Speech Delivered by President Thomas J. Schwarz at School of the Arts Gala
New York City, November 12, 2007
Good evening.
We are honored to have representatives of the Rockefeller family with us tonight. I want to express my appreciation to Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller for permission to use Governor Rockefeller’s name in these awards.
We are of course also honored to have with us the first designees of the Nelson A. Rockefeller awards from Purchase College. You were carefully chosen because you have set a standard for your artistry for all who follow. And the Durst family, in its support for the arts and focus on green buildings, carries on the interest of Nelson Rockefeller in both the arts and the environment. You all represent a standard of quality worthy of the Nelson A. Rockefeller name.
Growing up in New York, the title Governor applied to only one man. And indeed today for those my age, it is fair to say that we test each successive Governor against the accomplishments of Governor Rockefeller.
Tonight we remember Governor Rockefeller as a builder of SUNY, a patron of the arts, as well as a Governor very conscious of the environment.
- He was involved in visual arts, dance, theatre and music. (1)
- He created the NY Council on the Arts – the first of its kind at either a state or federal level (2).
- To him, and I quote from his 1970 book "the arts rank alongside international security"(3) – a statement made not in the face of terrorism but in the face of nuclear annihilation.
- He founded Lincoln Center and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (4) and Theatre of the Forgotten (5).
He saw the arts as part of our environment (6).
In the environmental area, he set up the Department of Environmental Conservation (7), again a first in this State. He focused on the Adirondacks and Hudson8 and established the Clean Water Act to pay attention for the first time to water pollution (9).
Governor Rockefeller believed that the arts "are…a critical measure of the quality of life"(10).
He said: "one of our concerns must…constantly be to lift the level of human awareness and perception, and to enhance the enjoyment of the world around us. For this, we look to the arts."(11)
Martha Nussbaum is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago. She wrote recently:
"If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away because they don't make money. But they do something far more precious than that by generating vital spaces for sympathetic and reasoned debate, helping to build democracies that are able to overcome fear and suspicion and, ultimately, creating a world that is worth living in." (12)
Purchase College is the embodiment of those principles.
And what a college Governor Rockefeller created: The School of the Arts is the only public arts college in the country with four programs based upon conservatory training that compete at the highest levels of art education, along with a superb liberal arts college.
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Dance
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Music
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Theatre & Film
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Art + Design
Over 3,600 applicants applied for 295 freshmen admission slots in the four arts programs this year, over 10,000 applicants to the College as a whole for only 750 slots.
The tuition of $4,350 is 1/6 to 1/8 that of private institutions such as Julliard, RISDE, Oberlin or Emerson.
Three-quarters of our students receive financial aid and within this pool of needy students, nearly 40 percent are getting a Pell Grant. This means that the Federal government is saying that their families can only afford to apply roughly $4,000 or less a year to their child’s total educational costs. In addition to the Pell Grant recipients, there is a significant number of students (nearly 10 percent of the entering class) that can only contribute approximately $4,000 - $8,000 to pay their total education costs of $18,000. This needy population misses out on aid eligibility (for Pell and other programs) by either a few dollars or a few thousand dollars. The consequences are extreme. These students receive on average about $5,700 less in aid (compared to the Pell eligible population)
and because of this financial problem, drop out at higher rates than the lower income population that does receive Pell Grants.
And even with these financial supports, many of our students would not be able to follow their dream without your help.
Tonight we have raised more than $1.3 million for scholarships and student artistic support and have begun to more fully secure the future of our present students and those to come.
I want to thank a number of people for their major contributions to the success of this inaugural event for the School of the Arts: Vice President of External Affairs and Development, Margaret Sullivan, the Purchase College Foundation trustees, the gala committee, the deans of the School of the Arts and our own Professor of Lighting Design and producer of the event here in the Hudson Theatre, David Grill. I want to thank all of you for coming. I know this is the Gala season and you are probably Gala–ed out. But on a personal level, your presence here for this purpose confirms my decision to leave the practice of law (and a lot of money on the table) to dedicate myself to public education.
I hope you will come to many School of the Arts performances and exhibits on the campus and now, it is my honor to introduce Emily Grant, Chair of the Purchase College Foundation.
Emily and her husband, Gene, personify those philanthropists who have dedicated themselves to public education at a college that they did not attend. They are leading examples of supporters of Purchase.
Citations from Nelson A. Rockefeller, Our Environment Can Be Saved, Doubleday (1970).
1. p. 121
2. p. 122
3. pp. 122-23
4. p. 127
5. p. 138
6. p. 9, 118
7. p. 18
8. p. 96, 69
9. p. 51
10. pp. 120-21
11. p. 118
12 Futures Forum 2007, Exploring The Future of Higher Education, Cultivating Humanity and World Citizenship, Martha Nussbaum, PhD. At 37-40 at 40. (2007).