The Cultural Policy Center

at the University of Chicago

State level support for the arts, humanities, heritage, and allied forms of culture has, for some time, been an important source of direct government support to these endeavors in the United States. Moreover, it is now widely recognized that legislation, projects, programs, and policies of a broad set of state-level agencies have an important impact on cultural policy. State cultural agencies and the grant-making programs of state arts agencies, in particular, provide the most visible support for culture, but the combination of policies and programs across state government are a better indicator of a state’s cultural vitality and potential for cultural development.

To understand more fully the attributes of state level cultural policy and to provide a service to individual states wishing to consider and reflect upon the full range of their cultural programs and policies as a unified whole, the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago has received funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts for a pilot project: "Mapping State Cultural Policy." This project is based on the very successful precedent of the Council of Europe’s program of Reviews of National Cultural Policies, which has provided the opportunity for some fifteen European countries to articulate and receive comment on their national cultural policies. We are in the process of adapting this service to the state level in the United States.

We begin with several assumptions: (1) it is typical for state cultural policy either to be delegated to a number of agencies and institutions, each with related but distinctly different notions of its role and its aims, or to be picked up by agencies that one would not have expected to become involved in cultural activities; (2) in such a context, it is not common to think of the aggregate of these agencies, institutions, actions, and policies as constituting a conceptual whole; and (3) much state cultural policy is implicit rather than explicit, being the result of actions and decisions taken without expressed policy intention.

 In this pilot project we propose to map and review the cultural policy system for a single state working across agency boundaries. The process that we are following includes the following steps:

• Commitment Meeting: This meeting, held in the proposed pilot state, is intended to discuss the proposed project with key stakeholders and to obtain a firm commitment to participate. To be successful this project will require the willing participation of the key agencies and their staffs. (Participation will not require any financial commitment from within the pilot state; all costs have been fully funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts as part of its "Optimizing America’s Cultural Resources" initiative.)

• Framework Development: The project team will develop interview protocols for the fieldwork portion of the mapping process.

• Policy Documentation: Members of the project team will visit the pilot state to interview key individuals involved in the various aspects of state cultural policy. These interviews will lead to a draft map of the current profile of state cultural policy, which will be circulated for comment.

• Policy Analysis I: During this phase the project team will discuss the profile of cultural policy that has been observed in the field and formulate a set of questions concerning the implementation and impact of the various elements of the revealed cultural policy.

• Policy Review and Reflection: At this point the project team will return to the field to interview policy agencies that were not included in the first round, perhaps because of their geographic distribution, as well as organizations and institutions that are at the receiving end of state cultural policy.

• Policy Analysis II: After the second round of fieldwork, the project team will produce a document reflecting upon the design and implementation of cultural policy in the pilot state. This document will be written with an eye to providing valuable external feedback.

• Final Report and Final Meeting: The pilot project will conclude with a final report and a final event. The event will be designed in consultation with the key stakeholders in the pilot state in order to be maximally useful in furthering the discussion of state cultural policy that will be begun by the mapping process.

It is our expectation that the full mapping and review process will take between twelve and fourteen months.

 We expect the outcomes of the proposed pilot mapping project to be the following:

• The pilot mapping project will provide policy makers, decision makers, and cultural actors within the pilot state with an opportunity to better understand the sum total of the policy initiatives already in place in that state and the implications of the ways in which that policy operates.

• It will enable the various actors in policy formulation and implementation to anticipate the actions of other key actors in making decisions within their respective realms.

• It will foster inter-agency understanding and collaboration in shaping policies that reflect shared purposes and expectations.

At one of our project planning meetings, Susan Bonaiuto, former Executive Director of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, made the central point quite eloquently:

The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago

Jointly sponsored by the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago, the Cultural Policy Center is the first such initiative in a public policy school in the United States. The Center supports research, staffs a curriculum in cultural policy, and organizes workshops and public events that examine policy issues confronting the arts and humanities. The Center brings scholars together with stakeholders to study the ways in which culture is influenced by governments, cultural institutions, and other policy makers.

Project Staff

J. Mark Schuster, Project Director

Mark Schuster is Visiting Professor of Cultural Policy (2001-2002) at the Harris School and Professor of Urban Cultural Policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Schuster is a public policy analyst who specializes in the analysis of government policies and programs with respect to the arts, culture, and environmental design. His publications include: Preserving the Built Heritage: Tools for Implementation, with John de Monchaux and Charles Riley; Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy, with Michael O’Hare and Alan Feld; Supporting the Arts: An International Comparative Study; Who's to Pay for the Arts? The International Search for Models of Arts Support, with Milton Cummings; The Audience for American Art Museums, and The Geography of Participation in the Arts and Culture (Seven Locks Press). He is a founding member of the Association for Cultural Economics and is co-editor of the Journal of Cultural Economics. He also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Lawrence Rothfield, Faculty Director, The Cultural Policy Center

Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He co-founded the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago after serving as Director (and co-founder, with Gerald Graff) of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. His major publications include Vital Signs, a book about the social function of the nineteenth-century novel; The Measure of Man (forthcoming), a study of the politics of culture in the Florentine Renaissance; and a volume of edited essays, Unsettling "Sensation": Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy. Professor Rothfield’s current research project is an analytic study of the ways in which the humanities generate social and cultural capital.

Colleen M. Grogan is Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Her fields of special interest include comparative state-level policy and politics, health policy and health politics, the American welfare state, and the intersection between American values and beliefs and public policy. Professor Grogan has taught in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University where she also held a joint appointment with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. She has taught courses such as Introduction to American Health Policy, Policy Analysis and Health Politics, Comparative Health Systems, and Government Institutions and Health. Professor Grogan has published broadly on issues of health policy and politics and U.S. health and welfare policies targeted at vulnerable populations. Her book with M.K. Gusmano, Deliberative Democracy and the Poor, is forthcoming.

David Karraker is a program evaluator, strategic planner, and public policy research specialist. He provides planning, training, program evaluation and policy development services to public agencies, foundations, not-for-profit organizations, university programs, and foundations. From 1984-2000 he was a Research Associate at the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service of the University of Southern Maine, Portland. From 1995-2000 he also served as the Director of Organizational Development and Planning of the Muskie School’s Institute for Child and Family Policy. David has provided a variety of strategic planning, research, program evaluation, and organizational development services to a wide variety of clients in the arts, culture, and child welfare. For five years he served as Project Director of a six-member team assessing the readiness of nonprofit arts organizations to participate in the National Endowment for the Arts' Advancement Program.

Susan Bonaiuto is an independent consultant working the fields of cultural policy and public education. Director of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts from 1987-1996, Susan has been involved in a wide variety of cultural policy projects at the state level. While in New Hampshire she emphasized strategic planning and partnerships with other state agencies with an eye towards adopting a broader definition of the arts and culture across state government. In 1994 her work was featured as a model for state arts agencies at a National Council on the Arts. She is former chair of the Research Committee of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, and a former board member of the University of Wisconsin Center for Arts Administration and the New England Foundation for the Arts. She has served on numerous panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and state agencies.

Steve Smith is Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs of the University of Washington where he directs the Nonprofit Management Program. His research interests focus on nonprofit and public management, community development, and the changing roles of nonprofit organizations and government in civil society. He is presently conducting research on the relationship between government and nonprofit organizations, focusing on the role of nonprofit organizations and community partnerships in building and rebuilding local communities and the impact of welfare reform and devolution on faith-related service agencies. He teaches gateway courses in nonprofit management and urban and regional affairs, and serves on the advisory board for the University’s Certificate Program in Arts Administration. Professor Smith is co-author of Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting and Adjusting the Balance: Federal Policy and Victim Services. He is also co-editor of Public Policy for Democracy. He is the editor of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ), the journal of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).

We have invited a number of individuals to join the Project Advisory Board for this project. To date, the individuals who have agreed to serve include:

Edward Arian, Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Arts Administration Program (retired), Drexel University

Jonathan Katz, Chief Executive Officer, National Assembly of State Arts Agencies 

Gail Leftwich, President, Federation of State Humanities Councils

Paul Minicucci, Deputy Director, California Arts Council

Kevin Mulcahy, Professor of American Politics, Louisiana State University

Anthony Radich, Executive Director, Western State Arts Federation

Michael Rushton, Professor of Economics, University of Regina, Saskatchewan

Last updated November 15, 2001