One of the plusses about working for a university is that your position is more generally secure than comparable ones in other arts organizations. On the other hand, I have quite a few people working for me on a regular basis who aren’t in a funded position looking to their job for some degree of support.

In some cases, it is worse being part of a state funded institution because no one thinks you need donations. Because you are competing for government funding, it is rather difficult to cultivate one person from whom you can make an ask since there are legislators, governors and levels of college administrators who all get a say in how much you end up getting.

In my case, it is even worse. Today I had to make a pitch before faculty and staff as to why the priorities in my strategic plan action items deserve funding. They in turn get to vote on whether my suggestions get to be college priorities.

My problems are twofold:

1- There were only two people I counted at the assembly who weren’t pitching their own action plans. Thus I was talking to people who were going to vote for their own priorities. There wasn’t anyone in the room that there was any chance of convincing.

2- There were people there pitching to fund life altering programs like getting enough staffing to enable the rural poor to attend college. Even though I was looking to do rather worthy things, the least of which was to get the office clerk reclassified so that she is paid properly for the responsibilities she has been handling for 15 years, I couldn’t help but think my requests were frivolous.

Recalling that I had read something similar in Artsjournal.com’s “Is There a Better Case for the Arts” discussion, I hopped over there. It was pretty much the exact same story, an arts person went before a city council to ask for funding immediately after a group trying to reduce infant mortality rates.

Theatre Communication Group’s Executive Director, Ben Cameron, address this:

…pitting the arts against other causes IS a trap. For a healthy society, it should be a both/and and not an either/or. Many of the past questionnaires ask us to prioritize how we spend money–e.g. which is more important between infant mortality and the arts–rather than asking us to describe those characteristics that comprise a healthy society. If we could look at the latter, there would be room and a necessity of a creative approach to policy–one that seeks to promote a more holistic sense of national health in which the arts MUST be counted–rather than the traps of competing causes.

Going back and reading that won’t make me any more likely to be funded, but for me it provides a view of the world to advocate and work toward shaping.