All year, we’ve been hearing about the difficulties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago administration in balancing the budget. (F Newsmagazine’s managing editor Sidne K. Gard discusses the latest cuts in our last issue.) As SAIC leadership makes adjustments to meet the new Trumpian reality of mega-xenophobia and anti-university funding policy, not all of the choices they’ve made have seemed wise or even effective to students.
It is a complex world, and there is a general sense that how SAIC is meeting new complexities is more of the same — with negative consequences for the people this whole place is meant to support: us, the students.
If I were running the school, I’d feel a little misunderstood by the critics. Nobody could have anticipated a xenophobic reality TV star who hates universities would become president for a second time, nor that the current economic and political pressures would be so damaging to arts education, with school after school hit so hard that many are starting to close their doors for good. After all, isn’t everybody figuring this out as we go along?
But the problem is not that the learning curve is steep. It’s that the people in power are circling the wagons — but not in a fun, retro computer game way. In more of an I’m-only-talking-to-a-few-people-about-this way. Which is small group decision-making. Which is really bad. It’s why the space shuttle exploded. It’s why President John Kennedy almost started World War III. And it’s a real problem in the school in this moment.
What we need is more people, not fewer, weighing in on these budget decisions. It’s worth mentioning that the administration solicited input from faculty while crafting this year’s budget. But there are more than 3,000 people who contribute to the school’s more-than-$200 million budget who are explicitly excluded from leadership positions at the school. Is there an actual, legitimate explanation for that? (Note that the school’s budget is combined with the Art Institute’s.)
It is the citizenry of Porto Alegre, Brazil, who we can thank for the participatory budgeting movement, which has ardent supporters across the globe and which has been adopted in countries from Peru to Portugal and Indonesia to Canada. In many places, such as has happened here in Chicago, it is more of a symbolic practice, with a tiny sliver of budgets available to citizen influence. Other approaches, such as the Portugal Participatory Budget, earnestly attempt to cede as much control to citizens as possible. In Brazil, the movement grew out of reforms following a brutal dictatorship, which came to an end in the 1980s. To restore faith in government, many reform measures were put in place, including citizen control over the budget.
Crisis often leads to reform, and this is a natural cycle even in the Academy. While SAIC President Jiseon Lee Isbara has recently sent a message to the community assuring us that the school is in good fiscal health, if true, it has come at the cost of many student resources, including 24-hour studio access and the beloved Video Data Bank. Anyone who talks to students about the state of the school knows many of us don’t feel as though things are “back to normal.” We feel like we’re getting less than we were promised, and it will take something creative to convincingly reset that scale.
Budget crises in the Academy are not unique to SAIC. Budget crises in general are a fact of a modern world, where the gospel of scarcity and the religion of capitalism dominate so much of the discourse — and policy making — in everything from governments to charities. It’s hard for executives to imagine anything but limited liability and avoiding all kinds of spending that might seem excessive or lead to accusations of wastefulness. I think SAIC’s current challenges are a blend of an incredibly volatile political climate and a lack of imagination on the part of leadership. As a school, we cannot really do much about the first part. But the second part is within our grasp.
People grapple with these budgetary problems everywhere, and one of the best solutions that anyone has come up with is that the people being served should be the people who decide. Participatory budgeting has thrived as a form of budgeting for nearly a half-century, and in many different contexts. It’s time for us to consider whether SAIC might benefit from taking this piece of the administrative puzzle away from people who sometimes seem more committed to protecting powerful institutions than students.
In fairness to the administration, which I know includes people who care deeply about the welfare of SAIC students, institutions always prioritize their own interests over even the people they are built to serve. It’s an inherent feature of organizations in capitalist societies, and the influence of capital on universities has only grown in recent years. I believe that what we’re witnessing at SAIC is an absence of counterbalances to the institutional impulse to center itself.
Budgets are a quintessential site of that imbalance. The administration is struggling to balance the school’s budget — why not give us students a shot? In considering such an experiment, the school would be taking a transformative step towards a student-centered approach to learning. Given the high-profile nature of SAIC, the impact could extend well beyond Michigan Avenue.
We often talk about our community as if we were in a bubble. But we are not in a bubble. We are in a world connected in myriad complex ways. The people who make decisions here are shaping an institution with tremendous influence locally, nationally, and even globally. This place is engaged in serious business, and if you’re a student here, you are that business.
