President’s Address
Alumni Reunion
University of the Arts
October 17, 2009

Welcome, graduates of the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, the Philadelphia Musical Academy, the Museum School of Art, the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, the Museum College of Art, the Dance Academy, the Philadelphia College of Art, the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, and the University of the Arts.

It’s easy to laugh, I know, at the alphabet soup of acronyms that represents our institutional history: PMSIA, PMA, PCPA, etc.

But I'm also proud of the heritage represented by that catalog of names. Not only because each of those remarkable educational and artistic institution graduated some of America's most important artists—painter Charles Sheeler, composer Marc Blitzstein, metals artist Olaf Skoogfors, choreographer Judith Jamison, experimental filmmakers the Quay Brothers, bassist Stanley Clarke, illustrator Roger Hane—and so very many more.

I’m proud too because the history of the University of the Arts is the story of successive generations of faculty, alumni, trustees, and administrators re-envisioning the institutions they cared about, responding to the challenges of their times, imagining the future of arts education.

Thus the Museum School became an accredited, degree-granting college. Two classical conservatories became a comprehensive college of performing arts. And neighboring arts colleges became the nation's first university devoted exclusively to the education of artists, performers, designers, media makers, and arts educators.

Now, these decisions came about for different reasons. The decision makers weren't always high-minded. Sometimes they were responding to fiscal crisis. At other times, they were reacting to national trends within their fields. At still others, they were truly dreaming a new future.

But whatever the immediate reason for institutional change, at its root was a commitment to young artists and an overwhelming desire to preserve, extend, and reinvent an extraordinary artistic mission and legacy. And that makes me very proud.

Yes, it also makes summarizing the history of the institution a tongue-twisting challenge! But I think of those acronyms as our genetic code. Instead of sequences of amino acids, we have interlocking histories of institutional evolution and transformation. And, as with DNA, there is buried in our genetic code something essential about our institutional character and potential: I believe it's a fearlessness about the future, a resiliency, and a willingness to contemplate change—even fundamental change.

Now, you're probably all worrying, wondering, why is he telling us this? There's not another name change in our future, is there?

No, I hope not! There are only so many acronyms I can hold in my head at one time!

But there is change in our future. In part, this is because there has been radical change in our recent past. And the near horizon of the future is crowded with challenges we—and many like institutions—must soon confront.

The recession, of course, is the most immediately apparent of these challenges. The University is weathering the recession. We have made significant cuts in our administrative expenses to compensate for declining revenue. Our faculty and staff have made sacrifices in order to help the institution through this storm. But at the same time we have increased financial aid for students, have filled all open faculty positions, and have continued to improve our instructional facilities. I hope you will have a chance to visit the Caplan Center for the Performing Arts, the new homes of the Industrial Design and Graphic Design departments in Terra Hall, and the new Foundation floor in Anderson Hall.

And these investments seem to have made a difference to our students. Retention from last year to this was our very best in years. More students than ever before in recent memory chose to come back here—and this during the worst recession in almost anyone's memory.

As a result of our expense reductions, personal sacrifices made by faculty and staff, the commitment and enthusiasm of our students for the institution, and the generosity of alumni and friends, we have significantly exceeded our revenue expectations for the year.

And so, again, I say, the University is weathering this recession well. We will certainly have to continue to plan carefully and to spend wisely. Because even though some economists tell us the recession is technically over, its effects will continue to be felt—especially in the non-profit sector and in education—for several years to come.

But the recession is only the most obvious challenge we face. Let me, very briefly, identify some of the challenges we will be called upon to rise to in the coming years.

This year, there were more high school graduates than at any time in more than a decade. But over the next decade, those numbers will fall—especially in the northeast and mid-Atlantic which are the most crowded higher education markets in the country. We will, all of us, have to work harder, cast our nets farther afield, and spend more to keep enrollments stable.

At the same time, parents, legislators, even college presidents, are asking themselves how much higher the costs of higher education will—can—rise. Is there a tuition bubble that will burst—just as the housing bubble did?

And what of the arts fields and arts professions? They have changed dramatically in recent decades—in part because of technology, in part because of globalization, in part because of changes in government funding, in part because of shifts in arts markets themselves and in the industries that commission and purchase and fund art—like newspapers, for instance, and the recording industry.

Artists and creative professionals have always had to be entrepreneurial, adaptable, perceptive, and thoughtful about the changes taken place around them. And this need hasn’t gone away. Indeed, it may be intensifying. At the same time that these changes have made things more difficult for artists, they have also created new expressive possibilities, new avenues for reaching audiences, new conceptual problems to be solved.

There are myriad other issues we might identify: A growing ideology of instrumentalism in the country—a sense that education, that art must be able to demonstrate their value in economic terms. The democratization, if you will, of the means of artistic production. While this has made it more affordable for a much larger population to express itself creatively, it has also resulted in a leveling of artistic expectation on the part of audiences—a growing sense that artistic expression is disposable.

These are, I would argue, massive changes, enormous challenges. I won’t say they are more momentous than at any time in the past. Each generation has faced its challenges, and each has thought them more momentous than those of the prior generation.

But these are our challenges and they are significant. They demand response. They demand that institutions face them head-on, fearlessly and creatively, with an openness to change, to reinvention, to new names, alliances, and approaches.

And that openness is precisely what is written into this institution’s DNA, its history, its culture.

And it is for that reason that I am not intimidated by the challenges we face—overwhelming as some might appear to be. Rather, I am vitalized. Because that is what this institution does: it grapples with challenges unafraid that it will be overcome, confident that it will emerge new but still and always itself.

This institution, its alumni, its students and faculty, its staff are already filling with questions and ideas, looking to the future as to a score waiting to be written, a canvas to be painted, a silence or an emptiness to be filled with sound and image.

This institution is our communal artwork, one that we revise and rework from generation to generation.

I am looking forward to painting it, sculpting it, performing it with all of you.