Valuing Public Scholarship: An Interview with Doug Blandy

A Landmark Year: Introduction    Jumping In With Courage: An Interview with Ken Krafchek (Part 1)    Learning to Translate Art into the Language of Community by Christy Zuccarini (Part 2)    Art Work, Social Work: An Interview with Kara McDonagh (Part 3)    Grassroots Arts Education on the Cutting Edge: An Interview with Sonia BasSheva Mañjon (Part 4)    The Athena Project: Refining the Practice of Mentorship in Community Art by Minette Lee Mangahas (Part 5)    Valuing Public Scholarship: An Interview with Doug Blandy (Part 6)    Third Space: Youth, Arts and Community Development by Lori Hager (Part 7)

Part 6 of "A Landmark Year: Community Arts and U.S. Higher Education 2006," a CANuniversity series of timely articles, interviews, photographs and syllabi from the field. This interview with Doug Blandy, director of the Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy at the University of Oregon in Eugene, looks at what it takes to establish and sustain a community-arts program in a large university, even one that has recognized the field for decades. It also touches on "public scholarship" and what it's worth to faculty members who are pursuing tenure.

The School of Architecture & Allied Arts (AAA) at the University of Oregon in Eugene has a long history of commitment to community arts. In 1965, faculty member June McFee established the Institute for Community Arts Studies (ICAS) as a research and public-service organization in the School of Architecture & Allied Arts, using a founding gift from the Wallace Foundation. The work of ICAS involved studies of the relations between communities and the arts, with the goal of nurturing and developing engagement between them.

Throughout the 1960s, ICAS conducted studies of Oregon communities and hosted national conferences on community service. In the '80s, ICAS studied "Art Education in the Community," researching the policies and practices of community arts programs. In the '90s, ICAS initiated CultureWork, an online "periodic broadside for arts and culture workers." And in 2005, ICAS became a Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy (CCACP), with a reinvigorated mandate to "sustain and strengthen arts and culture throughout the American West through research, policy, education, and community engagement." Among other projects, CCACP assists Lane Arts Council with facilitating conversations between the local arts communities and the City of Eugene.

ICAS (the name change is still in process) is the research hub of the Arts and Administration Program. This program offers a master’s degree in arts management that includes a community-arts area of concentration. A community-arts minor is also available to undergraduate students. Graduate and undergraduate students in theater, dance, music, art, education, sociology and family and human services among other disciplines and fields participate in the program to prepare themselves "to facilitate citizen participation in the arts," that is, work in nonprofit arts organizations and arts-oriented city agencies. Practicums provide students with opportunities to gain hands-on experience in the field – working with, for example, the Maude Kerns Art Center, Lord Leebrick Theatre Co., Eugene Opera, Impact Arts, the Bioneers, Eugene Glass School, Arts Umbrella and more.

When I visited the campus in spring 2006, I had the opportunity to observe classes (including Doug Blandy's 'zine class!), tour practicum sites and sit down with faculty and students for some long, thoughtful conversations. It was on this campus, more than any other, that I became aware of the enormous effort it takes to establish a field of study at a large university. Doug Blandy, who is director of the CCACP, is both a professor in the Arts Administration Program and an associate dean of academic affairs. He is well aware of the politics required to establish and sustain an academic foothold for community arts. He has built a dynamic junior faculty for CCACP and the Arts and Administration Program, including Assistant Professor Lori Hager, who coordinates the community-arts minor and the community-arts area of concentration within the graduate program. Hager earned her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in Theatre for Youth. She also works with students on the internship and practicum programs. The faculty also includes Assistant Professor Patricia Dewey, an arts-policy expert who in 2005 organized a Social Theory, Politics and Art (STPA) conference at the university. (STPA is an informal, global, interdisciplinary gathering of researchers, policy makers and practitioners that meets annually.)

To say that this Oregon team of public scholars is going through a creative burst is an understatement. They are furiously writing curriculum, networking internationally and brainstorming constantly about advancing community arts in every way they can. In the academic world of community arts, they are among the most knowledgeable people I have met. However, to insure the sustainability and growth of their own program at the university, they must all gain tenure, and to gain tenure they must "publish or perish." They are struggling, like so many others, with the tension between publicly engaged scholarship and academic credentials. The question is: What is public scholarship in 2006?

That question is bouncing off the walls at colleges and universities all over the U.S. right now. Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life is a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to public scholarship in the arts, humanities and design. They define "public scholarship" as activity that "joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence." Their Tenure Team Initiative (TTI) seeks to articulate and support the adventurous work of publicly engaged scholars and artists.

Led by National Co-chairs Nancy Cantor (chancellor and president of Syracuse University) and Steven D. Lavine (president of the California Institute of the Arts), the TTI calls for tenure and promotion policies that recognize and reward creative faculty members for their public scholarship and public culture-making.

Posted on the Imagining America Web site is a TTI "background study" titled "On Responsive Tenure Policies For Public Scholars in the Humanities, Arts, and Design." "As university presidents and chancellors," say Cantor and Lavine in their introduction to the background study, "we say we want creative scholars who are also committed to the public good. So how can we create environments that attract them? Their ranks frequently include faculty of color and women in underrepresented fields – just the kind we’d like to have – so how can we steer them away from the revolving door of recruitment without retention? Many faculty members experience a frustrating clash between their intellectual goals, which include pursuing community-based scholarship and art-making, and institutional tenure policies."

TTI hopes to clarify the meaning of "public engagement" for scholars whose activities comprise community projects; public practice of the arts, including exhibition, performance and art in public spaces; and developing and leading new programs.

The TTI background study presents preliminary recommendations for confronting and resolving this clash. They include recommendations that colleges and universities:

1. Adopt Imagining America's definition of public scholarship in the humanities, arts and design
2. Establish criteria for the scope and quality of public scholarship in the cultural disciplines
3. Value diverse scholarly products
4. Broaden peer review to include nonacademic peers
5. Include a public-scholarship project portfolio in the tenure dossier
6. Support junior faculty who pursue public scholarship.

All this puts into context the conversation I had with Doug Blandy. This interview took place on April 26, 2006, in Eugene, Oregon.

Linda Frye Burnham: I want to talk about the development of education for community arts here at the University of Oregon. You, personally, what's your investment in this field and how did you come to it?

Doug Blandy: I come to this field through arts education. I began my career as part of the disability-rights movement and working in schools for people with mental retardation. I believed I could be most influential in making the kind of social change that I thought was necessary in facilitating the goals and objectives of that group by moving into higher education, so I pursued a doctoral degree at Ohio State University in art education. That degree had to do with bringing people with mental retardation who had interest in the arts into the university setting. They were the same age as the university students and we brought them into a small letterpress facility. The research demonstrated that a level of mental retardation doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have facility in the arts. And in some cases they were producing handmade paper and doing typesetting equal to the university students who were working in that same setting.

From there I went to Bowling Green, Ohio, where I chaired a dept of art education and art therapy. Part of the work I did there was in collaboration with Kristin Congdon. We began developing a community-arts-oriented program for that university based in experiences she had here at the University of Oregon, and she always said to me that I needed to come west. She was a faculty member at Bowling Green, she received her PhD from the University of Oregon and took a position there. Together we were building a community-arts program and felt that we weren't going to get the support there that we needed. She then went to the University of Central Florida and I came here to the University of Oregon, both in 1987.

The last thing we did there was work with fishers in the northwest Ohio community, where fishing is huge both for professional activity in terms of lake fishing and also in terms of amateur fishing. We demonstrated a method for working with local community members to appropriate fine-arts settings for the purpose of demonstrating the aesthetic associated with their everyday life, everyday activities. Neither of us were fishers, but we both come from a folklore background and could bring those methodologies to work in those communities.

You did a demonstration project?

We did extensive interviews in the community, either ourselves or working with others, to identify the names of people that emerged in the community as having the respect of the community in terms of their relationship to fishing. Then once we saw that there were four or five names that kept emerging across all of our conversations, we brought them together and said, "We're interested in working with you and communicating what it is that's aesthetic about what you are doing." Our goal was not to impose our view, and the fact that we weren't fishers probably helped in that regard. (See "Community Based Aesthetics as Exhibition Catalyst and a Foundation for Community Involvement in Art Education," Doug Blandy, Kristin G. Congdon, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1988), pp. 243-249.)

Then you came to Oregon.

At that time I was with the Department of Art Education. They brought me in to coordinate the graduate-level cultural-services program. That was associated with preparing CETA workers that had been started by Vincent Lanier and June McFee. They brought me in to assist with the doctoral research that was being done at the time as well as coordinate that masters program. (For more, see, "Community Arts and Cultural Context: The Legacy of June King McFee and Vincent Lanier" by Paul Bolin)

In 1991, because of budget cuts, the Department of Art Education was closed, but the cultural-services graduate program had grown under my direction and the administration felt that my expertise and that of other faculty members was worth maintaining through an arts-management program.

What about your Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy?

At the University of Oregon, there are academic programs. It's primarily a degree-granting institution; departments and programs grant degrees. Oftentimes, though, research is run out of centers and institutes. So, June McFee established the Institute for Community Arts Studies. When we became a program in Arts and Administration, we revitalized that Institute and really made it an online publishing institute, publishing CultureWork. When Patricia Dewey joined us, with her interest in cultural policy, she began encouraging us to think about revitalizing it as the Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy because of the history of our program both as art-ed and also as community arts with cultural-policy issues, that's what we're doing now. So, I'm in a position as a senior faculty member to mentor three junior faculty members, all of whom have research agendas – Lori Hager in arts education, Patricia Dewey in cultural policy and Janice Rutherford in museums and cultural heritage. Together we see this as an opportunity to cultivate research in a way that also supports a larger research mission for that Center.

Does the cultivation of research bring in extra funding?

It has and that's the plan for the future. Basically centers and institutes are self-funded although there may be seed money. What we've been able to do is demonstrate to the vice president for research on campus that this is a worthy investment in the short term, because in the long term, particularly, Patricia and Lori are going to generate proposals that probably will bring external funding into the university.

So, the Center will have to support itself?

Yes.

How soon?

That's a good question. I would imagine maybe in two to four years Patricia and Lori will start generating the kinds of grants that will support the Center. Meantime, it's supported both by the vice president's office and the Arts and Administration Program.

Is there a foundation office that can help you with the fundraising?

Yes.

Will you do anything besides research with the Center?

That's a good question. Because we're a Research 1 institution, for junior faculty to receive promotion and tenure, they need to have a very active research agenda that results in publications in peer-review journals. At least for the short term, in my mind, and why I need to encourage them is that that's where their energy needs to go. Once they receive promotion and tenure, that gives them a little more flexibility in how they want to plan their careers here. But our ability to thrive in this environment requires a strong research agenda by all faculty.

I've heard talk that you and Lori and others have identified a need for a professional association for community-arts educators.

Yes. I come out of art education where there is a strong professional association and that's been very helpful to me in my career because of the journals associated with that field that I can publish in. With Lori not coming out of a strong professional field like that – although certainly theater and theater ed would be strong – those channels aren't so readily available. And I think she sees, and I agree with her, that fields are only as strong as the networks that support them and I think that would be crucial that we come together around these issues of common concern.

My earlier work was informed by the Alliance for Cultural Democracy, which isn't very active, if at all, any longer. I think something similar to that that would have venues associated with it so that scholars could come together around these issues and publish. I think the Social Theory of Politics and the Arts group in some ways does that, but they're not fully focused on community-arts issues. STP&A doesn't actually have an infrastructure like that of a professional organization. I think a structure that's a little tighter would be more useful. And we need a peer-review journal in the field because there are community-arts programs opening up in universities that include mostly junior faculty, and they have to have places to publish.

And without that you're not going to get enough leverage. What are the prospects for a journal in the field?

Academic journals are notorious for losing money, so they're usually published by universities or professional associations. There's such a great need for research in this field because there's so much that's been accomplished and I worry about the debris we've created over time, where the repositories for that will be. The fact that the Getty has picked up High Performance is very significant.

CAN is also trying to establish a physical archive at Virginia Tech.

An archive would be a project for the Center.

What is the nature of CultureWork as a publication?

CultureWork is an advisory that was designed to focus on particular projects or initiative in such a way that practitioners can be inspired or use some of the information.

But it's not a peer-reviewed journal. Is there one that's solely on the internet that you could call an academic journal?

Not in our field.

I've been hearing about the conversation at the STPA conference [Social Theory, Politics & Art conference at University of Oregon in fall 2005] about how people weren't getting any tenure-track credit for the work in the community. What you are talking about is probably going to credential that activity more.

One of the topics that continually comes up for us is the tension that exists between working at a research university where the emphasis is on research and education as opposed to working in the community, so one of the things we're working very hard to do here is to try and find some middle ground that permits both. I'm trying to be patient over the short term because what's most important for the junior faculty here is to get tenure. I don't want to push too hard for them to be doing all this organizational work because it will take time away from what they need to do in the short term. Patricia organized the STPA conference last year and that took a tremendous amount of time for her, What we first need to do here is establish the stability associated with the program by having people who are tenured. Then we can begin to take on some of this larger organizational work.

Do they understand that, the faculty?

I think to various degrees. But it's hard. I was a junior faculty member once, and you feel pulled in a whole lot of different directions. I enjoyed direct community work and I still do, but it ultimately had to be paired with research and publication.

So, what you're saying is the nature and the mission of the educational institution tells you the whole story.

It certainly is going to be influential in what your mission will be within the field.

And you're not about to leave, you personally.

Not me. I love Oregon. I enjoy working with the new dean. Her name is Frances Bronet. She's an architect and comes from Rennslaer Polytechnic. She also does a lot of community work and work with neonatal issues and she is also an engineer. One of her primary interests is dance and she's very strong in education. So, our program is very congruent with her vision for the school.

Is that a legacy concern?

I am looking forward to continuing my career in an educational institution that is conducive to the work that my colleagues and I enjoy doing.

It's important for you to know that High Performance sustained me during the early part of my work – and Kristin's too – because we could look to that publication and see that there was value given to the relationship between art and community, particularly art in relationship to social change, so it was instrumental in helping shape what I do and what I believe in. I routinely recommend the Community Arts Network and the publications that are online.

Doug Blandy is associate dean for academic affairs for the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, a professor in the Arts Administration Program, and director of the Institute for Community Arts Studies at the University of Oregon. As director of the Institute, he inaugurated the online publication CultureWork. He teaches and advises students at both the graduate and undergraduate level who have an interest in arts administration and community arts. Blandy's research is in community arts, civil society, program accessibility and art education. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in arts education from the Ohio State University. He is the editor, with Kristin Congdon and Paul Bolin, of "Histories of Community-Based Art Education" (Reston, Va: National Art Education Association, 2001).

Linda Frye Burnham is co-director of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2006