Good Timing for the New Guy
Lucky G. David Pollick. Last month he was formally inaugurated as the 13th head of the School of the Art Institute at what looks to be one of the most auspicious moments in the school’s 127-year history. Applications are growing in number, the school’s endowment is in reasonably good shape, and the ugliness surrounding the showing of artist David Nelson’s controversial painting of Harold Washington in frilly lingerie is long past if not forgotten. The importance of the arts is being fiercely debated even as high culture in America is being threatened from every side. What’s more, Pollick officially assumed his new position in the same week U.S. News & World Report issued its annual guide to the nation’s best graduate schools. At the top of the list of institutions offering master’s degrees in fine arts was SAIC, which tied with Yale after years of falling lower in the rankings.
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Pollick attributes the school’s newly enhanced prestige to several factors. Chief among them is its reputation for selectivity; for every 1,100 applicants to its graduate programs, the school chooses around 200. Despite the hardships the arts are facing, Pollick believes fine arts graduate schools with good reputations aren’t going to suffer enrollment drops in the long haul. “There will always be people who do what they love in spite of the risks involved.” The School of the Art Institute now also boasts a new $12-million, 18-floor facility at 112 S. Michigan. A former athletic club, the new building will serve as a residence hall and site for special events and conferences; it also contains graduate studio space and a public screening room. Pollick believes the new building will increase the sense of community among students, who previously had to forage for housing. “Now we won’t have so much of that feeling of being a commuter community.”
Pollick says he’s worried about whether the school is giving its students the best experience it can. He also wants to increase minority enrollment, a tough challenge at an institution where tuition and living expenses now exceed $20,000 a year.
