Lessons from the AGO

Last Saturday I attended the morning session of a symposium held to honour the remarkable achievements of Diana Nemiroff, who retired last summer as the Director of the Carleton University Art Gallery.  All the speakers were interesting, but in my view the most provocative, and hence the most thought-provoking, was Matthew Teitelbaum, Director of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) … and also a Carleton alumnus, having completed an Honours B.A. in History.  Mr. Teitelbaum’s current job involves spending a lot of time thinking about art galleries, and more specifically how to keep them afloat financially.  This means understanding why people buy tickets to visit institutions like the AGO.  His conclusion: visitors are seeking an authentic and shared “experience”.  They also want to be challenged intellectually by the exhibitions, even if they don’t agree with the views beings advanced.  I was struck by how different the job of the Director of a major art gallery is from those of the curators who manage the collections and develop the exhibitions.  The concerns of the latter are often very different.

And it seems to me that the same situation can be found in universities.  Faculty and staff may have one view of the institution’s priorities and purpose, whereas those charged with answering to governments and paying the bills each month probably have another.  Their perspectives are very different because they perform different functions.  Of course, both viewpoints are legitimate, and one might even say necessary.  But they will always create tension.  The trick is to find a way to harness that tension by transforming it into a productive dialogue.  This requires an atmosphere of transparency and receptivity to new ideas, both of which concepts should be ‘de rigueur’ at universities.

It is also interesting to apply Mr. Teitelbaum’s conclusions to an academic institution.  His research indicates that visitors want to “share” the experience, and I suspect that is certainly also true of universities.  Among other things, it explains why students on campuses which are primarily “residential” have a greater sense of community, not to mention a higher retention rate.  Universities that primarily serve students who live “off campus”, for example Carleton, are required to make a special effort to overcome this deficiency.  And the same challenge applies to moving teaching from a shared experience in a classroom to what is often an individual experience “on line” in front of a computer, which is why many commentators on postsecondary education predict that traditional forms of education will never be displaced entirely by new developments in technology.

But what about the notion that students come to a university to be challenged?  I would like to think that this is true, but I am not sufficiently naïve to believe that this is the motivation for a significant number of students in 2012.  Rather, for many it is only the degree that concerns them, and the job to which that degree may lead; in other words, their concern is with the destination, not the journey.  And for many, what they really want is for their existing beliefs and prejudices to be confirmed and reinforced, not challenged or changed. 

If so, that is an enormous tragedy.  As one of my foremost academic mentors, Richard Krautheimer, once said to me: “John, I don’t like it when you agree with me, because then I can’t learn from you.”  Amen!