Quantifying the Arts IV: Tie Professor's Salaries to Wages

Scott Walters, of Theater Ideas and CRADLE(arts), has decided that he isn't busy enough and has started a new blog with Tom Loughlin to generate new ideas about a Theater curriculum, named TACT (continuing a love of acronyms...). I'm excited to see what goes on over there, because I'm interested in changing the curriculum of the arts.

Anyways, my first introduction to the new blog was this post, which contained a Modest and Tactless proposal: "Tie the salaries of theatre professors to the income of their students."

Before you get all up in a hizzy (there was a brief second where I did), I think it would be good to revisit the spirit in which this proposal is offered, which probably goes back to the Kushner quotation that Scott used during his last "modest" proposal:

I can take comfort, however, from Tony Kushner who, when he proposed in his outstanding speech and essay "A Modest Proposal" (American Theatre, Jan98, Vol. 15 Issue 1) that we "abolish all undergraduate art majors," recognized that "Since[undergraduate arts education] so very lucrative, I can say let's get rid of it and we don't have to worry that anything will actually happen. So my speech is rather like theatre in this regard, and this frees us to consider the validity of my proposal...as a pure abstraction ultimately productive of nothing more unpleasant than a spasm of conscience and perhaps something as pleasant as a whiff of scandal and a flicker of ire." I should be so lucky.

Now, Scott's proposal this time around is a lot more fully fleshed out than the lottery idea, and it seems like it would work.

There's one huge, huge problem though: Scott notes that there is no profession (since the Actor's Equity salary median of all actors is $0), so tying professors' pay to students' performance in "the profession" may get professors to compete to turn out students into a system that won't support them. Even if some college out there figures it out, their incentives would now be aligned with a system that doesn't work. So what if professors are making sure that some of their students are earning over $8,000 a year? It's not a huge improvement over the current system, since the rules he proposes still allow a large number of students to fail.

But I take Scott's point in the context of the blog, which is that if professors were aligned to their students' interests, they would fight for curriculum reform. In fact, there's the possibility in this system that theater professors would suddenly find incentive to reform the theater industry -- trying to encourage students to make living wages at theater start-ups back home rather than pouring in to the over saturated market in New York.

I would like to point out, however, that there is a certain degree to which professor's salaries are tied to their profession. Now, before I make this point, I probably should make it clear that this is based on my own university, New York University, and is probably not representative of all schools.

But at the same time, it's clear that NYU pays its theater professionals a tiny fraction of what they pay (as a for instance) Business School professors. Although our school's financials are private, and therefore we can only speculate on much of the budget, public tax returns show that the highest paid NYU employee is a fertility doctor at NYU's School of Medicine, who makes something north of $2 million a year.

Why does the fertility doctor make north of $2 million a year? Because NYU feels it has to have the best fertility doctor in the field -- and therefore, it has to pay above the prevailing wage for fertility doctors (and in this case, above the prevailing wage for a top-of-the-line fertility doctor).

Our theater school also employs working professionals as our teachers (at least in our professional training classes) and, therefore, they have to pay better than what those teachers would be making in the field. Which, in our case, is basically tuppence. Whereas a business school teacher is probably forgoing a salary of $100k or more, the top-of-the-top teachers in our theater program would probably not really be making much worth talking about if they were outside of the school.

Again, this is probably a problem endemic to schools which seek to employ working professionals to teach. There's a different model for academics, since the competition there is almost exclusively other academics, and therefore isn't so moved by the economic fates in the market. And also, the difference between this process and Scott's proposal is that whereas right now, in general teachers' pay is linked to the success of an industry as a whole, Scott's proposal makes the individual teachers responsible to the success of students in specific.

One last point I want to make: Scott's proposal really only makes sense if the success of students really is affected in a huge way by teachers in the college level. Which of course to some degree it is. But if we look at the current problems in the American Theater (of which much ink/0101s have been spilled), then we can see that unless the system incorporates the change of the industry into it, the teachers will simply fail. The way the system is set up, there's too many artists for too few jobs, because the jobs are overly concentrated. As he points out, there's an 8:1 employment ratio within AEA, and I'm sure many of that 8 are just as qualified as that 1, but there's a glut.

The walk-away is that Scott once talked about needing to move the riverbed. I agree that tying professors' salaries to the success of the students is key. But to what success? In my last post I talked about how the market is incredible because it forces valuation on the intangible, because it can't deal with anything that isn't valued. When we structure the economy (the way that Scott's gedankenexperiment does), we need to choose what we value, because that's going to be the output of the system.

Educating Too Many Professionals

[update: in the original post, I mistakenly wrote that I was quoting Barry. In actuality, it was Barry asking the questions and Ian himself who had written the responses. My apologies.]

Speaking of Createquity, the last few days has seen Ian posting some conversations he had with Barry Hessenius. The second installment caught my eye, because it deals with art education.

The part of Ian's response that stuck out to me was this:

The reason is simple: the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow. If we are successful in our efforts and ensure that every child has the opportunity to experience all the arts they want to during their formative years, what happens to them once they get to college?

Now, Ian precedes that statement with an important set of disclaimers about how he's not dumping on the concept of studying the arts, and he doesn't want the arts to be an elite discipline--all of which is valid, and I appreciate what he's getting at.

So the question is a good one. What would we do in our dream scenario that arts education doubled the amount of people interested in the arts?

The problem, I think, is with what our arts education currently frames its goal to be. The goal, as Ian sees it, is framed right there at the top of that chunk: "the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow."

For the arts education system today, arts education is a professional system: it exists to create arts professionals. And in the higher-education world, this is correct, and is as it should be: once you're majoring in theater, you should be aiming to be practicing theater for your life.

Yet for some reason, this thinking exists even in elementary school. When we teach elementary school-kids music, we teach them how to play the tuba. And then the expectation is that, if they're good at it, they'll keep playing tuba and eventually get a good job at an orchestra playing the tuba. If they're not good at it, well then, they'll get something out of the rest of their education.

I'd like to contrast that with English. The philosophy behind English education, at least as I was exposed to it, was that English was a language, and therefore it enfused every part of the world around us. It didn't matter whether or not you were going to go into the literary criticism field one day, as a bank teller or as a media mogul or as a tuba player, your ability to think critically in English and communicate fluently in English was a key part of your job.

That's how we should tackle art. Our elementary school program should be an artistic literacy program, not an art professional program. Kids should be learning how to listen to music, how to express themselves in music--whether or not we train them in specific skills.

The example that resonates for me comes from Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed. Boal describes a short-lived Peruvian artistic literacy program where students were given cameras, and asked a series of questions which they had to answer through photography. One question, for example, was "Where do you live?" and one student responded to it with a portrait of his older brother, whose lip had been chewed off by rats in the night. The teacher asks, "Why did you take that photo to answer 'Where do you live?'" and the student responds, "Because I live in a country where these sort of things can happen."

That student learned something powerful about arts, communication, and critical thinking. Ian seems to imply that this student will now want to become a professional photographer, and therefore we'll need to make space for him. I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Condoleeza Rice was given a beautiful full training as a concert pianist, but that didn't take her away from the realm of foreign policy.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair. What Ian really means is this:

If we’re trying to hook 55 million children on the arts in a system that pours 3.2 million new high school graduates into the market every year, even if only 10% of them decide to pursue professional careers, what happens to them when, by the NEA’s own figures, only 2 million artists can coexist in that market at any given time?

The 10% figure is a lot more reasonable. But on the other hand, it is somewhat looking at the glass half-empty. So, 10% of 55 million children on the arts adds another 5.5 million children to our 2 million artist ceiling. That leaves 49.5 million art-hooked but not professional people.

So, there's two options to what those 49.5 million will do. One is they'll say, "Well I didn't get to be an artist," and then never call us ever again. The other is that they'll say, "Boy, I love the arts, and I want the arts to still be a part of my life." And then they become our concert-goers, our donors, our audience.

If they become our audience, then the 2 million cap that Ian references will probably be raised. By how much? Difficult to tell. But surely as our audience grows, so do our artists.

But I agree with Ian that it won't just happen. If we teach those 49.5 million kids that the only way to participate in the arts is by being a professional, we shouldn't be surprised if they fail to materialize in our audiences. But if we teach them to hunger after any sort of connection with arts, and give them the opportunity to connect with arts in however their lives can connect to it, then they'll be the engine that drives the 5.5 million who practice it full time.

And suppose those 49.5 million turn into voters, into advocates for the arts. Then we'll have a much better chance of turning around the negativity towards arts funding, the lack of public support. And then we'll definitely have a shot of shifting the 2 million.

"High-Value Professions"

Required reading from Ezra Klein:

Money Quote:

If you're in a high-value profession, hard work can do you a lot of good. If you're not, it may not do you any good at all. And though anyone can work hard, we're mostly able to admit that not everyone has the specific constellation of opportunities that lets you go to law school, or spend your time goofing off in amateur political punditry.

My response below (in his comments section)

Thank you! I've been struggling recently with my own chosen profession--theater--and getting increasingly angry at the fact that people who graduated, say, in the field of investment banking, will make money hand over fist.

I recently saw a statistic (it was quoted as being from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) that said that the median wage for actors in Actor's Equity Association (which not everyone can get into) is roughly $6,000.

$6,000. It's not as though we in the theater are doing something selfish--we raise property values, supplement education (not to mention the esoteric upside of things like cultural value). But we rarely turn a profit.

From a capitalistic point of view, our profession is a waste of time. The "entertainment" and "culture" slots are filled much more effectively by the internet, by the film industry, etc.

When I apply for a job outside of the theater (which obviously I have to, since I don't make anything from my theater yet), they don't look at my theater experience as being ANYTHING at all.

I've fulfilled the role of "stage MANAGER" but I could never be considered for a managerial role; I've led a team of artists on an independent project, raised funds, and controlled a budget. But what is the best job I can land in the quote unquote "real world"? I sold popcorn for Regal Entertainment.

So the question I'm saying that your question raises is, WHAT ARE THE HIGH VALUE PROFESSIONS. And why? Is a teacher not a high profile profession? Is Bill Kristol worth more to the news business than the arts reviewers, who are getting shed like flies? Are hedge-fund managers worth more to us than the much maligned "community organizers"?

A little context: Ezra Klein is a lucky guy, and also a talented guy. He's a political pundit. He's one of the few that I follow regularly, and I've very much enjoyed his status; I don't think it's ill deserved. And he has always used his powers for good--unlike Bill Kristol, who I took a shot at in the comment.

As you can tell, I've been a little irritated by this for a while, and it's kind of building. Because it's the assumption we all work under: only the true, true geniuses will break even--because someone wealthy will back us up.

I'm not bitter at Ezra, or at people who are successful in their fields. But when actors come to politicians for support, we get brushed off, as though we're some sort of luxury. I mean, theater is associated with wealth (because of the cost of high-end theater), but we in the theater business tend to be the poorest of poor. If you go to a Congressman and say, "will you help our small business?" or "Will you help our farmers?" they will at least pretend like they care. But theater? So far from their priority.

We are workers. We fight because we think this is a worthwhile industry; we benefit our communities. Why are we low value?