The College of Fine Arts is struggling to fund its programs and may be looking to students for help.
Kymberly Pinder, dean at the College of Fine Arts, is promoting a universal fee for the arts to help foster growth within the program and University as a whole.
An “arts and culture fee” would go a long way to helping with necessary repairs and keeping quality staff at UNM, she said.
Pinder’s proposed $40 tuition raise would have gone to the College of Fine Arts annually, to address some of the problems facing the department.
The Board of Regents voted against the raise when Pinder presented it in March. The members of the board said asking student to shoulder the budget problems was not a sustainable solution.
“It is our job to think outside of the box to fix the problem,” Regent Suzanne Quillen said during the meeting.
But Pinder said she’s not giving up on the idea and is creating a comprehensive strategy so that she can present the proposal again in the future. She said department-specific support from the student body is nothing new.
“The same way that there is a blanket fee for supporting athletics, we would like to have one for the college of fine arts,” she said.
The College of Fine Arts has had funding problems for a few years now, and it has fallen to the administrators within the College to find solutions.There had an allocated equipment budget, but it was cut when the economy crashed and has yet to be reinstated. Finding money for equipment purchases is now relegated largely to fundraising, she said.
But even with generous donations coming from outside sources, more needs to be done to address the many issues Fine Arts is facing.
About $100,000 was recently allocated to the sculpture lab for new HVAC systems, but the building itself needs to be replaced, she said. It has been on the 10-year plan for renovation for about 30 years now, constantly being patched up in places while the larger picture has been ignored, she said.
Steve Block, Department of Music chair, said he supports the idea of a universal fee and that a number of colleges around the country have a universal fee for the arts, neighboring University of Colorado Boulder being one of them.
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“If you’re looking at a universal fee, you’re helping to pay for very expensive equipment,” he said. “We’re talking about the ability to have a jewel program like music, in a state where music is significant and the arts have always been significant.”
Aside from giving quality faculty the incentive to stay, a universal fee would allow the College of Fine Arts to give more back to the students, he said.
With better funding, musical performances done by the department could be free to all students, for example.
The Department of Music is housed in a building that dates to 1964. While that may not seem so old, buildings at other colleges are being replaced much sooner, he said.
Block said he would like to see more support coming from the upper administration.
“In my view, people should be held to a standard when it comes to the fundraising, from the top down,” Block said. “We’re about to go into what they’re calling a responsibility oriented management phase. If that’s the case, everybody has got to be held accountable, including how much fundraising is being done at the very top. That’s where you’re starting to build for the future.”
UNM students pay some of the lowest tuition rates in the nation for public universities, and considering that people regularly pay $5 for a cup of coffee, $40 a year is a relatively small investment, Pinder said.
“For the College of Fine Arts we have very particular needs that deal with equipment upgrades and software upgrades,” she said, “making sure that we have a facility that is using the most current equipment and most up to date software so our students are best prepared when they graduate.”
Matthew Reisen is a staff reporter at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com, or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
