CAA News Today
caa.reviews Seeks 2012 Doctoral Dissertations
posted by Alyssa Pavley — October 15, 2012
Dissertation titles in art history and visual studies from American and Canadian institutions, both completed and in progress, are published annually in caa.reviews, making them available through web searches. PhD-granting institutions may send a list of their doctoral students’ dissertation titles for 2012 to dissertations@collegeart.org. The complete Dissertation Submission Guidelines regarding the format of listings are now available. CAA does not accept listings from individuals. Improperly formatted lists will be returned to sender. For more information, please write to the above email address or visit the guidelines page. Deadline: January 16, 2013.
Register for the 2013 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — October 11, 2012
Registration is now open for the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. Register before the early deadline, December 14, 2012, to ensure the lowest rate and your place in the online Directory of Attendees.
Registration includes access to all conference sessions and to the Book and Trade Fair. Each registrant will receive a copy of the Conference Program and access to the online Directory of Attendees, along with online access to Abstracts 2013 and free admission to selected museums and galleries throughout greater New York during the conference.
Those interested in Career Services should sign up now to secure a place in several high-demand activities. Register for a variety of Professional Development Workshops covering topics ranging from grant writing to tenure issues. Sign up for Mentoring Sessions that include the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring.
Making travel plans and hotel reservations? Check out the special discounts available to conference attendees. Students can take advantage of further reductions on accommodations at select conference hotels.
You may also purchase tickets for a variety of Events taking place in the New York area, including:
- Opening Night Reception at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Chelsea Gallery District Walking Tour
- Montclair Art Museum Tour and Reception
Space is limited, so please register early.
CAA will regularly update the conference website over the next few months, with additional details on the program, awards, tours, and more. A list of session names and chairs has been posted, with the names of all speakers and the titles of their presentations coming in November.
The CAA Annual Conference is the world’s largest international forum for professionals in the visual arts, offering more than two hundred stimulating sessions, panel discussions, roundtables, and meetings. CAA anticipates more than six thousand artists, art historians, students, curators, critics, educators, art administrators, and museum professionals to attend the meeting, which brings CAA’s Centennial year to a close.
Appraisers Association of America Presents “On and Off the Road,” an Evening with America’s Most Popular Appraisers
posted by Christopher Howard — October 04, 2012
The Appraisers Association of America, an affiliated society, invites CAA members to attend “On and Off the Road,” an evening with America’s most popular appraisers, to be held at the Grolier Club in New York on Tuesday, October 16, 2012. Experts from television’s Antiques Roadshow—Lee Dunbar, Kathleen Harwood, Daile Kaplan, Leigh Keno, Betty Krulik, Kevin Zavian, and Alasdair Nichol—will share their experiences on and off camera. Attendees will have the rare opportunity to hear some of the country’s leading appraisers discuss the process of evaluating everything from fine art to memorabilia. You also have the chance for private appraisal consultation to find out if you own a hidden gem. Meet and speak with some of the most trusted experts in the business.
Tickets are $85 for individuals and $75 for CAA members, staff, and guests ; $200 for patrons and $175 CAA members, staff, and guests; and $350 for a patron duo and $300 CAA members, staff, and guests. Tickets are tax deductible, with the proceeds benefiting the association’s Appraisal Institute to support educational programs on connoisseurship, assessment, and valuation.
Doors open at 6:00 PM. The panel discussion begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a reception at 7:30 PM. Free appraisal consultations are offered to those with patron tickets; please RSVP by October 9 by calling 212-889-5404, ext. 11., or writing to programs@appraisersassoc.org .
The Grolier Club is located at 47 East 60th Street , New York, NY 10065 (map). For the Appraisal Consultation Guidelines, and for information about the Appraisers Association of America, please visit www.appraisersassociation.org or call 212-889-5404, ext. 11.
Kress Foundation Awards CAA Grant for Fair Use in the Visual Arts
posted by Linda Downs — October 03, 2012
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded CAA a start-up grant to support the development of a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use of Copyrighted Images in the Creation and Curation of Artworks and Scholarly Publishing in the Visual Arts. The project will address all areas of the visual arts and involve participants from the fields of art history, studio art, print and online publishing, art museums and related areas.
CAA’s Board of Directors recognized the need for the development of a Code of Best Practices by establishing a Task Force on Fair Use at the May 7, 2012 meeting. The rationale for this undertaking is to address what amounts to a crisis in the visual arts field. At this time, there is significant evidence that concerns around the implications of copyright—and especially uncertainty surrounding the fair use doctrine (currently codified under section 107 of the Copyright Act)—is substantially inhibiting the ability of scholars and artists to develop new work requiring the use of images and other third-party copyrighted works. The visual arts field needs the opportunity to explore and better understand copyright and fair use law, come to a consensus on best practices in the use of third-party images, and adhere to a code that is within the law and practicable for visual arts scholarly publications and creative work.
This fall, with the support of the Kress Foundation, CAA will establish a research plan and administrative framework for developing a comprehensive Code of Best Practices for Fair Use. CAA’s newly-created Task Force on Fair Use will begin work with two recognized authorities on the subject: Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, Washington School of Law, American University and Pat Aufderheide, Director, Center for Media Studies, American University. Jaszi and Aufderheide, the authors of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back into Copyright (Chicago University Press, 2011) have worked with numerous disciplines—including documentary film makers, dance archivists, research librarians, and journalists—to develop best practices in fair use. CAA’s Task Force will be co-chaired by Jeffrey P. Cunard (CAA Counsel and Partner, Debevoise & Plimpton) and Gretchen Wagner (CAA Committee on Intellectual Property and ARTstor General Counsel); its other members include Anne Collins Goodyear (CAA President and Associate Curator, Prints and Drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute); Linda Downs (CAA Executive Director and CEO); Suzanne Blier (CAA Board Member and Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University); DeWitt Godfrey (CAA Vice President for Committees and Director, Institute for Creative and Performing Arts, Colgate University); Randall C. Griffin (ex-officio as CAA Vice President for Publications, Professor, Division of Art History, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University); Paul Jaskot (CAA Past President and Professor of History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University); Patricia McDonnell (CAA Vice President for External Affairs and Director, Wichita Art Museum); Charles Wright (CAA Board Member and Chair, Department of Art, Western Illinois University). Throughout the project, CAA will involve its members and the larger visual arts community in building a comprehensive Code designed to serve all members of its constituency. CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property will address CAA’s work on Fair Use at its upcoming public session at the Annual Meeting in February 2013 (Saturday, February 16, at 12:30 pm).
Interviews with Mira Schor and Janine Antoni at the 2013 Annual Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — October 03, 2012
The painter and writer Mira Schor and the sculptor and multimedia artist Janine Antoni will participate in the Annual Artists’ Interviews, taking place in ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia, will interview Schor. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.
As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking.
Schor is based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, which includes more images of her work.
Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.
In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”
Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.” Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, with several photographs of her work.
Images
Top: Mira Schor, The Dreams of All of Us, 2012, ink, rabbit skin glue, oil, and gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Bottom: Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993, two self-portrait busts: one chocolate and one soap, 24 x 16 x 13 in. (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
MIRA SCHOR AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted by Christopher Howard — October 03, 2012
Mira Schor, a painter and writer based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is Janine Antoni. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, will interview Schor.
Mira Schor
Mira Schor (photograph © 2012 Mary Jones)
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.
As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Schor’s first decade of writing on contemporary art and culture is collected in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Composed during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the book addresses the work of David Salle, Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls. In the often-cited essay “Figure/Ground,” Schor’s distinctly feminist voice, seeped in the history of modernism, discusses the perseverance of painting in light of contemporary aesthetic debates. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking, for which she received support from the Arts Writers Grant Program in 2009. Entries include “You Put a Spell on Me,” about the relationship of African art and Renaissance portraiture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Youthfulness in Old Age,” about the late paintings of Joan Mitchell and Roberto Matta; and “Books Are Like People,” an exegesis on the life and destruction of the free library at Occupy Wall Street.
Schor maintains a dialectical understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In a 2011 conversation with Bradley Rubenstein for Culture Catch, she explained, “I speak of two ‘politics,’ what is happening in the world, and art politics, examining which definitions of art are hosts for different types of power. My identity as a painter has always been caught, in a generative way, between the traditions of painting and the proclamations of the death of painting, of the object, of the individual artist, of private studio practice—everything that has become the doxa of contemporary art.”
Mira Schor, Silence….speech, noise, 2010, ink, oil, and gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Her most recent solo exhibition, Voice and Speech, was held at Marvelli Gallery in New York in spring 2012. A recurring motif in the show was a pensive, schematically sketched figure, what Schor has called an “avatar of self.” In each painting, handwriting, sometimes contained in thought-balloon rectangles, conveys a sense of cartoonish yet poetic immediacy. In a review of the show, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, “Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now…. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.” The paintings, all modestly scaled, convey a sense of private urgency, like torn-out pages from a notebook. In a 2002 interview with the painter Joan Waltemath, published in the Brooklyn Rail, Schor discusses the specificity of painted language, and how her visual art relates to her writing: “the direction of my painting and writing are intimately linked in a constant interplay between practice and theory—I find it hard to place one before the other as I speak: I paint writing and in some cases I paint the (critical/theoretical) writing that I’m writing. I certainly never gave up on visual pleasure. On the contrary I am interested in embedding verbal writing as image into the rich materiality of painting so that the two cannot be disentwined.”
Mira Schor, Slit of Paint, 1994, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Schor earned an MFA in 1973 from the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. At CalArts she came into contact with Fluxus art tactics from artist professors such as Alison Knowles and the poet Emmett Williams. Schor was actively involved in the Feminist Art Program, one of the first of its kind in the country, started by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Schor fondly recalls the “goofy spirit” of the school, comparing it to the television show created by her fellow student, Paul Reubens’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The atmosphere was “subversive but in a sweet, slightly anarchic rather than nihilistic manner.”
Teaching studio art and art history to several generations of artists has been an important component of Schor’s life as an artist. She has been an associate teaching professor of fine art at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design since 1989. Recently, she has served as a guest lecturer at the School of Visual Art’s MFA in art criticism program and a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Over the years she has taught at many schools, including the Rhode Island School of Design—where Janine Antoni, the second CAA interviewee, was her student—Sarah Lawrence College, Vermont College, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Schor’s solo exhibitions include Painting in the Space Where Painting Used to Be at Some Walls in Oakland in 2011, Mira Schor: Paintings from the Nineties to Now at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010, and Suddenly: New Paintings by Mira Schor at Momenta Art in Brooklyn in 2009. With Susan Bee, she founded and led the art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G/, which was active in print between 1986 and 1996; it continues as an online publication (a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published in late 2011). A collection of texts from this publication, titled M/E/A/N/I/N/G/: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, was published in 2000. Schor is also the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Schor has received awards in painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 1999, CAA recognized her writing with its Frank Jewett Mather Award. She is currently represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and by Marvelli Gallery in New York.
Stuart Horodner
Stuart Horodner is artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia. He has held positions as visual arts curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon and director of the Bucknell University Art Gallery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was also a coowner of the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York. Horodner has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions and has worked with artists including Leon Golub, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Judy Linn, Melanie Manchot, William Pope.L, Kay Rosen, Joe Sola, Jessica Stockholder, and Jack Whitten.
His criticism has appeared in journals and magazines, including Art Issues, Art Lies, Art on Paper, Bomb Magazine, and Sculpture. Horodner’s new book, The Art Life: On Creativity and Career (Atlanta: Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2012), collects statements and texts by visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers that address the Sisyphean task of sustaining a lifelong career in the arts. (Read an interview with Horodner about The Art Life in ArtsATL, published in March 2012.) He has served in an advisory capacity to organizations, including Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, Creative Capital, the Ford Family Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.
JANINE ANTONI AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted by Christopher Howard — October 03, 2012
Janine Antoni, an artist based in New York, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is the painter and writer Mira Schor. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and a curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.
Janine Antoni
Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992, performance with Loving Care hair dye Natural Black, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York, and taken by Prudence Cumming Associates at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1993)
Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.
In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”
In Antoni’s work, a charged relationship between the symbolic nature of her preferred materials (chocolate, lard, soap, hemp) and the artist’s given task to transform raw material, results in a highly personal, metaphysical evocation. For the installation Gnaw (1992), Antoni wanted to use her own body as a tool to redefine what a figurative sculpture could be. She chewed on a block of chocolate and a block of lard, spitting out pieces of each to be melted down and respectively repackaged as heart-shaped chocolates and lipstick. In Lick & Lather (1993), she sculpted two self-portrait busts out of chocolate and soap, generating a nearly tangible sensation of taste and touch.
Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992, 600 lbs. of chocolate, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 600 lbs. of lard, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 45 heart-shaped packages for chocolate made from chewed chocolate removed from the chocolate cube; 400 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax, and chewed lard removed from the lard cube displayed in glass case (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Another recurring theme in Antoni’s art is the lasting enigma of the family. She has staged photographs of her parents dressed in drag as each other, which results in a comical yet strangely moving portrait of a couple. In 2008 she photographed her toddler daughter attempting to feed her mother through her bellybutton. The doublings and life cycles in both series transcend mere performance or enactment to become lasting meditations on human relationships. In a 2009 interview in Art in America, she states, “My work occupies the territory between object, performance and relic. For each piece, I ask myself what the piece needs, how much I should tell and how much I should leave to the viewer’s imagination. With earlier projects, I spoke through the work in a very direct way, and I thought that was a generous gesture. Now, I’m more interested in leaving a space for the viewer’s imagination.” This new, more open-ended approach to her practice is evident in Tear (2008), an installation that pairs a video projection of a close-up of Antoni’s eye blinking in unison to a thudding sound. The video is screened in a room which contains a visibly scarred, lead wrecking ball that had been used in the demolition of a building. The artwork implies a triangulated relationship among all three components; tension and mystery are built from the unseen elements in the narrative.
Antoni was born in 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Mira Schor was an influential professor for Antoni in graduate school, introducing the younger woman to the work of three feminist artists from the 1970s whose physical bodies were integral to their art practice: Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneeman.
Janine Antoni, Slumber, 1993, performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, PSG machine, and artist’s REM reading, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Antoni has shown her work in more than twenty-five solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Her most recent was Touch (2011) at the Museum Kunst der Westküste in Alkersum/Föhr, Germany. She has participated in international biennials in Venice, Johannesburg, Istanbul, and Kwangju and domestically in the Whitney Biennial in New York, SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, and Prospect.1 in New Orleans. The artist has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award, a Creative Capital Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York.
Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.”
Klaus Ottmann
Klaus Ottmann is director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He is the author of Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought (Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2010), The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition (New York: Spring Publications, 2004), and The Essential Mark Rothko (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003). In 2006 he translated and edited Yves Klein’s complete writings for the book Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, published by Spring Publications.
Ottmann has curated more than forty international exhibitions, including Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture; Still Points of the Turning World: SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial; Life, Love, and Death: The Work of James Lee Byars; Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective; Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008; and Fairfield Porter Raw: The Creative Process of an American Master.
Help Spread the Word about CAA Travel Grants
posted by Christopher Howard — October 02, 2012
Many of you began your CAA membership as students, so you know how important the Annual Conference is for young artists and scholars breaking into the field. From networking to interviewing to attending panels, the conference enables them to get more involved in the visual-arts community and fosters their professional aspirations. Every year, students apply for CAA’s travel grant to help them cover the costs of getting to the conference. In the past three years, though, CAA has only assisted about 30 percent of those who apply. Please help CAA’s student members to reap the benefits of the Annual Conference by increasing our travel-grant fund through Indiegogo, a crowd-funding website! Make a contribution yourself or share our campaign via Facebook, Twitter, or other social media by reposting this link: http://igg.me/p/230278?a=1266837. Every share increases the chance that we’ll meet our goal of raising $4,000!
We at CAA greatly appreciate your membership and commitment.
AAU Proposes Higher Education, Innovation Agenda for Presidential Candidates, Next Administration
posted by Linda Downs — October 01, 2012
The CAA Board of Directors has endorsed a policy paper, released on September 19, 2012, which calls for increased funding for the arts and humanities, among other subjects.
Calls for Strengthening Partnership between Federal Government and Research Universities
The Association of American Universities (AAU) today proposed for the next Administration a detailed agenda for strengthening the partnership between the federal government and the nation’s research universities as a means of fostering innovation, prosperity, and economic growth.
The paper also lists steps that universities need to take to strengthen the partnership and improve the ways they carry out their missions of education, research, and public service.
AAU will provide the policy paper, entitled “Partnering for a Prosperous and Secure Future: The Federal Government and Research Universities,” to both major Presidential campaigns.
For some of its key proposals, the paper relies on the recent National Research Council (NRC) report, “Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation’s Prosperity and Security.” AAU is an association of leading public and private research universities that focuses on national and institutional issues important to research-intensive universities, including funding for research, research and education policy, and graduate and undergraduate education.
The policy paper issued today provides recommendations for government and for universities in the following areas:
Addressing the nation’s fiscal challenge. The report calls for “a balanced approach that seriously and thoughtfully addresses entitlement programs, which are a primary source of long-term spending growth, and incorporates substantial tax reform that is designed both to encourage economic growth and to raise revenues needed to reduce the deficit.”
Cultivating human capital by strengthening access to college. The report calls on the federal government to sustain vital student aid programs, especially Pell Grants, and ensure that student loan programs encourage sound borrowing and manageable repayment plans. It also emphasizes the importance of universities controlling costs while sustaining educational quality, providing appropriate institutional financial aid, and ensuring transparency about costs as well as financial aid.
Attracting and developing talent by strengthening graduate and STEM education and reforming immigration laws. To strengthen graduate education, the report calls on universities to become more efficient by increasing completion rates and reducing time-to-degree and to strengthen pathways for students in a broad range of careers, not only in academia. It calls on government to adopt career development initiatives designed to supplement and expand fellowships and traineeships.
The report notes AAU’s five-year initiative to strengthen undergraduate education in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and urges government to encourage such initiatives.
The paper also calls for comprehensive immigration reform as well as specific reforms designed to “turn immigrant talent into American talent,” including establishing a clear pathway to citizenship for advanced STEM degree graduates from US colleges and universities; enacting a version of the DREAM Act to help make it possible for children whose parents brought them to the US to attend college; and gradually replacing the seven-percent-per-country cap limitation for employment-based green cards with a first-come, first-serve system for qualified, highly skilled immigrants.
Fostering new ideas and discoveries. The report urges the next Administration to follow through on the NRC’s recommendations for sustaining federal support of basic research, including full funding of the America COMPETES Act. It also expresses support for allocating research funds by merit review as well as for sustained funding of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ensuring a regulatory and legal framework that encourages innovation. The association calls for regulatory reform to simplify and make more efficient the regulatory framework governing federal research and higher education programs. It also urges maintaining the current legal framework for university technology transfer, as set forth by the Bayh-Dole Act; developing proof-of-concept and gap funding programs that would support the translation of ideas generated with federally funded research into viable commercial products; and rejecting proposals that would allow faculty to be “free agents” and directly commercialize federal research results. To further promote innovation, AAU calls for legislation to encourage federal research agencies to build and interconnect public-access repositories of peer-reviewed articles developed from the research they fund. The association also advocates policies that support expanding public access to both domestic and international research repositories.
Encouraging other sources of support for research universities. The policy document calls for federal initiatives to encourage states to live up to their obligation to support public higher education, including federal-state matches that require maintenance of effort by states. The report also calls for extending and improving tax policies that aid students and families in financing higher education, particularly permanent extension of the American Opportunity Tax Credit and its consolidation with the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit and the deduction for undergraduate education. The report also calls for the preservation of strong tax incentives for charitable giving.
About AAU
The Association of American Universities is an association of sixty-one leading public and private research universities in the United States and Canada. AAU focuses on issues important to research-intensive universities, such as funding for research, research policy issues, and graduate and undergraduate education. AAU universities award over one-half of all US doctoral degrees and 55 percent of those in the sciences and engineering. They are on the leading edge of innovation, scholarship, and solutions that contribute to our nation’s economy, security, and well-being.