Purdue News
Purdue News"Whatever you do, encourage the public to support arts programs in schools, facilitate arts festivals in the countryside, and establish the image of a nation that loves and respects the arts, for that is one of the hallmarks of a first-rate civilization."
James Michener, This Noble Land: My Vision for America
Late on Friday, Nov. 14, after signing H.R. 2107, President Clinton announced that "The National Endowment for the Arts will continue to provide active and visible support to important American arts communities, and is funded at $98 million, $1.5 million below the 1997 level."
This occurred after a summer of bitter, contentious debate about the future of the Endowment. In July, opponents of the NEA in the House of Representatives, by voting for zero funding, had come close to eliminating the agency altogether. Strong support in the Senate guaranteed survival, however, and eventually a bipartisan House-Senate Appropriations Committee worked out a compromise.
What is it about this tiny, beleaguered agency -- the annual cost of which per taxpayer comes to half the price of a cup of coffee -- that arouses so much partisan controversy, creating campaigns of misinformation every year, and turning the American arts into a battered political football?
First, a quick overview of the Endowment. Since its founding in 1965 as part of the Great Society agenda that declared war on poverty, the number of symphonic orchestras in the United States has quadrupled, theater companies have increased eightfold, and annual audiences for arts events are now calculated to exceed those for professional sports. That there are now more opportunities than ever before for Americans to "participate in and be enriched by cultural experiences" is directly related to federal funding for the arts over the past 30 years.
What, then, is the problem? Why have opponents labored so long to wipe out the Endowment? Some point to the fewer than 40 grants deemed "controversial," out of the more than 110,000 that have been awarded. Others attack the agency as "elitist," and are bothered by the prospect of using federal funds to support "highbrow pastimes." Still others, like New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein, claim that since art is "an essentially undemocratic achievement by extraordinarily gifted individuals," it simply should not be "thrust into a marketplace marked by clamorous demands for democratic distribution."
But if we agree with James Michener that the arts are the hallmark of any great civilization, and we ponder where they would be in this country without the remarkable proliferation that the NEA has generated in 30 years, then it seems very difficult to justify dropping federal support. Without the Endowment, our cultural landscape would seem a very different place.
At Purdue Convocations, specifically, the impact of the NEA has been enormous. Convos has benefited from several direct grants, such as the one which, in 1984, allowed us to both create a staff position for fund-raising and to launch our Friends of Convocations organization, which now brings the department some $200,000 annually in contributed income. Many of the great dance, opera, theater and chamber ensembles we have presented -- among them, the New York City Opera, Western Opera Theater, the Acting Company, the Ying Quartet, Paul Taylor Dance, David Parsons, Twyla Tharp, Margaret Jenkins, Alwin Nikolais, Hubbard Street, Urban Bush Women -- have been able to undertake the huge expense of touring nationally largely because of support from the NEA.
And what of the impact on the rest of the country of the thousands of arts education and outreach programs made possible through Endowment funding? What of the literally hundreds of thousands of children and seniors who have been given free to reduced-rate admissions to major dance, opera and theater presentations? Without the Endowment, far fewer important dance, opera and theater organizations would have existed in the first place -- and dance audiences, in particular, would not have grown from one million to what is now estimated to be close to 20 million annually. Such observations suggest that the charge of "elitism" is simply misguided. The fact is that federal dollars have created a solid tradition of access to the arts in American rural communities, as well as in a large number of working class and minority urban neighborhoods.
To be sure, for arts advocates, President Clinton's signing of H.R. 2107 was a rather bittersweet victory. Although arts funding is alive, and will continue without the mandatory phaseout provisions that had been threatened, the Endowment still faces an uphill battle. No matter how innocuous they sound, there's a strong possibility that some of the new guidelines may serve only to further politicize the process of arts funding.
Specifically, I'm concerned about the provision in the current bill which will add six members of Congress to the National Council on the Arts. Also, the proposal to increase block grants to individual states could, in the long run, have the ironic effect of weakening awards that had earlier always been thoughtfully screened by panelists experienced in the appropriate field.
The words Jane Alexander spoke before resigning as NEA chair in early November are simple and to the point: "As our nation moves into the next millennium, I believe that the Endowment's role as a national voice for the arts will become even more vital."
I hope very much that she's right.