It seems of late that Andrew Taylor’s writing on Artful Manager has been been inspiring me to connect ideas he presents with those I found in other articles. My entry yesterday is one recent example.
Usually I feel elated and proud of myself for seeing connections between ideas from different places. Some thoughts his writings evoked yesterday were rather disturbing though. I started thinking about subjects everyone wants to think they are on the right side of, but if they make an honest assessment, find they share a burden of blame.
I was reading Andrew Taylor’s Measuring Value keynote speech delivered to the NJ Theatre Alliance. It is mostly a discussion of how any institution or individual that is providing funding to a non-profit concern wants to track the value of the non-profit’s operations on the community. People and institutions are interested in a return on their investment be it serving greater numbers, how effectively these numbers are being served or any other criteria.
He goes on to note that as time goes by, it is the measures that define arts organizations rather than the mission and the elements of the organization that make it unique.
Nothing terrible about this to be sure. But it was a couple sentences he quoted that elicted some memories of other articles. The first is from psychologist Kenneth Kenniston:
“We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up.”
The second is from two attendees at the conference at which Andrew spoke:
“Said one participant, “we’re constantly trying to fit ourselves into what others want us to be.” Said one funder on a panel discussion, “We’re moving away from relationship-based philanthropy,” toward funding based on matrices and aligned with corporate brand.”
I recently read two articles where school focus on what type of graduates they were producing lead to some discomforting results.
The first was Jonathan Kozol’s article in the September issue of Harper’s magazine, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid.” Among the educational disparities he notes, (and as you imagine, there are many) is that at affluent schools, students have choice of electives like journalism and computer graphics while the poorer schools had vocational courses like multiple levels of hair dressing and sewing.
Essentially, there is an expectation about the jobs students at each school will fill when they graduate regardless of their achievements or aspirations.
I mention this as something of a counterpoint to another recent article, this one from the New Yorker, “Getting In- The social logic of Ivy League admissions.” by Malcolm Gladwell. He basically talks about how the Ivy League schools shifted from merit based admissions to other criteria in order to keep their student body a predominantly WASP demographic.
Among the criteria, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen, which Gladwell quotes, were manliness –
“The admissions committee viewed evidence of ‘manliness’ with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him…”
Things that kept people out of the Ivy League were equally intangible-
“…they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files. “This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness,” read one. Another comment reads, “Seems a tad frothy.”
The Ivys’ focus shifted from merit
“to a ‘best graduates’ approach to admissions…The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance.”
True, academic success doesn’t equal success in the real world.(Witness Harvard grads and C students, George W. Bush and John Kerry.) This is another example though of how measuring the success of schools by the type of human being they promote can have negative results for certain groups.
I am not saying the No Child Left Behind measures are good. I actually slogged through writing all this to make the following suggestion–if this sort of institutionalization of expectations happens from middle schools all the way up to Ivy League, is it occuring in our arts organizations as well?
The Ivys are doing this sort of thing, Gladwell says, to protect the perception of their brand.
In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Jewish applicants. As Karabel writes, “In the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.” No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain.
He also uses the following anecdote:
“I once had a conversation with someone who worked for an advertising agency that represented one of the big luxury automobile brands. He said that he was worried that his client’s new lower-priced line was being bought disproportionately by black women. He insisted that he did not mean this in a racist way. It was just a fact, he said. Black women would destroy the brand’s cachet. It was his job to protect his client from the attentions of the socially undesirable.”
Though this example has a tinge of racism, this is a real concern for any brand–“Sometimes when companies try to create more of a mass market, a lot of the early adopters feel the brand is being bastardized,..”(from Entrepeneur.com)
So reading these different articles this week got me thinking. Are arts organizations trying to protect their brand either consciously or unconsciously by keeping the bulk of the perceived undesirables out and just letting a token few in? We talk about needing to diversify our audiences and perform outreach to different communities. But do we really want them showing up?
The Kozol article cites schools claiming “rich variations in ethnic background” but in actuality had 2,800 black and Hispanic students, 1 Asian and 3 whites. When arts organizations are claiming to have diverse audiences, are they basing it on similarly tilted numbers? Are they only expending energy and resources to maintain a ratio at which they feel comfortable using the “ethnically diverse audience” tag.
I am not saying it is intentional or maliciously done. I am just asking people to honestly examine the situation the arts are in and figure out if the system is placing limits on who our organizations can appeal to.
If as, I quoted in Andrew Taylor’s article, arts orgs are feeling pressure to conform to a corporate brand or be what other people want us to be (ie people with money), what about feeling pressure to maintain a certain aura for individual patrons? There are certain types of people who give lots of money who essentially keep our doors open. Are we afraid they will stop giving if they feel our ballet/symphony/theatre loses its cachet?
When we read in Kozol’s article or hear on the news that in New Orleans the affluent moved to the suburbs leaving the poor in the city, can it help but enter our subconscious that if the affluent leave us, those left won’t have the means to regularly buy enough tickets or donate enough money?
I am sure there was similar hand wringing at some point over whether offically telling people not to worry about dressing up, it is okay to come in jeans, was going to destroy the brand. That hasn’t driven too many people away. But with the whole controversy over the inconsiderate patrons who come in late and talk on their cell phones or to their friends, there is already additional erosion to the brand transpiring. Can arts organizations afford to risk further potential damage to their public image?
You may damn me for being so politically incorrect and posing these insensitive questions. I am partially playing devil’s advocate, but partially serious. You may think your company is enlightened and doesn’t have any of this taint upon them. But really, unless you are wholly independent of private, foundation or government funding, I feel safe in saying you ain’t as pure as you think. I am certainly not making that claim and I live in a place where I am in the ethnic minority.
When I talked about arts organizations bearing some of the blame at the beginning of this entry, I was essentially referring to a situation I have talked about before where organizations say they aren’t elitist, but don’t make an effort to alter that perception either. I think all these questions I have posed about fear of brand erosion contributing factors to this reluctance to act. (That an some are elitist.)
But at the same time, as I noted, arts organizations are in a sort of trap of expectations. We can resolve to honestly change our programming and really go about cultivating a new audience over the long term and making our offerings accessible to them. There are foundations out there who will be thrilled to underwrite it in return for…you know it…reporting measurable results.
It is a lot tougher to change audiences and donors. Many of the decisions they make are beyond an organization’s scope of control. If they want a Cadillac and they feel you are offering an Elantra, they may leave. When they leave, the Cadillac dealer and the real estate company that specialize in multi-million dollar homes who both underwrite your shows each year may decide to leave as well. (I have seen the ad the bank puts in my playbill and the one they put in the symphony’s playbill. Its pretty clear whose money they value more.)
Then maybe some of your board members leave because they no longer have the opportunity to socialize with the people they want to network. Your fundraising capacity suffers a little more because now you no longer have the matching funds for foundation grant proposals.
In the face of such possible outcomes, is it any wonder an arts institution might feel they were making their organizational identity subservient to measurable outcomes and brand identity? Is it any wonder they keep desperately catering to a segment of the population that is quickly dying off? (And not just for their $10 billion in bequests!)