Amid a 15 percent budget cut due to Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s unilateral state budget unallotment, Hibbing Community College has announced plans to downsize its celebrated theater department. Because I work for HCC (in the communication department no less) I am dangerously close to the politics of this. As such I won’t comment much on this specific issue on this, my non-work-related blog. It’s up to the citizens of the Iron Range to fight for the arts and I hope they do.
I will say this. The budget situation is similarly bad at all of the community colleges in northern Minnesota even though enrollment has in many cases been rising by fairly significant margins (though not in all cases). Dislocated workers are pouring in the doors but the colleges are being told that they will have to do “more with less” — the mantra of the Pawlentyites — which just means less. “Why weren’t you just born in a property tax wealthy community like us? Why’d you have to be rural? Why did your parents have to be poor and work with their hands?” And yes I know that Tim Pawlenty grew up in a working class family. That just makes his decision to embrace this unallotment catastrophe all the more disturbing. He put his political future ahead of thousands of students just like him when he was young.
Schools and colleges that do not prepare students to think beyond their vocational training are inadvertently training their students to be subject to the control of outside forces. The Iron Range has had enough of that, thank you.
And, please note, these are the views of me, the writer and political operative, and not those of any of my employers.
From hibbingmn.com:
“The college suspended five low-enrollment programs, including sales and business management, web developing, business software specialist, network security forensics and medical coding. HCC intends to bring back network security forensics and medical coding after a one year suspension.”
Seems those programs are vocational. Seems those programs might help people find jobs. Seems holding the line on taxes means cutting services.
Seems better to pay income tax on income than property tax on no income.
Seems people should consider that taxes might do something to better their lives when they go into the voting booth.
Interesting, isn’t it, how there were more services in many areas when everybody paid more taxes a couple of decades ago. I think that the whole idea of taxes needs to be reformed. It needs to be viewed as the price we pay for living in a great country with great programs and services.
In addition, it seems reasonable to me that people could also pay a “voluntary tax” in grateful appreciation for all that this country has done for them. There are a lot of people who have made a good living because of this great country. These people may be the “rich,” but they may also be people who just see how well off they are on whatever scale they want to measure themselves.
Many of us who are not rich already give away well more than 10% to charities because we haven’t bought into the buy-and-acquire mindset of our culture.
This would be a loss to the entire region. HCC’s Theatre is:
–a laboratory for your arts professionals whose positive economic impact on any economy has been measured (for example) by Florida’s assessment of the “creative class.” Letting the HCC theatre with moves the Hibbing economy into the Pittsburgh & Detroit category: “They pay lip service to the need to “attract talent,” but continue to pour resources into recruiting call centers, underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls” instead of nurturing the kinds of creative economies generated by the arts. (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html) HCC’s theatre is or could be a center to explore these possibilities for the Iron Range.
–a center for community. Above and beyond the positive economic benefits that a thriving theatre program may spark, in a small way, because of the way it nurtures creative professionals, it also spurs community involvement into an activity that is both expressive and economically vitalizing. People commit to the theatre because of passion and because of the relationships that spark between theatre and audience, in ways that we don’t see anywhere else in the arts or in most forms of charity. People commit to local theatre, I would argue, in a level we don’t see anywhere except maybe church! The voluntarism and the energy has a positive feedback for the community.
–a real point of intersection between higher ed and the community. A community college exists to serve the community, but has few mechanisms to keep the community coming back after graduation. There are few mechanisms to bring the community into contact with the college on a regular basis. One open house would draw a tenth of the community that comes to campus for one play. In times when community colleges are under constant budgetary threat from a man whose ambitions, it seems clear, are to undermine quality of life in his state before leaving office, we need that connection.
Think of the UW model, in which two-year colleges are jointly funded by state and county. The county has an investment in the community college much larger than the MNSCU system, to be sure — and works harder for those points of intersection.
HCC has that point of intersection built into its curriculum and infrastructure. Why lose what other colleges struggle to build and maintain?
–a focal point for growth and possibility. The theatre department could be the space for new innovations. Theatre is a discipline of innovation that could become a laboratory for more than just plays. The former Ironworld / Minnesota Discovery Center could become the site of and beneficiary of projects in the technical staging of exhibition spaces through the HCC Theatre department. (No one running a museum knows lighting like a theatre professional.) Courses in dramaturgy could be combined with work in historical reenactment to improve the experience of visitors to dozens of regional museums. And working in concert with excellent faculty across the range in English, Communication and other fields, the HCC Theatre program could explore performance in the context of new media production.
It’s easy to forget that many community and technical college have theatre programs not because they fill some liberal education requirement, but because they are a craft like any other, with practical applications as well as artistic expressions. That HCC’s theatre program is also a possible center for regional economic development and community connection with the school only reinforces what HCC could lose.
This was drafted in a hurry. Apologies if it rambles or misrepresents.