HODSOLL’S 2ND TOUR IN ‘BULLY PULPIT’

Two years ago in New Orleans and last month in Seattle, Frank Hodsoll talked about using his office as a “bully pulpit” in support of arts education.

During intermission on a recent PBS “Live From Lincoln Center” program celebrating the 85th birthday of composer Aaron Copland, Hodsoll was campaigning on the education theme again, saying “we’re . . . trying to make the arts a basic part of education, (and we’re) trying to do that in the schools.”

So what is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, admittedly a “David” in the process of determining educational policy, doing on the turf of the “Goliaths”--the U.S. Department of Education and state educational departments and local school districts?

“Somebody has to make the case,” Hodsoll said in a recent telephone interview. Just appointed by President Reagan to a second four-year term as NEA chief, he is the first lawyer and first former career government official to head the endowment, and its fourth chairman in 20 years.

Former deputy assistant to the President and deputy to former chief of staff James A. Baker III at the White House during the first year of the Reagan Administration, Hodsoll is making arts education, or “literacy” in the arts for every high school graduate, his issue.

“ I picked this. Since we’re spending the taxpayers’ money, we have the duty of bringing the arts we support to everybody,” he says.

The 47-year-old administrator has dabbled in the arts himself, starting with piano lessons at age 5. “And that came through a teacher, not an artist,” he emphasizes. At prep school in Santa Barbara and later at Yale, where he was “partly an art history major,” he performed in theater productions and sang in glee clubs.

Hodsoll has managed to pick for himself a pistol of an issue. And the crux of it is his apparent emphasis on teachers--not artists. That has drawn fire from a key national arts organization, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

State arts agencies across the nation have artists-in-residence programs, funded by the states and the national endowment, whereby artists from a variety of disciplines are dispatched to schools, hospitals, prisons and other community and cultural centers. Arts agency representatives fear that with Hodsoll’s new emphasis these programs are now in jeopardy.

Within the state arts agencies, artists-in-education coordinators, who oversee the residency programs, worry that Hodsoll, like Theodore Roosevelt who coined the phrase bully pulpit, may be speaking softly and carrying a big stick--the stick of funding denial.

Hodsoll and the executive board of the National Assembly will hold a summit of sorts in Washington on Wednesday in an attempt to resolve their impasse.

The arts education issue mean while has broader ramifications. Here is Hodsoll focusing on arts education and yet within the endowment’s $163-million budget, the current artists-in-education program (whose name Hodsoll wants changed to art-in-education) amounts to $5.6 million--or 3 1/2% of the NEA budget. It falls between the endowment’s $5.1 million in literature grants to individual writers and its $6.9 million in expansion (or ethnic minority) arts program.

Moreover, the NEA’s $163-million budget is virtually a drop in the nation’s budget-bucket compared to the gargantuan Department of Education, whose budget is $17.9 billion.

“Granted, we have a flat budget. . . . However, we have an educational program, and we can make that count even more. There are some who disagree,” acknowledges Hodsoll, a Republican who hardly expects the endowment’s budget, or indeed the programmatic budget, to grow in an era of ever-escalating national debt.

“I think that money is less important than process on the state and local level, of going to get schools and have them see it in their interest to spend their money,” Hodsoll explains, “and they have a lot of money that’s (spent on arts education) not focused, not sequential. I think it’s worth a try. We’re not going to shift massive amounts of money.”

“In a number of states,” he continues, “I don’t know whether it’s a majority or a minority--there is no question that there is resistance on the part of the artist residency coordinators. They--at least what is being conveyed to me--are very concerned about ‘David and Goliath.’ Secondly, they are concerned that moving more in this direction might undercut their ability to get money for residencies either from us or the states. First, that’s not our intention. . . . “

Asked whether it couldn’t happen that way, Hodsoll replies: “All sorts of things happen hypothetically,” and on a softer note, adds: “There are risks.”

Moments later, however, Hodsoll seems to shift direction. Referring to the NEA’s proposed guidelines, draft No. 12, the term-paper-sized document generating all the furor, he notes: “We’re asking each of the states to send us back the guidelines, mark them up. We think it says ‘such and such.’ They may not. There may be a miscommunication here. We may disagree in some areas.

“If there is anything in those guidelines that says there shall be no more artist residencies, that’s wrong. If there’s a sentence in there that implies that, we’ll fix it.” Hodsoll emphasizes. “But I don’t know what sentence that is.”

The guidelines, in their current form, detail what the endowment is looking for in coming fiscal years in state applications for arts-education funding.

“After an appropriate transition,” draft No. 12 notes, “the competition for federal funds will be based on an assessment of the state arts agency’s vision for art as a basic in education, the practicality of its strategy to move towards that vision, and in time actual progress in that direction.”

(In California, coordinator Philip Horn notes that, unlike in most states, artists-in-schools constitutes only a third of the grants within the $1.7-million artist-residency program of the California Arts Council, the rest going to various community centers. He is concerned over what might happen to the majority of residencies outside the schools.)

“What we’re trying to do,” Hodsoll explains, “is ask the state arts agencies” to ask “the broader question” of the educators, to put to them “the arts side of the equation.”

“The fact is,” Hodsoll said, that 61% (of Americans) don’t go to things we (the endowment) support. Statistics show they usually go to minor things, like the orchestra once on a Wednesday afternoon. For the future of the cultural heritage, we simply have to have arts as part of American education. . . .

“We have the possibility of making fundamental change in small steps,” Hodsoll continues, citing Illinois, Ohio and West Virginia among other states he believes are already moving in the appropriate direction.

“What I am asking the states (arts agencies) to do is push the edges,” Hodsoll says, giving the barest of hints that, particularly in rural states, if a state’s arts representatives have talked to educators and pushed everywhere, they would not be penalized. “(Let’s) see if we can’t get a few states to move forward.”

In the process, Hodsoll has pushed the edges of discontent.

At its annual meeting of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies in Seattle last month, the arts education issue overrode the convention’s planned theme of “the arts and livability.” On convention eve, state coordinators engaged in a heated discussion with Hodsoll and other NEA officials over their proposed guidelines. Out of Seattle came two resolutions:

The first, while approving the concept of making the arts a basic, “encouraged the recognition of residency activities and other innovative approaches.” It urged the endowment to extend the “timeline” for artist-in-education program revision. The second, and tougher, resolution stipulated that “the proposed draft guidelines (draft No. 12) do not reflect a true partnership between the federal government and the state governments, and these draft guidelines are not acceptable.”

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies originally asked for a meeting in New York the afternoon of the Copland concert. Instead, Hodsoll, who had planned a four-week trip to South America to meet with his hemisphere counterparts and discuss the 500th anniversary celebrations in 1992 of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America, proposed the Wednesday alternative.

Meanwhile, Hodsoll’s timetable about taking the issue to the National Council on the Arts in February, does not appear to have changed. Hodsoll chairs the NEA advisory board.

In Seattle, Hodsoll’s most telling argument on behalf of the importance of arts as a basic came from someone else. Hodsoll had quoted Elliot Eisner, a professor of education in art at Stanford, reflecting on “great art” which “enlightens in a special way and stretches the mind in the process. . . .

“There is no verbal equivalent to Bach’s Mass in B Minor,” Eisner had said. “Words cannot convey what the music has to say. But the messages in these works are not there simply for the taking. They must, so to speak, be recovered. They must be read. The works themselves must be unwrapped to be experienced. School programs that do not provide adequate time and education to the arts deny students access to a stunning part of their culture. Such students simply are unable to read our most profound forms of human achievement.”

However, Charles Christopher Mark of Arts Reporting Service in Bethesda, Md., recently looked at the issue from another perspective. “The problem,” Mark wrote, “is that Hodsoll wants to pass ‘laws’ . . . because he is a lawyer. It can’t be done. If he thinks the state arts agency directors are giving him difficulties now, wait until he sees how the state education commissioners will react when they get wind of an arts agency wanting to fool with their curricula. . . . Our state arts people are no match for these officials if it comes to invading their backyard.”