Draft of December 4, 2009

Town Hall Conversation #3: Arts & Culture
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - Fashion Institute of Technology

Summary

Interrelationship of Arts & Culture and Universities
1. Colleges and universities are among the greatest repositories of arts and culture in the 
world.  However, they are not just repositories but also places where the impulses and 
skills that lead to the creation of art and culture are nurtured, trained and funneled.
2. Critical thinking, which is integral to college and university education, is in part the 
process of experiencing things that don't have easy answers.  The arts represent a 
particular example of critical thinking.  We should ask how we can apply core 
principles in the arts to reading, composition, science.  For example, in teaching 
written composition, might it be instructive to compare how one describes things in 
writing with how one "describes" things through art.
3. In our colleges and universities, we regularly seek understanding of different cultures.  
Understanding culture is critical to new ways of seeing art.  (That said, we would not 
necessarily want to privilege an understanding of the underlying culture as a means to 
understanding a work of art over the emotional and visceral reaction it provokes in us.
4. We should challenge all of our faculty to bring the arts into their classrooms, to build 
arts into their curricula.  Residencies for artists can be instrumental in this.

Role of Arts & Culture in Economic Revitalization
1. Colleges and universities must examine how the arts and culture can be part of a 
winning strategy for economic development in a region; must be repositories of data 
and best practices on such strategies.
2. The Alliance for the Arts here in NY City has done extensive research on the 
economic impact of arts and culture.  (Randall Borscheidt, president.)  The "draw" 
that arts institutions provide a locality creates a fertile environment for local small 
businesses.
3. The arts help create life in underused urban areas and "revitalize" them.  Arts 
organizations are "anchors" for activity in a community.

Arts and the Individual
1. New York has more human capital in the arts that is overeducated and underutilized 
than any other place in the world.  The sheer number of artists in the State is 
overwhelming.  
2. How can SUNY take advantage of this?  We should ask: what could artist-in-
residence program be on your campuses, especially outside the generally conceived of 
boundaries of "the Arts"?
* Artists need space above all else.  Few have access to it at the level they need.  
Colleges and universities could provide this.
* Artists often spend a great deal of time outside of the U.S.  How could we 
change this to the benefit of our students, faculties, community through 
residences on our campuses?
* Artists often engage with the most pressing issues of the day and provide cutting-
edge responses to them.  How could we take advantage of this more fully on our 
campuses - beyond our departments of art?

Arts and Communities
1. How can we re-think partnerships between arts organizations and higher education 
institutions across NY State to create new paradigms for their interaction?
2. Most arts organizations have less than a $5 million operating budget and rent space, 
spending a very large portion of their budget on this.  How can universities support 
the infrastructure needs of arts organizations through resource sharing?
3. Communities large and small generally feel ownership and pride in their arts 
organizations.  These institutions provide a "pride of place" contributing to a sense of 
community.
4. The arts are a part of culture but not synonymous with it.  We should look for art 
among the cultural aspects of our communities, for example in the music of our 
spiritual communities.
5. The arts are means of expressing culture.  Can SUNY institutions help their 
communities identify and disseminate their culture through the arts, thereby engaging 
residents with their communities and their SUNY institutions to create a greater 
quality of place?
6. How can universities serve as intermediaries to connect arts organizations with their 
communities?  How can our universities help bring arts into our everyday lives, close 
the distance between our lives and the arts?
7. What opportunities exist for strategic partnerships between universities and arts 
organizations in their communities?   Might universities be able to assist arts 
organizations in meeting their infrastructure needs and thereby bring arts to our 
campuses at lower cost than they otherwise could?
8. Arts and culture allows us to understand who we are, how we are interrelated, what 
"diversity" and "globalization" mean.
* The Queens museum, located in what is arguably the most diverse location in the 
US, has taken the approach that by exhibiting Queens-based artists it can 
represent the enormity of cultures that exist in our world and link these to our 
immediate communities.
* The Studio Museum in Harlem explores through the art it exhibits the connections 
between the African and Caribbean communities that surround it.

Arts and the World
1. Arts may serve as a vehicle through which we can embrace globalization and the 
diversity of our world, through which we can explore how the universal meets the 
particular. 
2. SUNY colleges and universities may serve as links among the arts and artists across 
the state and throughout the world.
Access to Arts & Culture
1. It is important to nurture the arts in our communities and provide access to the arts for 
everyone, everywhere.  What are the roles for universities in this?  How can 
universities create new audiences among those who don't see the relevance of the arts 
in their lives?
2. We do not yet understand well enough the access points to the arts.  Universities can 
provide research on this.

Roles for SUNY with Respect to Arts & Culture: What We Can Do
1. Communication across SUNY institutions is a huge problem.  We should explore how 
we can use technology to create awareness of what's going on in arts & culture 
throughout our system, and in the world in general, at any moment.
* We should be able to do this in the same way it's now possible to search the 
System for faculty research.
* Use technology to promote state-wide online discussions of arts and culture; 
create ongoing "wikis."
* Make SUNY a gateway to "all things art." 
2. In thinking about communication, consider that arts organizations always need 
information and tools to find their audiences.  How could SUNY institutions help 
them do this?
3. Our campuses are already engaged extensively in the arts.  We need to think harder 
about how we can engage our communities in what we do.  This means not only 
exploring new kinds of initiatives along these lines but thinking in nuts-and-bolts 
terms about the logistics of getting people onto our campuses.
4. We have skills and instruction in them on our campuses that are of great value to arts 
organizations, things such as grant writing and accounting.  These are things of value 
we can provide in return for the contribution of these organizations to our educational 
enterprise.
5. The System should make "engagement of the community in the arts and cultural life 
of the campus" something we measure, something for which the System holds 
campuses accountable.
6. The diversity of institutions within SUNY should be something we use to explore the 
different ways in which we can support arts and culture - for both our students and 
our communities.
7. We can build into our budgets mechanisms that encourage us to embed the arts 
deeply into the fabric of our campuses.  (E.g., "We'll know we've been successful 
when the maintenance budget of each campus includes funding for string quartet 
performances.)
8. SUNY should create a "Chancellor's Performance Series" that delivers performing 
arts integrated with other disciplines to PreK-12 students.
9. The sciences and the arts are too silo-ed on our campuses.  How might we combine 
them in the same facilities in ways that encourage us to use art to engage students 
with concepts in science or math, or to use these disciplines to provide new ways of 
exploring and understanding the arts?
10. We should look at how our SUNY campuses are already engaged with their 
communities in arts and culture initiatives, especially in small towns where we're the 
only game in town.  We should create a database of these initiatives, of best practices 
in them.
11. These days, there's vastly more federal funding for STEM initiatives than for the arts 
and humanities.  SUNY should fund a pilot study that evaluates if and how teaching 
in the STEM disciplines is enhanced by incorporating the arts into pedagogies.  
Funding such a study would be important because so little is known about this now 
and so little research is being done.  Among other things, it should evaluate the "scale-
ability" of such pedagogical approaches.
12. As the SUNY system and SUNY institutions think about all of the issues raised 
today - communication, pedagogies, infrastructure - they should bring artists 
themselves into the discussions.
13. It should be our goal not simply to find new ways of teaching the arts on our 
campuses but to explore how we might truly infuse arts and culture throughout our 
campuses.
14. SUNY should host the world's largest art show simultaneously among its 64 
campuses, beginning with a single opening night introduced by the Chancellor via 
webcast.

Key Points
1. It is important to express the intentionality of arts & culture on our campuses.  This is 
best embodied through leadership from presidents, boards of trustees and the 
Chancellor on this topic.
2. Robust and multi-faceted communications is critical to ensure that the resources of 
each of the 64 campuses are available to all of them.
3. We must think imaginatively about how to incorporate arts and culture in the curricula 
and pedagogies of the sciences, social sciences and math disciplines.




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