When I started working at California College of the Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in 1987, the debate had already begun as to the difference between “arts” and “crafts.”
I don’t mean to weigh in on that, because it was an intensely partisan discussion, and it didn’t really matter to most people. Why was, say, jewelry design a “craft” while oil painting was an “art”?
But the split was happening. “Crafts” eventually lost, and it became official some years ago when the school changed its name to California College of the Arts (CCA). My job, from 1987 to 1990, was Director of the Career Planning and Placement Center, a job I took seriously. A good part of my days was spent advising people who had graduated years earlier, with a Bachelor or Master of Fine Arts degree, who were unable to get decent jobs. Typical of them was a 40-year old woman who told me, “I graduated 18 years ago with a degree in painting, and I’m tired of being a waitress. Can’t you help me get a job making $75,000 a year?”
The answer, sadly, usually was No.
I did, however, have a solution for the future, which I had learned while working in the Career Center at San Francisco State University in the mid-1980s. It was to develop an internship program. This is where students serve as employees (they can be paid or unpaid) for companies where they can learn the skills and mental attitudes needed for good jobs. Such a thing had never before been tried at CCAC, where graduating students were just tossed into the job market with no marketable skills. My boss, the Dean of Student Services, supported me, although he warned I’d be opposed by the other Deans.
Oh, man, was he right.
“Over my dead body!” declared the Dean of Architecture. “No!” announced the Dean of Graphic Design. Their argument was that they were not educating their students to be mere commercial drones: no, they were teaching them the CCAC way of fine arts. They didn’t give a damn what happened to their students after they graduated. The best of them, they told me, would thrive. As for the rest, well, who cared?
The Dean of Fine Arts, on the other hand, was mildly supportive.
We had to convince the college President to allow the internship program, and, as anyone knows who’s ever worked on a college campus, a low-level director (as I was) can never compete against the Gods that Deans are.
So it wasn’t surprising to me yesterday to learn that CCA has finally given up the ghost and gone out of business. It was an expensive school, often leaving students (and their parents) in serious debt. CCAC never learned to accept responsibility. Their enticing brochures promised successful careers in the arts; it was a lie. Their business model, it turns out, couldn’t be sustained. The college first gave up its Oakland campus some years ago. Now, the San Francisco campus will be taken over by Vanderbilt University, so it’s Sayonara to CCA.
The point, I think, is that CCAC was wedded to an outdated ideology that couldn’t work. It was a vision inherited essentially from the Middle Ages, when artists took apprentices. But it couldn’t work today, and this is especially true when the college is taking their students’ money, as Oakland takes ours through taxes.
Like the old CCAC, Oakland is being thoroughly irresponsible with its people—us. B. Lee is falsely claiming credit for the lower crime rate, deliberately withholding the fact that crime is dropping in cities across the U.S. At the same time, she and her cronies continue to conspire to weaken the Oakland Police Department and transfer city funds to dubious “equity” departments that are, in fact, nothing but fronts to hire more people of color as city employees, thus fattening the memberships of the unions that keep this nefarious system in place. This makes Oakland’s leaders as morally bankrupt as CCAC’s leaders when I worked there. (The college, I understand, did eventually develop an internship program, long after I left.) CCAC, for all its good intentions, was a scam, and so is the government of Oakland, both stuck in a moribund ideology that benefited themselves but not the students who paid for it all, and whom they were supposed to help. Had the college listened to me 35 years ago, they might have built a thriving environment for everyone. Parents would have been happy to pay the tuition, and students would have flocked there, knowing that they could make a good living. Instead, the school stubbornly resisted change, and paid the price.
Steve Heimoff