Last year, I joined several colleagues in The Curriculum Project. Together, we investigated the state of higher education for community cultural development in the United States. Our findings and recommendations were published by Imagining America; they can be downloaded at http://www.curriculumproject.net/report.html.

A key issue that emerged from our research was the challenge of offering students truly meaningful opportunities for community engagement as an integral element of education. The type of work that Appalshop does cannot be learned entirely in the classroom; students need the give-and-take, the sustained experience of community, to develop the requisite skills and sensitivities. Our research revealed difficulties in building equitable partnerships between universities and the community partners who could accept student placements. We saw that constraints on time built into academic systems made it difficult to achieve the continuity of relationship so essential to good practice. There were strong community engagement opportunities here and there, but most were seen, even by their creators and colleagues, as less than sufficient. The challenge of connecting the culture of the university and the cultures of surrounding communities needed to be recognized both as formidable and as well worth tackling.

Jamie Haft’s essay foregrounds these challenges. In describing her own eye-opening experience with Appalshop, a leading practitioner of community cultural development, she draws out questions of privilege and inclusion, questions that go to the heart of education’s purpose. She explains that she and her fellow Tisch Scholars returned to NYU from their Appalshop experience only to discover that the university will not nurture and support the type of learning they experienced there. She quotes keynote speaker Michael Roth, then President of the California College of Arts: “The university is no longer a place where one goes to access opportunity, but rather, is just a mechanism for preserving privilege.” In this 2006 essay, she predicts a global crisis gathering force beneath the radar of privilege. As we read her words today, the crisis has arrived.

When we began The Curriculum Project in the summer of 2007, we remarked that higher education programs oriented toward community-based artists had been proliferating at a time when funding was scarce for the field of practice students in these programs would enter. Would there be jobs for graduates? As I write this in early 2009, the funding situation has become much more dire. As Roadside’s artistic director Dudley Cocke recently wrote, members of Congress succeeded during debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus package in portraying the arts as a “toxic amenity.” The Tisch Scholars program has ended, and with it the Appalshop immersion experience for NYU students that Jamie describes. Appalshop and other community-based organizations are facing unsettling future prospects, given that both contributed and earned income are falling with the economic downturn. There is hope that the new administration will recognize and support the essential importance of culture to recovery; and that university leaders will be inspired by The Curriculum Project and others’ urgings to invest in and configure programs in ways that will prepare students to take part in that vital work. But whether these hopes become reality remains to be seen.

Arlene Goldbard

Read the Article