Rethinking What We Teach Future Arts Administrators: It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game

Every once in a while, a provocation comes along that jolts the field of arts administration out of its comfortable assumptions. Last week, Joanna Woronkowicz delivered one of those jolts in her piece, “Stop Teaching Arts Administrators to Run Organizations.” Her argument: we’ve been training students to operate hierarchical nonprofit institutions without nearly enough questioning if what those organizations are offering is actually wanted by the public, by funders, by anyone outside of the people who enjoy making the work.

Her piece struck a nerve, not because she’s wrong about the need for change, but because she’s touching something the field has been whispering about for years: we’re out of balance. We’ve been so focused on the internal mechanics of running arts organizations that we risk losing sight of the larger purpose — the impact on audiences, communities, and society.

But then came Michael Rushton’s thoughtful response, which reminded us of the other half of the truth: organizations still matter. Skills still matter. Financial management, legal literacy, HR, fundraising, marketing — these aren’t relics of the 20th-century nonprofit model. They’re the scaffolding that makes it possible to produce art consistently, ethically, and sustainably. As Michael points out, employers still expect graduates to know how to work within organizations because organizations remain the backbone of the arts ecosystem.

Taken together, the two posts crystallize an old tension: should arts administration education center the organization or the ecosystem? Should we prepare students to run institutions or to create “public value”? Should we prioritize artistic careers, administrative careers, or audience experience?

Here’s where I land: this isn’t a zero-sum question.

We don’t need to choose between institutions and ecosystems, or between artists and audiences, or between administrative skills and public value. What we do need is a recalibration — a shift in emphasis from inward-facing concerns (departmental structures, workflows, internal politics) to outward-facing ones (audience experience, community relevance, public meaning). That recalibration doesn’t diminish the importance of artists, administrators, or organizations. It actually strengthens all three.

What Joanna Woronkowicz Gets Right: Start With the Value Created for the Public

Joanna’s central provocation resonates. Too often, arts administration programs treat the organization as the main character and the public as an abstraction. We treat audiences as revenue streams, not people with needs, motivations, anxieties, and hopes. We treat communities as stakeholders to be “engaged,” not partners in meaning-making. We teach students how to write budgets and grant proposals but not how to articulate the point of the work: why art matters to people who don’t already believe in it.

Her call to re-center value creation for the public is not only correct — it’s overdue.

Anyone working in the arts today knows that audience behavior is shifting faster than our institutions. Participation patterns, discovery habits, trust in institutions, willingness to pay, expectations for experience — it’s all changing. We cannot keep designing arts organizations for a world that no longer exists. If the goal of arts organizations is to inspire, provoke, teach, comfort, entertain, and connect people, then training future leaders to understand people and public value should be a core competency, not an elective.

On that point, I’m fully with Joanna.

Where Joanna’s Argument Needs Reinforcement: Artists and Administrators Matter Too

But I part ways when the argument for “public value” starts to imply that artists and arts administrators are somehow secondary, or that organizations are replaceable scaffolding for a world moving toward looser networks and ephemeral projects.

Because here’s the truth: value for the public doesn’t appear out of thin air. It’s created through the labor, expertise, and sustained commitment of artists and arts administrators — people whose careers depend on environments that are stable enough to support them and flexible enough to let them grow. Public value doesn’t emerge from a vacuum; it emerges from artists supported by structures strong enough to take risks, experiment, and serve communities over time.

If we dismiss institutions as outdated or bureaucratic, we miss the larger point: in a society where so many things are temporary, extractive, or transactional, arts organizations serve as reliable, ongoing, steady public goods. They provide continuity, shared memory, and a space where the arts can be not just consumed but lived with. They provide insurance — cultural, economic, artistic — against the boom-and-bust cycles of the private market.

And they provide jobs. Real jobs. With health insurance, mentoring, pathways to leadership, professional growth, and protection from the precarity that dominates the rest of the creative sector.

Public value may be the destination, but institutions are the vehicles that get us there.

Where Michael Rushton Is Right: Foundations Still Matter

Michael’s reminder is useful: regardless of where a program is housed — business school, music school, public affairs, fine arts — employers expect graduates to master certain core skills. That’s because those skills are not artifacts of some outdated “organizational era.” They are the fundamentals that allow any arts initiative, whether a nonprofit, a collective, a festival, or a community project, to operate responsibly.

Financial literacy, strategic decision-making, project management, fundraising, legal knowledge — these are not “institution-centric.” They’re what enable leaders to turn ideas into actions, and actions into impact.

We shouldn’t abandon them. But we also shouldn’t treat them as the end of the story.

The Recalibration We Actually Need

The future of arts administration isn’t about replacing one model with another. It’s about integrating the best of both perspectives:

• Yes, teach the skills to run organizations well.
  Because institutions matter — to artists, to administrators, and to society.
• Yes, teach students to understand value creation for the public.
  Because audiences and communities are not incidental; they’re the point.
• Yes, teach multiple organizational models.
  Nonprofits, collectives, hybrids, fiscal sponsorships, cooperatives — the whole ecosystem.
• Yes, center people.
  Artists, administrators, audiences, neighbors — the real humans behind the charts and budgets.

Our field doesn’t need an either/or. It needs graduates who can zoom out and in — who can see the community as clearly as the balance sheet, and vice versa.

If we make this shift — from inward-facing to outward-facing, from organizations-as-objects to organizations-as-public-commons — the arts will emerge stronger, more relevant, more resilient, and more capable of earning the confidence and participation of the people we serve.

That’s the recalibration the moment demands. And that’s the arts administration education our students deserve.