Pardon me while I celebrate a landmark commitment to my pet project. Betsy and Dick DeVos of Grand Rapids, Michigan have committed $22.5 million to supporting our arts management institute at the Kennedy Center, which has now been renamed the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center.
This pledge, a mix of operating and endowment funds, gives permanence to a project we initiated in 2001 with our Fellowship Program.
It must be the largest gift ever for arts management training in the United States or abroad, acknowledgment of the perceived importance of arts management training.
I have been lobbying for more attention for arts management training since the early 1990s. It has been abundantly clear to me that we spend a disproportionate share of professional arts training on performers and creators. In fact, billions of dollars are spent educating dancers, singers, pianists and actors. We spend a pittance on training the people who will employ them, who will find resources to support their work and will attract their audiences.
Many universities have started arts management programs over the past 30 years. I taught in the NYU Masters program for six years. These programs have provided a foundation of arts management knowledge for young arts managers but they are not sufficient to meet our arts management training needs. We have thousands of managers without sufficient training at senior levels of many of our arts institutions. These hardworking, talented individuals are not likely to return to school for a postgraduate degree at this point in their careers.
We need opportunities for practicing arts managers to hone their craft and we need laboratories that give them a chance to practice what they learn in the classroom. Just as no one would hire a doctor who had only learned by reading a book to operate on them, arts mangers need more than a classroom education.
That is why we started our arts management institute at the Kennedy Center. We train mid-career arts executives in the U.S. and around the world through a coordinated series of year-long fellowships for American arts managers, summer fellowships for international students, capacity building seminars in cities throughout the United States, board seminars, and on-line resources on artsmanager.org.
And we offer a real, working arts organization in which our students and young professionals can get practical training.
Until we received this grant from the DeVoses, the institute felt fragile. Even though we have received millions of dollars of grants from numerous funders over the past several years to create training programs, I was worried that the programming was far too dependent on me. This gift gives a true sense of permanence to the institute; it provides the funding needed to build a cadre of trained mentors and the teaching materials required for our classes.
I am so grateful to Betsy and Dick DeVos and am so pleased that our institute now bears their name.
Perhaps the Betsy and Dick DeVos Institute can put some of this activity into better perspective.