with Dean Becker to discuss the direction of CUarts. I hope that we can work with Dean Becker to protect the vibrant environment for the arts that the Arts Initiative has created. As Dean Becker herself said recently in a speech at Boston University in February, “fundamental to such creative environments is the belief in and commitment to process.” Advocates for the Arts Initiative, along with the hundreds of signatories of our “Save the Arts Initiative” petition, are ultimately committed to a transparent and inclusive process that engages those most affected by any change in CUarts: the students and alumni from every school at Columbia. Dean Becker is obligated to institutionalize a process for student oversight of CUarts, ensuring that the Initiative will continue to thrive at Columbia.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in East Asian languages and cultures. He is a member of Advocates for the Arts Initiative.