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VOL. 10, NO. 2 
FALL 2021 

 

EDITORIAL 

Universities as Arts and Cultural Anchors 
Moving Beyond Bricks and Mortar to Entrepreneurship, Workforce, 
and Community Development Approaches 

Amanda Ashley 
Boise State University 

Leslie Durham 
Boise State University 

 

ABSTRACT: Economic developers refer to universities as anchor institutions because 
they are rooted regional economic drivers that are sites for development, incubation, 
entrepreneurship, workforce training, and knowledge transfer. Most anchor research 
speaks generally about the university or focuses on STEM. Our study asks: to what 
extent are public universities arts and cultural anchors? Through a comparative case 
analysis supplemented with interviews of field innovators and a translation of 
transdisciplinary literature, we deepen the anchor concept, and we propose a 
conceptual assessment tool. Our applied research helps universities move from 
being an arts patron to an arts entrepreneur, investor, innovator, and catalyst. 
KEYWORDS: arts economic development, anchor institutions, artist workforce 
development, university arts entrepreneurship, university arts innovation. 
DOI: doi.org/10.34053/artivate.10.2.150 

Introduction 
Policymakers, economic developers, and university leaders label and position higher education 
institutions (HEIs) as “anchor institutions” in our cities and regions. Civic, private, and public 
actors champion these deeply rooted and entrenched organizations as invaluable sources of 
regional economic activity because HEIs have the political influence, financial resources, and 
institutional infrastructure to grow, sustain, and revitalize metropolitan regions in a time of 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

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footloose industrial location and global corporate consolidation (Birch, ). Researchers 
attempt to sharpen this blunt concept and refine understanding of HEIs’ regional economic 
contribution and “stickiness” through analysis of workforce chains (Nelson & Wolf-Powers, 
), technology transfer roles (Allen & O’Shea, ), and property development (Gaffikin, 
; Ehlenz, ), entrepreneurship (Dodgson & Gann, ), and innovation (Chea & Yu, 
) among other areas of impact and contribution in economic, social, and community 
development. While scholars have made significant progress in unpacking the anchor concept 
and connecting theory to practice, they have yet to thoroughly identify and explain how HEIs 
perform as arts and cultural anchors in local and regional arts economic and community 
development (AED), which includes a more nuanced understanding of how they anchor 
economic and social innovation, entrepreneurship training, workforce development, and 
knowledge transfer. 

Powerful and important conversations in the academy and in popular media tout 
universities in the US as great patrons of the arts largely due to their investments in bricks-and-
mortar projects and their academic programs that train emerging artists in traditional and 
discrete artistic disciplines. There’s often a particular focus on star-architect projects and how 
these iconic facilities remake university identities and create cultural gateways as part of civic 
boosterism (Russell ; Hannon, ). As Tepper and Arthurs () broadly note, 
universities are likely the “greatest arts patrons” in the United States, with an estimated 
investment of more than  billion dollars due to their wide-ranging budgets that support such 
investments as capital projects, arts department funding, artist commissions, and public art 
installations. 

This perspective overlooks the ways that universities anchor arts and cultural activity as 
part of the regional creative ecology, and it bypasses the ways that universities are sites of arts 
and cultural innovation, entrepreneurship, and development in ways that resonate with 
economic developers, policymakers, and employers. While important, this traditional focus 
with the anchor as patron overlooks new and alternative connections, opportunities, and 
imperatives that universities have in other arenas, including the broad umbrella of artistic 
workforce development (AWD) that covers entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer, and 
innovation in economic, community, and social frameworks. This evolving concept of the 
university twenty-first-century arts and cultural anchor recognizes  the durable, intrinsic power 
of the arts in a new way while also being driven by the growing realization that the arts are more 
than just an amenity but a vital part of economic development—in the same way that the 
university is not a patron of science and technology but a partner and collaborator in the 
regional development of related industries (Tepper & Kuh, ), occupations (Markusen, 
), and communities (Grodach, ). Simultaneously, solely positioning the university as 
a patron suggests that while the arts may be a jewel in a university’s crown and a sign of its 
beneficence, they are rarely central to its primary role as an intellectual innovator or a vital 
entrepreneur in economic and social frameworks. This makes investing in arts and culture 
difficult since they are not regarded as essential university assets that are crucial for driving 
institutional advancement and distinction. This oversight or misunderstanding is due in part to 



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the anchor concept’s relative “fuzziness,” both from a scholarly standpoint, since it’s a relatively 
new concept (Ruthesier, n.d.), and from the practical vantage of those actually working in and 
leading institutions. Studying the arts in the universities also necessitates a broader 
understanding of how local and global forces shape the behavior of universities (Harris & 
Holley, ) when it comes to arts and culture activity. 

There is an increasingly robust literature that studies the ways new arts curriculum 
approaches are moving from traditional to more integrated and interdisciplinary programs that 
focus on practical skills that prepare artists for jobs in arts industries, for self-occupation, or for 
using their artistic skills in non-arts industries (Essig & Guevara, ; Essig, ; Essig, ), 
and that also recognize that artists have often taken a variety of paid work and volunteer 
positions in the quest for a creative career (Thomson & Jacque, ; Ashley & Durham, ). 
This research is often left out of the anchor conversations, and the lapse is particularly 
problematic in a time when liberal arts education (which includes the visual and performing 
arts) is under increased scrutiny due to dwindling public investment in higher education 
(Seltzer, ; Selingto ), a sharp prioritization of STEM (Axelrod, ), and an eagerness 
to respond to workforce readiness calls-to-action (Pimentel, ; Busteed, ). The COVID-
 pandemic and its short and long-term impacts are also adding pressure (Denon, ). 

Additionally, while scholars have done impressive work aimed toward understanding 
different players in the creative ecology (Becker, ) and the regional arts and cultural 
network, they have yet to contextualize where the university or “higher education institutions” 
(HEIs) sit in these “sticky” conceptualizations, with the exception of scholarship (Beckman, 
; Beckman and Essig, ; Essig, ) on a handful of new curriculum streams to enhance 
artist workforce readiness. This is starting to change as university leaders are calling for this 
change in positioning. Senior Fellow of the Association of American Universities, John Vaughn, 
predicts that universities will follow the example of American cities when it comes to 
recognizing the arts as a key asset for economic development: 

Ten years ago, mayors across the country viewed arts institutions and artists as amenities and 
symbols of achievement and status. . . . Today, mayors see the arts as essential for economic 
development, strengthening schools, improving quality of life, addressing issues of sustainability 
and attracting and retaining talented creative class workers” (Tepper & Arthurs, ). 

However, it’s unclear if university leaders know how to operationalize or optimize their 
role as arts and cultural anchors. In part, this is because there is a significant lack of applied 
research that might provide universities with access to a framework or tool for making and 
articulating these connections, which means that theory and practice are often disconnected 
(Ehlenz, ). While this is a general problem across all anchor literature (Rutheiser, n.d.), it 
is compounded by the lack of knowledge around the intersection between the anchor concept 
and AED. Little is known about how to realize these connections explicitly or how universities 
are marshalling financial, structural, and faculty resources to be a potent anchor that is aware of 
its role in the local and regional arts and cultural ecology. 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

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There is some movement on the notion of “integration” that calls for a “creative turn” in 
higher education (Penn State, ). Barbara Korner, Dean of the Penn State College of Arts 
and Architecture, spoke to members of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities 
on June , , to argue for greater, substantive collaboration across the arts and sciences to 
“maximize the impact that the university research can have on people’s lives,” and she noted: 

Too often the arts are considered useful methods of communication and we’re brought in at the 
end of the research project to visualize the data, or to translate that data. However, I’ve been 
hammering away at the notion that if science researchers bring artists and designers to the table 
at the beginning, they will find that these creatives will ask new questions, will explode those 
questions and explode that research wide open, and will lead to new directions and new 
discoveries (Penn State ). 

This reflects a savvy movement underway by a small number of research universities organized 
under the umbrella Alliance for Arts in Research Universities (ARU) to study and promote the 
integration that is happening across universities with a substantive focus on curriculum. 

This general dearth of knowledge regarding arts and anchor institutions combined with 
these specialized movements in research and curriculum integration comes at a crucial moment 
given general trends in higher education. Decreasing investment in HEI coupled with university 
reliance on the extramural funds provided by federal and corporate research funding is placing 
strong pressure on public universities to prioritize science, technology, engineering, and math 
(STEM) (Axelrod, ). The broad and dogged emphasis on a “workforce ready labor force” 
has contributed to the devaluing of liberal arts education (Dutt-Ballerstadt, ), with 
“generalists” and “careerists” (Jones, –) debating whether the liberal arts will “survive” 
the twenty-first century (Haris, ). At the same time, news stories abound about the value of 
liberal arts (Johnson, ; Olejarz, ), with headlines proclaiming, “Don’t Ditch that Liberal 
Arts Degree (Chriss, ),” “The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the 
Digital Rule (Hartley, )”, “Google Finds STEM skills aren’t the most important Skills” 
(Glazer, ), a “Liberal Arts Degree is More Important than Ever” (Dix, ), and “The Arts 
and Humanities Deliver Untapped Value for the Future of Work” (Wolff, ). While many 
voices debate whether the liberal arts is “dead” (Harris, ; White, ) or if it is part of a 
larger historical arc of “continuous death and resurrection” (Jones, ); policymakers, civic 
leaders, parents, and students are asking the university to communicate and articulate the value 
of higher education in new ways (Paul, ; Lederman, ). The “arts” fall under the liberal 
arts umbrella, and they face those same pressures, if not greater ones, thanks to a lack of public 
appreciation for the broad applicability of artistic skills in a contemporary marketplace (Tepper 
& Kuh, ). We share the public’s interest in how universities are responding and adapting 
to these external forces given that universities are a site of existing cultural activity and perform 
as an arts organization. We see the potential for their important role as an arts and cultural 
anchor as a crucial avenue for reform in higher education with an emphasis on 
entrepreneurship, innovation, and knowledge transfers across economic, community, and 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

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social avenues. 
Our transdisciplinary research helps universities in the region turn instinct into data-

informed practice so that we can broaden, deepen, and apply the university anchor concept. 
Our overarching question is: To what extent are public universities arts and cultural anchors? 
To address this broader topic, we are interested in the following supportive questions: How do 
public universities act as arts and cultural anchors? How have these anchor features changed 
over time? How do universities see and articulate their role in the regional arts and cultural 
ecosystem? How do universities support students, faculty, and regional artists as they create and 
sustain artist career trajectories as professional creative workers? How does the location, 
particularly public universities in the Intermountain West, influence the ways that universities 
act as arts and cultural anchors? 

We study these questions by looking at existing literatures and practices in AED, urban 
studies, and university reform in the early twenty-first century while we look specifically at 
public HEIs in the fast-growing Intermountain West with concomitant increasing student 
enrollment numbers. This is an understudied geographic area in the contemporary AED field 
that typically favors older, larger cities or smaller niche communities. Our comparative case 
study research highlights HEIs in Boise (ID), Fort Collins (CO), Reno (NV), and Salt Lake City 
(UT). These highly desirable, livable cities share more than a place on the map in the 
Intermountain West and similar population sizes: they are all home to growing, public, 
metropolitan universities and booming, buzz-generating cultural scenes despite limited 
resources, a short history of philanthropic wealth, and smaller markets on which to draw. These 
sites also provide a different set of supposed opportunities and challenges due to their physical 
and geographic isolation combined with the fact that they are newer cities that do not have the 
deep tradition of arts and cultural investment from large scale private and corporate 
philanthropy that bigger, older cities have as part of their DNA. Subsequently, beyond what 
these cases can tell us generally about anchors, we were also interested in whether the anchor 
concept looks different in places with those particular traits or if it presents new opportunities 
and challenges from a theoretical and practical perspective. 

As university leaders begin to turn their attention to maximizing the economic and cultural 
impact of their artistic assets, including the ways they are training artists for their careers in and 
beyond the arts, they need to understand the specific conditions affecting the regional artistic 
labor force and the potential role that universities have as intentional, potent arts and cultural 
anchors. Our study provides guidance on how to conceptualize and communicate about the 
university as an arts and cultural anchor so that universities can make (and defend) evidence-
based decisions and investments. Based on the research, we also include a pilot assessment tool 
that university leaders can use to consider different ways of approaching their role as a 
contemporary cultural anchor.  Our next steps focus on testing the tool with a handful of public 
universities so we can determine how to make it more useful and adaptable. 



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Literature Review 
There’s a significant body of scholarly literature in urban studies and urban planning around 
the idea, importance, and evolution of the “anchor institution,” which Ehlenz () notes is a 
concept that the Aspen Institute coined in the early s to denote an institution with 
significant assets that is unlikely to move. Universities, hospitals, and some large nonprofit 
institutions (foundations, churches, cultural institutions, and sport teams) became anchors 
either consciously or unconsciously in regional economic development due to corporate 
consolidation and the globalization of industries that created footloose companies and 
organizations that were no longer so heavily tied to place (Community-wealth, n.d.; Ehlenz, 
; Birch et al., ). In response, scholars began to identify the traits and characteristics that 
university anchors and their “sticky capital” possess: they are major employers and support 
career ladders; they have sizable landholdings and invest in infrastructure; and they are centers 
of knowledge and innovation (Maurrasse, ). In some cases, they also anchor intraurban 
collaboration and competition creating “wider city-regional networks” (Addie, , p. ). 

A handful of scholars suggest that there is an additional “social purpose” credo in the US, 
including Taylor and Luter (, p.) who argue that “to be an authentic anchor, an institution 
must be more than a large place-based organization in the region. It must have a social-purpose 
mission enabling it to become a change agent and engine of socioeconomic development.” HEIs 
might articulate these “shared valued” approaches (Porter, ; ICIC, ) through 
curriculum innovations like service-learning (Friedman et al., n.d.) or more formal university-
community partnerships (Regional Plan Association, ). More work is needed in this area 
from a university and arts perspective that follows Ehlenz’s () approach to create and assess 
the utility of a typology of how universities practice the anchoring of neighborhood urban 
development with its advantages and limitations. 

There is a sliver of anchor institution research connected to arts and cultural nonprofits 
that draws on in-depth qualitative case analysis. Johnson () studies the politics and 
implementation of arts and cultural districts as urban anchors in place-based economic 
development in Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Birch et al. () and 
Johnson () identify how nonprofit arts and cultural organizations perform as urban 
anchors through their involvement in arts education, arts public participation, neighborhood 
revitalization, as well as how they develop and navigate public/private partnerships to fulfill 
their missions. However, there is a gap in the branch of anchor research that looks at the 
intersection between universities and arts and culture. In sum, we increasingly recognize that 
universities act as urban anchors, but we know very little about how universities act in the realm 
of arts and culture. 

We may not immediately think of universities as arts organizations, but universities are 
likely the greatest arts patrons in the United States, as mentioned earlier. Universities house art 
museums, theatre companies, symphony orchestras, film studios, and publishing outlets, just to 
name a few arts organizations and brick-and-mortar investments that live under the higher 
education umbrella. But most crucially for our study, universities in the twenty-first century are 



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more than just arts patrons of physical structures, they are potential collaborators and partners 
in the regional arts and cultural ecology through their work on entrepreneurship, innovation, 
and knowledge transfer in economic, social, and community development. They are the places 
where most emerging artists receive their artistic training and skills (Ashley & Durham, ; 
Davis, ; Chen, ). Universities support and invest in faculty and staff that oversee arts 
curricula, they fund scholarships, they pay faculty who are artists in their own right, and they 
provide the research support and infrastructure for arts economic development. They hire 
faculty who bring ideas of organizational change for arts and culture, and they consider how to 
fund and finance those ideas. 

The shift in perspective we are chronicling relates to a provocative area of work on higher 
education reform broadly conceived. Recent scholarship such as Joseph Aoun’s () Robot 
Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, David Staley’s () Alternative 
Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education, Robert Sternberg’s () 
What Universities Can Be:  A New Model for Preparing Students for Active, Concerned 
Citizenship and Ethical Leadership, Mark William Roche’s () Realizing the Distinctive 
University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture, Ronald Barnett’s () Imagining the 
University, and Cathy Davidson’s () The New Education:  How to Revolutionize the 
University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux are among the works charting innovative new 
paths for HEIs in response to the technological revolution of the late twentieth century and its 
subsequent impact on the ways people work, what and how they need to learn, and the economic 
and social pressures of the evolving knowledge economy.  Staley writes: 

Like the crisis of the university that Chad Wellmon has identified [in Organizing Enlightenment: 
Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern University ()], ours is a moment 
fertile for news forms of the university. Like the German philosophers who imagined the 
research university as a response to that crisis, we have an opportunity to imagine what the 
university can be.  If we are truly interested in innovation, we might simply ask, ‘What can the 
university become?’ (, p. ) 

Our research is particularly interested in what the university can become if it is activated 
as a cultural anchor in its community and how that community can become stronger 
economically, socially, and creatively as a result. Staley () argues that universities struggle 
to achieve “distinction” from each other, offering similar programs, celebrating similar 
achievements, and marketing themselves with similar images and slogans.  We see awareness of 
anchor traits, particularly in a specific regional context, as a yet untapped resource for offering 
universities a chance to tell a powerful story of distinction to their multiple stakeholders. 

The role and potential of the university as an intentional, artistic, and cultural place maker 
in the urban ecology is beginning to attract international attention as well. Roodhouse () 
studies the role of universities in cultural quarters (CQs) (often referred to as art and cultural 
districts in the United States) and how these cultural concentrations influence creative 
innovation and workforce growth in English cities. He (, p. ) comments: 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

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Those institutions with an established interest in the creative industries which may have one or 
more faculties of art, design, performing arts, music, architecture, media, and animation are 
most likely to be involved not only in training individuals to enter the workforce, but also in 
developing the workforce and supporting business growth with their engagement in Cultural 
Quarters. It is in the interests of these universities to support creative businesses in the locality 
through mechanisms such as Cultural Quarters as a means of generating employment for 
graduates, have access to expertise to support teaching, and as a living research laboratory. What 
is missing in this scenario is the formalization of relationships between Cultural Quarters and 
the appropriate university. There are university science and technology parks, but, more 
importantly, Cultural Quarters in partnership with universities can be the new creativity parks. 

Roodhouse’s work not only deepens knowledge about the role of universities in localized 
spaces for arts and cultural innovation, but it underscores the ways that the anchor concept 
plays out. In generations past, emerging artists looked towards undergraduate and graduate arts 
education to hone the artistic skills that they’d been developing since early childhood, and then 
they learned how to put those skills to work strategically if and when their careers evolved. Many 
parents, politicians, and pundits have lost patience with the length of this process and the 
sometimes-lackluster results in the school-to-career transition. They have pressured 
universities to monetize the value of their arts programs and to consider new innovative 
curriculum models to improve student and university outcomes. 

Hoping to smooth their graduates’ transition to the workforce and spur economic 
development in their home cities, many universities are experimenting with curricular, extra-
curricular, and structural models that complement or supplement traditional fine arts curricula 
(Essig & Guevara, ; Beckman, ). Transdisciplinary arts integration programs like arts 
entrepreneurship (Essig & Guevara, ); STEAM-initiatives that merge the arts with 
computer science, digital media, and other technologies (Maeda, ), and public policy and 
administration arts-related programs have grown across the country (Considine, ; 
Luberecki, ; Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, n.d.). As Korner () notes, there is 
still a challenge in ensuring that artists are part of the entire process rather than joining as 
sporadic assistance, particularly around STEM and STEAM integration. In tandem with these 
efforts, some universities are also situating the arts in their broader entrepreneurial ecosystems 
that may include maker spaces, incubators, and venture competitions (Essig, ; Allen, n.d.; 
Cummings, ). 

There is a growing body of research that seeks to understand different aspects of these 
integration ideas where, due to their prevalence, most of the convergence centers on arts 
entrepreneurship and management. This small but robust group of scholars unpacks this 
burgeoning research arena as a hybrid field and practice (Beckman, ; Beckman & Essig, 
; Essig, ). Beckman and Essig’s seminal works have both identified and distinguished 
trends and the broader landscape of the arts while also specifically looking at different more 
targeted manifestations and investments in direct and indirect curricula, including labs and 
maker spaces. 



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9 

As these leading scholars note, a fair amount of debate exists about how to define and 
conceptualize “arts entrepreneurship” as a stand-alone curricular concept or in contrast to 
“cultural” or “creative” entrepreneurship in the US and internationally (Essig, ). Beckman’s 
early work treats arts entrepreneurship as a catch-all phrase, and in one of his earliest 
foundational studies, Beckman (, p. ) argues that arts entrepreneurship embodies two 
curriculum avenues: ) “new venture creation” that aligns with typical economic development 
activity around innovation and new products; and ) a fuzzier concept noted as the 
“transitional” approach that gives students skills that they may need as professional artists. As 
the field and practice began to grow and specialize, Essig and Guevara () have documented 
its prevalence and growth—both scholars and academic leaders are beginning to dismantle and 
differentiate this all-encompassing concept (i.e., traditional arts education plus any kind of 
additional training in non-arts arenas) to include a more refined set of avenues, purposes, and 
intentions. Goldberg-Miller and Wyszomirksi () suggest that the naming of approaches 
within arts entrepreneurship needs to be more narrowly defined: where entrepreneurship 
focuses on the individual artists that start their own businesses and arts management centers on 
how artists work within and across organizations in the public, private, and community sector. 
As we found in our work, and as we explain later, arts management and arts entrepreneurship 
are the most common approaches, but they are not the only ways to think about integration or 
how the university anchors workforce development of arts or the innovation of arts and artists. 
Our research contributes to a greater understanding of the depth of different practices and 
approaches. 

Beyond naming or articulating the foundational qualities of these approaches, Beckman’s 
(, p. ) rich work on “adventuring” HEI curriculum points out that there is little 
agreement about the most effective techniques for arts entrepreneurship because most of this 
education exists outside of established degree plans, and the degrees that do exist are non-
accredited, and there is little commonality from one university to another. His work focuses 
solely on how this plays out for traditional arts programs in music, arts, and theatre where 
department and college curriculum committees tend to append general business courses—as 
opposed to creating specialized business arts offerings—due to financial and structural 
imperatives and an instinct to support an interdisciplinary approach. Overall, Beckman () 
critiques approaches where students learn skill sets but not the ability to contextualize or apply 
those skills for their particular fields or career paths, which is why he argues for a new model 
that prioritizes experiential learning. In that same conversation, Sternal (, p. ) reinforces 
Beckman’s critique by pointing out that, from a curriculum perspective, there isn’t enough 
“basic data” to know what works and what doesn’t, but he also argues that even if these programs 
deliver on providing an array of skills and talents, they will be weakened without external policy 
or programmatic measures in the region. 

What we don’t know is whether these arts integration connections, through curricular and 
programmatic endeavors, are cultivating sector resilience or new opportunities for students that 
they couldn’t get in traditional arts programs. To do so, scholars and university leaders would 
not only need to evaluate the effectiveness of learning outcomes at the end of a university career, 



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but they also need to evaluate when students are participating in the workforce, whether as self-
employed entrepreneurs or in supporting an organization. As Beckman (, p. ) notes, 
there is little consensus on the most effective techniques to differentiate the primary end goal of 
these programs as professional development or a “discrete educational directory”. 

Career trajectories and success have changed over time, and work life today is evolving into 
a chaotic pattern of short-term, project-based employment: A  study by the US Department 
of Labor finds that, on average, Americans between the ages of  and  will work – 
different jobs in their lifetimes (Bureau of Labor Statistics, ). Today’s graduates (arts and 
non-arts) will change jobs frequently (/ of American workers expect to be in a different job 
within  years), hold several jobs at any one time, work across sectors, be self-employed, and 
start more enterprises. About  percent of all college graduates — including STEM fields — 
will not be working in fields closely related to their majors within five years (United States 
Census Bureau, ). These general trends are amplified by what we know about the career 
trajectory and profiles of artists as a workforce practice. In-depth examinations and surveys 
show that artists are more likely to be “multiple jobholding” or “moonlighting” compared to 
other professions (Alper & Wassall, ) that work across public, private, and civic sectors 
(Markusen et al., ). Studying how universities help artists cope with uncertainty and the 
factors that influence their resilience should be relevant for understanding these broader social 
and economic trends facing today and tomorrow’s workforce. 

Over the past decade, researchers have established creative labor as a fundamental force 
driving the entire economy, not merely as animating an attractive but discrete sector. Stuart 
Cunningham and Jason Potts (, p. –) argue that “the creative industries provide the 
capabilities that incline us, both individually and socially, toward the origination, adoption, and 
retention of novel ideas.” But despite such eloquent championing of the power of artists to 
propel ideas and products through the “innovation trajectory,” artists’ economic and civic 
potential remains, at best, partially tapped. It’s unclear what drives this un-tapping, but it is 
likely not just individual traits but the way artists are (or are not) trained. 

Artists have long been part of the “precariat” because creative work tends to “individualize 
risk” (Bain & McLean, , p. –).  It is likely to be highly competitive despite its modest 
or intermittent financial rewards; it may place great demands on the worker intellectually, 
physically, and emotionally; and it frequently requires workers to self-finance necessities like 
insurance, benefits, professional development, marketing, and workspace. Such conditions 
compel working artists to develop multi-dimensional strategies of resilience across economic 
sectors in order to thrive. This sector agility is a key trait of artistic career resilience, and it 
represents ways that artistic competencies can be translated from conventional arts contexts to 
the civic and corporate spheres in the form of “innovation services'' (Cunningham & Higgs 
, p. –). Far from just making products “pretty,” when artists leave the arts as 
traditionally defined or organized, they take with them their unique skill competencies in need 
identification, problem definition, iterative thinking and action, sensitivity to issues of social 
justice and equity, and facility in building human connection to audiences, markets, and 
communities (Maeda, ; UNESCO & UNDEP, ). The question becomes how the 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

11 

university, as an arts and cultural anchor, can help their students with this risk and cultivate 
their resilience, which is central to entrepreneurship, workforce development, and innovation 
career paths. In addition, it’s also important for the university to help communicate the ways 
that arts and artists contribute to the health and well-being of their community and regional 
economy since, as noted in the literature section, these contributions are hidden both in terms 
of the intrinsic and instrumental values of art and culture (McCarthy et al., ). 

While the AWD is a central concept to deepening the anchor concept, it is just one part. 
Our transdisciplinary research seeks to broaden and give depth to the ways that universities act 
as arts and cultural anchors and to understand 
how they see their role in our attempt to align 
theory and practice in this specific topical area. 
We position our work at the intersection of 
arts economic development, higher education 
reform, and anchor institutions (figure ). 

For this study, our questions are: How do 
public universities support arts and culture in 
the twenty-first century? What are the features 
of a university arts and cultural anchor? How 
do universities see and articulate their role in 
the regional arts and cultural ecosystem?  How 
do universities support students, faculty, and 
regional artists to create and sustain artist 
career trajectories as professional creative 
workers? 

Research Design: Data and Methodology 
Our qualitative study focuses on concept building through the translation and adaptation of the 
university as anchor institution to the university as arts and cultural anchor by drawing on a 
variety of data sources and analytic elements (Berge & Lune, , p. ) that are necessary to 
building conceptual “thickness” (Geertz, ). We collected information through a 
comparative case analysis, targeted interviews with university leaders, and a synthesis of public 
media and peer reviewed scholarship, which we discuss in greater depth below. 

First, we explore this concept through a comparative case study where our institutional 
approach breaks down the university’s monolithic structure into different “actors” (Markusen, 
) and components to explore how HEIs anchor artistic economic development across 
different occupations, sectors, and career stages. We follow Yin’s () suggestion of a “cross-
case synthesis”, an analytical technique where “each case is treated as a separate study,” and then 
the findings are aggregated across all cases to look for trends and patterns (Yin, , p.). 
We employ this strategy by treating the four different cities/universities as separate cases, and 
we consider each individual case by examining our qualitative data collected from interviews 

Figure 1. Literature intersections of our 
research. From Ashley & Durham, 2019. 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

12 

with university stakeholders. The objective is not to provide a descriptive comparative case 
analysis but to use these observations and analyses to help frame our concept building. 

For the comparative case study, we scanned Intermountain West public universities, and 
we selected three primary institutions because of their location, the size of their university, and 
the presence of some kind of arts integration or new ways of thinking about arts education (table 
). These institutions include University of Reno-Nevada, Colorado State University, and the 
University of Utah. We also added a secondary case study, Boise State University, since it is our 
home institution and acted as point of comparison in the analysis and development of our work. 

We collected different types of case data that help create necessary “thickness” for our 
comparative structure (Creswell, , p. ). We visited each site, and we interviewed – 
people at each location, and in total we interviewed  subjects. These targeted “elite” interviews 
focused on university leadership (deans, department / program chairpersons, center/institute 
directors, research directors), relevant faculty, and community partners so that we could begin 
to uncover “fantasies and realities” of university investment and partnership (Baum, ) as 
well as opportunities for the alternative university (Staley, ). 

This method is optimally suited for our work because we can compare university 
investment, broadly defined, across similar metropolitan HEIs in similar sized cities as well as 
artist perceptions and experiences with university investment. Targeted subjects focus on those 
who control funding and set university policy. Our interview protocols are designed to unearth 
) how these different “actors” perceive of the cultural assets on campus and in their city, and 
) how they view the university’s role in artistic economic development, and ) the ways that 
they support artistic workforce development. Interviews lasted between  and  minutes, and 
we employed four different semi-structure formats. 
Table 1. Contextual Factors for Comparative Cases 

 Boise State 
University 

University 
of Nevada, 
Reno 

Colorado 
State 
University 

University of 
Utah 

City/ 
Population  

Boise 
, 

Reno 
, 

Fort Collins 
, 

Salt Lake 
, 

Region 
Population 

Boise-Nampa 
, 

Reno-
Spark 
, 

Fort Collins-
Loveland 
, 

Salt Lake 
,, 
 

Student 
enrollment 
(undergraduate/ 
graduate) 

, 
,/ 
,  

, 
,/ 
, 

, 
,/ 
, 

, 
,/ 
, 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

13 

Integrated 
Departments, 
Centers, 
Institutes 

School of the Arts School of 
the Arts 

LEAP 
Institute for 
the Arts 

College of Fine 
Arts 

Sample of 
Integrated 
Degrees or Value-
added products 
(degrees, 
certificates, 
specializations, 
badges) 

Arts 
Entrepreneurship 
Minor; Gaming, 
Interactive Mobile, 
and Media 

n/a Minor in Arts 
Leadership and 
Administration; 
Master of Art 
Leadership and 
Cultural 
Management 

Entertainment, 
Arts & 
Engineering 

Artist workforce 
development 
initiatives 

n/a n/a n/a ArtsForce 

Source: University and public sector websites. 

For dean or upper administration interviews, subjects we asked: 
. What is the history of your degree program/center/department/college? 
. How does your university and your university’s culture support the arts and, 

conversely, make it difficult to be an artist or educate artists? 
. Do the narratives and realities about an arts and humanities or liberal arts crisis affect 

the way you develop and run your programs and/or do your work? 
. How/when do you connect to other arts programs or non-arts programs at the 

university? 
. How do you promote the unique skill sets of arts graduates to community partners, 

the corporate sector, etc.? 
. Have you had to react to new budget or new assessment models in the 

university?  How? What do you consider your greatest success and/or how do you 
measure success? What have been your major sticky points or challenges? 

. When do social justice or equity issues connect to the university’s work in arts and 
culture? 

. How do you make the work you do visible to the university, the community locally, 
your community at large? 

. How does the community and local culture support or affect your work? 
. What impact do you hope the program/your work will have on your 

city/community?  How will you measure impact? 
. How does the university support people and place-based innovation and artistic 

workforce development? 
. If someone gave you  million to advance the university’s work on art and culture, 

how would you spend the money? 
 
 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

14 

For Chairperson or Program Lead interview subjects, we asked: 
. What’s your research background, and what have been your program/department/ 

initiative priorities? 
. How does the university support the arts, and how do they support artists? 
. How does your specific program or department support arts and culture and artist 

workforce development? 
. How did you become familiar with the new arts programs and initiatives on campus? 
. What is your role with these programs and initiatives? 
. What is the structure of the program or initiative? 
. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the program or initiative? 
. How well are the programs integrated into the broader academic units? 
. When do social justice or equity issues connect to the university’s work in arts and 

culture? 
. Do the narratives around the crisis of the humanities and liberal arts affect these 

programs? 
. If someone gave you  million, how would you advise the university to use that 

money to invest in arts and culture? 
 

For Faculty interview subjects, we asked: 
. Why did you become an artist? What is your training and background? 
. How do you and your department/program talk to your students about their unique 

skill sets? 
. When and how did you become connected to the new arts program or initiative? 
. What’s the history and evolution of the new program or initiative? 
. How do these programs connect to other arts programs or non-arts programs on 

campus? 
. How do you promote the unique skill sets of arts graduates to the public, private, and 

community sector? 
. What do you consider the integrated program’s greatest success, and/or how do you 

measure success? What are your major sticky points or challenges with these 
integrated programs? 

. How do you make the work that the integrated program does visible to the university, 
the community locally, your community at large? 

. What impact do you hope that your work has on your city/community? What impact 
do you hope that the integrated program work will have on your 
city/community?  How will you measure impact? 
 

For Community partner interview subjects, we asked: 
. How did your community organization connect with the university? What is your 

relationship to the university? 
. How does the university support art and culture in the community and region? 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

15 

. How are you connected to the new integrated arts program/initiative? 
. What do you think are the strengths/weaknesses of the integrated initiative? 
. How would you like the university to support arts and culture in the community? 

 
With these interviews we moved from a single case analysis to conduct a cross-comparative 

analysis across cities to identify any themes that transcend all case experiences. Thus, our 
research analysis is not a description of individual cases but of how these cases help us further 
develop our grounded theory to understand the role of the university as part of the arts and 
cultural ecology of the region and how these cases better contextualize and deepen the general 
concept of the university as an anchor and an anchor of arts and culture. Part of this process 
involved returning to “prior expert knowledge” (Yin , p. ) generated by academic 
scholars and practitioners to consider variables and practitioners that universities and/or artists 
may not have considered or referred to in our data collection, which allows us an additional 
dimension to analyze. 

In that vein, our second data source set came from interviewing an additional five US 
university leaders outside of our cases who had developed a variety of interdisciplinary artist 
workforce curriculum approaches or who explored different university structures to support 
these arts interdisciplinary activities so that we could “see which is not ordinarily on view and 
examine that which is often looked at but seldom seen” (Rubin & Rubin, , p. xv). These 
interview subjects encompassed a diverse set of approaches and structures, including arts 
entrepreneurship, gaming, arts management, creative placemaking, and STEAM. We asked 
questions about motivations, implementation, and evaluation around these different 
approaches, and we learned about the effort, resources, and strategic decisions that shape these 
projects. 

Finally, we supplemented these cases with a literature analysis to look at the intersection of 
research on artist workforce development, anchor institutions, and higher education institution 
reform. We also scanned university activity in arts and culture nationally to look for integrated 
initiatives to help us better understand the evolution and broadening of university efforts. This 
was a central part of our work in considering ways that we could adapt the anchor concept to 
arts and culture. 

Through this qualitative approach that is exploratory in nature, our data sets allow us to 
identify the ways that the universities support, hamper, or overlook their connections to artist-
driven economic development in their role as contemporary urban anchors. The unearthing 
and adaptation of these “data sources and analytic elements” (Berg & Lune, , p. ) give us 
the information to build our concept of the university arts and cultural anchor, and it allows us 
to see some broader trends and patterns (Ashley, ). This approach shares similarities with 
grounded theory (Silverman, ) in the early stages where this concept is a “symbolic or 
abstract element representing . . . [a] phenomenon” that lays the groundwork for theory 
construction and development (Berg & Lune, , p. ). 

Extending this concept building, we are also able to design and produce an impact 
assessment tool for universities to employ when attempting to explain, narrate, or critique their 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

16 

role as an art and cultural anchor. We hope this tool can help universities consider the ways in 
which they support economic and community development.  In many ways, this assessment 
tool is part of a broader movement by communities and institutions to quickly and efficiently 
evaluate the state of their city, region, organization, or institution from a particular perspective. 
These assessment mechanisms are used heavily in the health industry, and they fall under the 
diverse rubric of health impact assessment (Forsyth et al., ). They are also slowly beginning 
to develop in the arts economic development and arts community development fields through 
such labeling as “cultural vitality indicators” (Jackson et al., ). We believe that, beyond a 
region-wide snapshot, it would also be useful for public universities to evaluate the perceptions 
and realities of artist-driven investment in order to create awareness of the multiple and 
comprehensive ways to anchor AED. With this pilot concept and pilot tool, we then hope to 
move to the testing phase of “practical research” (Essig & Guevara, ) so that we can move 
from a conceptual to theoretical phase to transition to a more robust framework. 

Analysis and Findings 
We collected, synthesized, and analyzed our primary and secondary data to address our 
overarching question: To what extent are public universities arts and cultural anchors? To 
address this broader topic, we are interested in the following supportive questions: How do 
public universities act as arts and cultural anchors? How have these anchor features changed 
over time? How do universities see and articulate their role in the regional arts and cultural 
ecosystem? How do universities support students, faculty, and regional artists as they create and 
sustain artist career trajectories as professional creative workers? How does the location, 
particularly of public universities in the Intermountain west, influence the ways that universities 
act as arts and cultural anchors? 

Our goal was not to focus on comparative case analysis of each university but to compare 
and contrast how these university experiences can be employed to answer these questions in a 
way to broadly deepen the anchor concept. From our analysis, we identified seven major 
findings that are nested within these broader questions. 

Finding : The University is an Arts and Cultural Anchor 

The university is an important and diverse arts and cultural anchor—as a knowledge center, 
landowner and real estate developer, major employer and facilitator, and as an agent for social 
practice and community engagement. Our research is designed not only to apply general anchor 
attributes to arts and cultural frameworks, but also to see how an arts and cultural perspective 
may change how we view the anchor concept. Our observations underscore recent research that 
calls for an unpacking and differentiating of the anchor conceptualization. Our work, while it 
has a different focus, agrees with Ehlenz’ () argument that the anchor concept, while new, 
has undergone a series of evolutions. We find the same in our research in differentiating 
between the traditional and contemporary anchor, as noted below. 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

17 

These shifts in identity and usage are catalyzed by external forces (the utility and vitality of 
the liberal arts debates, decreased government funding, civic emphasis on workforce readiness, 
enrollment declines, political divides) as well as internal culture (e.g., faculty who are inspiring 
these changes through their own research and administrative interests and administrative 
leaders with or without a background in the arts). 

We also suggest that there be a deepening of what knowledge creation means from an 
anchor perspective: that it goes beyond just offering degrees but has a workforce readiness 
component as well as a clearer articulation of what integration means for curriculum and 
beyond. The university is not an ivory tower, and the anchor position allows it to be a convener 
of different ideas, interests, expertise, and motivations. 

The current anchor conceptualization does not consider how the university’s art and 
cultural assets support regional economic development beyond the arts. So much focus from 
economic developers is to create attractive environments to draw clusters of high knowledge 
workers and related industries. The arts, as Ashley () notes, are part of this amenity package 
and profile, and the university not only houses infrastructure but nurtures these artists who act 
as a particular draw. For the arts community, the universities may also create new consumers as 
they develop arts and cultural preferences. 

There were some typical anchor attributes that we could not align or did not have evidence 
to connect to the arts and cultural anchor. For example, we could not uncover how university 
research offices respond to the creation of artistic intellectual property and products, but we saw 
the emergence of a clearer sense of the variety of artistic products on the parts of some research 
administrators as well as interest in supporting them (Participant , spring , fall ). 
We neither could see a deep commitment to helping artists incubate creative businesses and 
products in the region, although we know this is happening elsewhere to different degrees of 
success. We hypothesize that universities broadly are not yet actively cultivating artistic 
economies in the way they are fostering development in the biomedical and technology sectors. 
Universities, we suspect, have not translated technology transfer and intellectual property into 
applications that might be applied to the arts. Rising to and overcoming this challenge may lead 
to an expanded and sustainable model of arts investment. This is an area of future research. 

Finding : A Shift from a Traditional to Contemporary Anchor 

Each of the five creative economy reports makes claims about the assets and needs of the city, 
supporting their claims with evidence in narrative form and/or with data about their city. At 
times they refer to other cities’ creative assets through narration and comparative quantitative 
data as a strategy for telling their own story. Both the story and the data are aimed at identifying 
policy recommendations and promoting the promise of the city’s creative economy. Just as a 
good story relies on narrative tools to construct the story, so too do these reports. While our 
coding suggests that some rely primarily on narrative elements to point to the policy 
recommendations and the moral of the story, coding also reveals that other reports rely more 
heavily on data to serve as the signpost toward the moral and recommended outcomes. While 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

18 

we do not address the value, either positive or negative, of using narrative rhetoric or data-
driven evidence in reports, we show that these two types of evidence are each mobilized toward 
describing and making arguments about the creative economy, allowing for comparison 
between cities’ strategic use of each type of evidence in their reports. 

There has been a shift in how the university acts as an art and cultural anchor: from the 
traditional patronage approach to a contemporary model in which the university is an investor, 
innovator, facilitator, and catalyst. We see an evolution underway that marks a transition from 
a traditional arts and cultural anchor to a contemporary st-century model (table ). The 
traditional activities are still important, vital anchor contributions, but they have evolved to 
include additional elements that supplement these practices and to catalyze some reflection on 
how to refresh traditional practices. In the contemporary manifestation, the university moves 
from a more passive role as a patron to an intentional innovator and entrepreneur in creative 
investments. From our analysis, we created a map to articulate how general anchor attributes 
(knowledge transfer, innovation capital facilities and landholdings, regional employer, social 
practice) could be relayed or conveyed into art and cultural functions. We then were able to see 
patterns emerge between a traditional and contemporary framework where there is a transition 
from a patron to an investor perspective. We argue that this shift happens on a much more 
comprehensive scale than academic programs alone. The different categories are to be treated 
fluidly, as one example can illustrate more than one attribute where intentionality and 
motivation matter. For example, a university can finance maker space, which can speak to 
priorities in both landholdings and real estate as well as artist workforce readiness and 
innovation. 

 
Table 2. Traditional and Contemporary Attributes of Universities as Arts and Cultural Anchors 

Traditional Anchors of Arts & Culture Contemporary Anchors of Arts & Culture 

Knowledge Transfer 

Artist patronage Human capital investment in workforce training and new 
signifiers of training mastery 

Traditional training in arts programs with 
specific but separate and distinct degrees in 
music, visual art, theatre, and dance 

New interdisciplinary degrees that integrate the arts but are 
for students interested in creative or more commercial 
focused arts (e.g., arts and engineering, gaming and design) 
and aren’t aligned with traditional arts and are usually not 
in the same administrative unit 

 New interdisciplinary degrees for traditional arts students 
(majors, minors) 

 New non-degree credentials for art students to opt-in and 
skills focused to supplement traditional degrees (certificates, 
badges, one-off skills courses, and workshops) 

 New learning outcomes and courses supplement traditional 
arts degrees that are geared toward workforce training or a 
broader contextualization of the arts in society 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

19 

Internal apprenticeships and graduate 
research opportunities (e.g., college radio 
stations, printmaking assistantships, lab 
assistants) 

Focus on experiential learning, including internships, 
service learning, and studios connected with external 
partners  

 Connecting with local and regional workforce providers in 
both arts and non-arts fields to work on job placement but 
alignment with training and job needs 

Landholdings, Facilities, and Infrastructure 

Artist patronage Bricks and mortar investments enhanced 

Build and subsidize facilities where material 
is delivered by experts who manage, 
produce, and present the material to visitors 
or passive observers (e.g., proscenium 
theatres, museums, exhibition spaces, black 
box theatres, roadhouses)  

Build and subsidize new physical spaces (maker spaces, arts 
labs, other) where work is self-directed and democratic, and 
may involve collaborating with external partners 

Provide access to equipment, materials, 
audiences through traditional facility 
investments to members of the community 

Opens doors to community members and organizations to 
provide access to equipment, materials, and audiences for 
subsidized rates and supports arts faculty and students who 
collaborate with community members and organizations to 
design, produce, and share work 

Use large scale arts and cultural facilities as 
part of Urban Renewal histories and 
legacies 

Use arts and cultural facilities and infrastructure for 
targeted neighborhood revitalization and redevelopment 
(e.g., Baltimore’s Station North; MICA; Johns Hopkins) 

 Works with regional economic partners to use public art 
facilities as part of an amenity profile or attraction for high 
knowledge workers 

Major Regional Employer 

Artist patronage Human capital investment in attraction and retention 

Hire artists as faculty where salary supports 
artist work and also gives these faculty 
access to equipment, networks, and 
performance/exhibition spaces 

Recognize and support arts faculty and students as creative 
forces and drivers shaping the regional creative sector in 
economic development 

Hire artists (community artists, student 
artists) to staff arts and cultural 
programming on and off-site 

Focus on art degrees and programs where an artist is 
(re)trained as an innovator and problem solver that will 
lead to greater economic benefits for the region 

 City and regional economic developers market arts and 
cultural facilities as part of a region’s amenities profile to 
attract and retain knowledge workers 

Innovation and Transfer of Ideas 

Creating traditional arts programming that 
is delivered to internal and external 
audiences 

Build and subsidize new physical spaces (maker spaces, arts 
labs, other) that are designed to help students learn how to 
create products not just for traditional nonprofit sectors but 
also civic and for-profit ends  



ARTIVATE 10.2 

20 

 Focus on new integration degrees geared towards the for-
profit creative sector and economy to support STEM 
clusters and high knowledge workers 

 New integration initiatives, generally called STEAM or 
design thinking, that are housed outside of traditional arts 
programs that draw on art approaches and processes to 
solve problems more effectively and efficiently; may not 
involve traditional arts faculty or programs 

Grow and spin off arts and cultural 
organizations that initiate from 
student/faculty collaborations 

Grow and spin off arts and cultural organizations that test 
an idea or product then helps these groups launch it 
strategically and with resources  

Social Practice Focus and Community Engagement 

Artist patronage Investment in community or community development 

Train students to be art educators, 
establishing future gatekeepers of arts and 
culture 

Collaborate and partner with community groups and 
stakeholders on equitable development and neighborhood 
revitalization  

Offer subsidized tickets to low income or 
resourced groups for university 
performances and exhibitions 

Different academic units (colleges, schools, centers, 
departments, programs) incorporate a social purpose into 
their mission 

Subsidize university space for arts and 
cultural events for low resourced groups 

Offer new academic programs that use or leverage arts for 
social practice and community engagement (e.g., creative 
placemaking) 

 Collaborate with other regional anchors to address issues of 
inequality and oversight 

Source: Synthesis of literature, interviews, and case study research. 

Note: This is not an exhaustive list but an illustration of the shift from a traditional to contemporary 
anchor institutions. 

In its earlier form, and beyond its essential educational mission, the university had three 
primary functions in ) knowledge creation and transfer, ) capital projects and real estate 
activities, and ) major employment generators.  First, it primarily focused on bricks-and-
mortar investments through landholding, facilities, and infrastructure. Performance and 
exhibition facilities provided space and equipment for student training, for faculty use in their 
own artistic practices, and for the university to use as a source of revenue through touring 
companies and events. These facilities also supported the university’s role as a site of knowledge 
transfer with its emphasis on offering traditional arts degrees and experiences where students 
learn and develop a particular craft and discipline in traditional arenas, including music, theater, 
visual arts, and dance. As a major regional employer, the university hires artists as faculty 
(tenure-track, lecturers, clinical, adjuncts); it provides financial stability to the artist and gives 
them opportunities to train and mentor students in their particular disciplines. Depending upon 
the position and other factors, the artist as a faculty member is also given access to equipment, 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

21 

networks, and performance/exhibition spaces. While some scholars debate whether universities 
anchor through social practice in general, we saw illustrations of this in the traditional realm, 
too, namely through the university’s ability to subsidize space and event experiences and to 
supplement arts education in public schools. One study subject commented on the number of 
ways that faculty artists participate in the community and the importance of that engagement, 
“There are so many universities right along this [Intermountain West] corridor. If all of us went 
away, it would be devastating” (Participant , personal communication, fall ). 

In the contemporary form, the university arts and cultural anchor not only takes on greater 
variation in its activities, but there is also an emerging shift towards a more active and 
intentional approach to its role. There is a movement from pure artistic training in a singular 
practice to a workforce readiness approach that features skill development and cross-sector 
training. There has been a well-documented increase in curriculum experiments around arts 
entrepreneurship and arts management products or value-added signifiers (singular courses, 
minors, certificates, badges, specializations) that art students may couple with their traditional 
degrees. There are also several other integration curriculum experiments that bring art and 
artists into other student experiences across campus in non-arts academic units. For example, 
there is an increase in STEAM (science-technology-engineering-arts-math) initiatives that 
observe how arts-related inputs (be it students, faculty, materials, or scholarship) can change 
the way a problem is conceptualized, solved, and communicated, which makes for a better end 
product or solution. There are also new, more commercial-focused degrees in gaming and 
design that meld different components of computer science, engineering, and graphic design 
along with storytelling, music composition, and editing. There is also a small and slow-growing 
cluster of courses and certificates that integrate the arts in urban studies or in community and 
environmental health to champion creative place-making and public health benefits in place-
based communities. Beyond these individual curriculum innovations, the university is also 
investing in new structural operations, including new centers about creative enterprise, creative 
placemaking, arts and entertainment, and arts entrepreneurship. The university anchor has 
adapted in response to these new integration avenues. 

The university has also made a substantial shift in how it marshals its capital facilities and 
infrastructure investments. Maker lab spaces, art incubators, creativity labs, and more facility-
based innovations are supporting student training and undergraduate/graduate research as well 
as faculty research development. These are smaller, fine-grained spaces that have an array of 
motivations and intentions that vary across universities and can be, but do not have to be, 
connected to academic units and programs. We increasingly see universities collaborating with 
regional economic partners to use the public art facilities as part of a broader marketing package 
to attract and retain highly coveted knowledge workers (people with college degrees) to the 
region, which shows closer connections to growth coalitions than in the past where the 
university was often isolated from conversations about how to grow the region. 

As arts and cultural anchors, universities are also increasing and broadening their role in 
social practice and in other forms of community engagement. There are a growing number of 
academic units, degrees, academic centers, and extension services that incorporate “social 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

22 

practice” (Carrigan, ; Grant, ) or that center community engagement into their 
mission, values, and principles. In part, this is driven by a focus on experiential learning (Eyler, 
; Seymour & Lopez, ) and the growth of art forms (Grant, ). One of our subjects 
commented, “The biggest impact you can have is to go in and listen to a community. When a 
community is heard, they will often take action themselves” (Participant , personal 
communication, spring ). 

This can happen in traditional art programs that support social practice of the arts as well 
as integrated efforts elsewhere in the university through such examples as STEAM initiatives 
(Rhode Island Steam Center, ; McClanahan, ), art-related social work (Huss & Sela-
Amit, ), art physical therapy (Tiret, ), creative placemaking certificates (New Jersey 
Institute of Technology, n.d.), and experiential learning in arts management programs 
(University of Buffalo, ). There are academic experiences, both credit and non-credit 
bearing, where students—through curated service-learning projects, externships, university-
community partnerships, and other experiential opportunities—use their traditional training 
and any valued-added training to solve a community problem or celebrate a community’s assets. 

Students have long shared their artistic skills with communities to enliven and enrich them: 
they've created public art, developed after school and other extracurricular programming, 
presented impromptu and planned performances, and incorporated arts into therapeutic 
settings, but today we're also seeing interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, art 
students, and others in the university and community; for example, artists and/or urban studies 
students use pop-up art to start a civic conversation about sustainability in neighborhoods 
(Ashley, ). Some universities partner with local arts organizations on neighborhood 
revitalization and equitable development as did Baltimore Station North Inc. with Maryland 
Institution of Contemporary Art and Johns Hopkins University to help revitalize the Baltimore 
Station North Arts and Entertainment District through funding, internal and external space, 
faculty/student time, and marketing support (Ashley, ). 

Finding : The Anchor Role is Hidden and Isolated 

University leaders, both in the arts and in general leadership positions, are largely unaware of 
how they might explain and communicate the ways that universities can act as anchors and how 
their specific institution performs in that role. As we have shown, a substantial body of literature 
exists around anchor institutions, but university and arts administrators, unless they happen to 
have a background in urban studies, planning, and economic development are unlikely to have 
encountered it. They could identify some anchor components where they had strengths and 
weaknesses, but it was not their frame of reference. 

University leaders did not think or talk about themselves as arts and cultural anchors. One 
of our subjects commented, “It’s hard to explain value and benefits. It’s easier to have them 
experience it. It’s hard to quantify value. It’s something you have to experience to understand” 
(Participant , spring ). They did not position themselves broadly as actors in AED and 
its trends: aesthetics, workforce development, community development, amenity building, and 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

23 

creative industries (Ashley, ). They do not measure the local economic impact of their 
campus arts activities, the arts activities that their faculty participate in off and on campus, or 
the type and quality of relationships their institutions have with commercial and non-profit arts 
organizations in the community. This is an example of how research and practice are 
disconnected in that scholars increasingly visualize or narrate these processes or attributes, but 
it is not the language of the actual practitioners or stakeholders. 

Universities provide important resources to student and faculty artists affiliated with the 
institution such as employment, training, networking, and access to facilities, and even in a 
climate of dwindling resources, universities are arts-rich places. They do know their traditional 
artistic success quite well, but there is an opportunity to consider these AED narratives for their 
own benefit and institutional advancement. In fact, we often see university structures as the 
barriers to shaping the creative ecosystem, and it isn’t clear where the universities’ points of 
entry are for high community impact. Additionally, we did not see evidence of universities 
measuring how these resources advance artistic careers or how they support the creative 
ecosystem. One study subject commented, “Too often we abdicate our responsibilities for 
explaining to our students what they are going to do with their degree” (participant , spring 
). 

In general, interview subjects typically noted a curriculum alternative in supporting artist 
workforce development, which is an important starting point. However, we also see this 
“hidden-ness” as isolation when it comes to curriculum integration via arts entrepreneurship, 
arts management, creative placemaking, and STEAM practices (table ). Ideally, in a 
contemporary setting, universities actively and intentionally shape artistic careers through their 
resources and infrastructure, and these programs try to do so. There is external excitement 
around new integration or workforce readiness programs, but as Beckman shows (), there 
is also fuzziness around design and implementation because of the lack of accreditation in fields 
with otherwise strong accrediting bodies (NASAD, NASM, NAST, and NASD) and the lack of 
the ability to articulate what the different programs accomplish for students. In many instances, 
these programs do not have a home program or department due to their interdisciplinary 
structure, and if they do have a home, it is often disconnected from the traditional arts 
departments and their related infrastructure. In many instances, these programs have high 
expectations from university administrators but are inadequately resourced. One subject 
commented, “I have said to the people above, thank goodness I’ve run nonprofits and businesses 
because if I was a straight academic, I couldn’t do this” (Participant , spring ). 
Additionally, these programs are opt-in, and thus, it suggests that workforce readiness is not 
important enough to integrate into the existing and traditional arts programs. 

 
 
 
 
 
 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

24 

Table 3. Illustrations of Types of Integration and Interdisciplinary Programs 

 Intention/ 
Motivation 

Sample of Student 
Targets 

Arts Entrepreneurship Skill building: Give arts students the skills to 
own their own business, make new products, 
create their own brand; highly connected to self-
employment 

Arts  

Arts Management Skill building: Give art students the skills to 
work for arts organizations in public, private, 
civic sector 

Arts 

Gaming Problem solving: Give STEM students a new 
approach to answer problems by using art 
practices, applying art theory, or working with 
artists 

STEM, 
Sometimes Arts 

Creative Placemaking Social innovation: Use art and design to remake 
urban space or to work with artists to help 
facilitate urban change 

Urban planning, 
Urban studies, 
Sometimes arts, 
Community members 

Design Thinking Problem solving: use a particular strategy to 
address a problem in the private, civic, or 
nonprofit sector 

Business 

Arts Education Supporting artists to become art teachers in K-
 

Education 
Arts 

Source: Ashley and Durham 

Note: This list is not exhaustive but shows examples of integration and examples of motivations 
and intentions. 

Finding Four: Broadening Anchor Concept to include Social Practice and Community 
Engagement 

We agree with Taylor and Luter () that the arts and cultural experience within HEIs shows 
how the university anchor conceptualization should include a “social purpose credo” (Ehlenz, 
) or a “change agent in social development” since we see an increasing practice of this 
theoretical positioning in our cases and in research. As one of our study subjects commented, 
“We haven't coalesced in a meaningful way to leverage the power of the entire college to reach 
out to communities that may be marginalized or oppressed.  [There is] growing interest at the 
administrative level and the individual faculty level [in doing so]” (Participant , fall ). 
The anchor concept is limited in its focus on a standard treatment of regional economic 
development and overlooks the ways that the university anchor contributes to social 
development in the community, which leads to intrinsic and extrinsic outcomes. Our work goes 
beyond typical “scholarship of engagement” frameworks or how the university sees its public 
facing role in connecting students to the “real world” (e.g. service learning, technical assistance) 
(Northmore & Hart, ; Reardon, ; Wiewel & Knaap, ; Winkler, ) to 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

25 

incorporate a richer understanding of engagement as posited by Tepper and Arthurs () as 
a “trading zone” where collaboration, innovation, and intellectual risk-taking build 
transformative new alliances that explode previous institutional structures and redefine 
participants’ experiences of relationship and place. For example, the National Creative 
Placemaking Certificate employs arts and culture as a strategy for improving community 
development in under-resourced neighborhoods, and there are a number of ways that the 
university could partner with community organizations on a variety of topics, as other scholars 
have noted in their work (Wiewel & Knapp, ). 

These experiential collaborations are more than tacking on a service-learning project or 
experiential learning connected to arts curriculum: they are a more comprehensive and 
deliberate way to use the problem-solving skills of art students, art/integration faculty, and 
community partners to realize the broader vision as Alexroth and Dubb (, p. ), who 
suggest how 

Urban universities [can] seek to fully achieve their anchor institution mission —that is, to 
consciously apply their long-term, place-based economic power, in combination with their 
human and intellectual resources, to better the long-term welfare of the communities in which 
they reside. 

In essence, this is another way that arts and culture have contributed to the contemporary 
frame of the anchor institution by reinforcing the role that universities can play in their 
communities through drawing on their many arts and cultural assets. This is also in line with 
new evidence-based practice about the impacts of experiential learning and its importance for 
high-quality education outcomes (Busteed, ; Eyler, ). 

Finding : The Intermountain West as Varied Context 

We found that anchor attributes and the evolution of the anchor identity is not a one-size- fits-
all narrative. Rather, universities are part of a longer historical arc in the development of the 
region’s arts and cultural identity. Several study subjects commented on the importance of the 
geography and natural surroundings, not only in their practical or artistic work but as part of 
inspiration in work/life balance, as one person noted, “The wide-open spaces, liberating 
skies . . . [there’s] more freedom here. There’s less constraints” (Participant , fall ). 

Analyses need to move beyond the university as an isolated, separate (or immune) entity, 
and they need to frame how the university has responded and reacted to the political, cultural, 
financial, and regulatory forces that drive the structural foundation of the region. This 
observation is particularly relevant for our geographical focus and scale. For example, we found 
that, for many years, artists could live and work affordably in the region, and interviewees with 
a history in the region spoke to the importance of an affordable cost of living in their choice of 
locale for launching careers and entrepreneurial ventures.  But as these cities have grown, and 
as more people in other industries flooded into the region, housing costs in particular have 
skyrocketed. One university administrator noted its impact on attracting and retaining faculty 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

26 

artists: “The cost of housing in our growing city is a huge issue, and we’re on the brink of a crisis.  
Unless newcomers have independent financial resources, they won’t be able to afford suitable 
housing on our starting salaries in the arts.  Buying a home is out of reach, and rentals are scarce. 
The situation is untenable.” Artists with faculty appointments have much more stable incomes 
and benefits than student artists and non-faculty artists, so the impact will be even more intense 
on those populations. The pipeline fueling the creative sector may become highly constricted as 
a result. In addition, the right-to-work nature of many of the Intermountain West states has 
implications for how universities anchor arts and cultural activity since artist unions are 
common and powerful in the performing arts. In another example, regionally dominant 
organizations and institutions influence how certain arts practices and disciplines develop, and 
thus, how the university responds to those priorities. Additionally, a fair amount of the anchor 
literature stems from the loss of corporate commitments and the rise of large nonprofits to fill 
that leadership, funding, employment, and philanthropic gap. However, the large cities of the 
Intermountain West don’t share that story, but they are often connected to different industries 
in agriculture and extraction rather than in corporate finance and high-end services. 

It is essential to understand the path-dependent nature of the arts and culture eco-system 
to position the university and its role as an anchor.  There is limited information about how 
anchor institutions—as well as how arts and cultural institutions—play a different or more 
profound role in the Intermountain West due to the geographic isolation and the lack of a strong 
history of philanthropic investment in the arts, as one study subject commented, “People won’t 
spend money on art here. [We’re] trying to educate the public on why art is expensive and what 
the value is of collecting art (Participant , spring ). At the same time, it does raise 
questions about whether the entrepreneurial spirit of the West influences the way universities 
work and function as their role shifts. We see the isolation of universities in medium-sized 
markets in the Intermountain West not as a limitation but as an opportunity to control for 
variables that strengthen comparative elements as well as providing a much-needed lens with 
which to view high-growth cities that are overlooked in AED research. 

Finding . Difficulty Finding the Connection Between Anchor and DEI 

We found that many of the universities did not discuss how their work (strategies, 
programming, resources, curriculum) with AED or AWD connected with university goals or 
objectives in supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (DEI). There is also very little 
general anchor research that discusses the university in that arena, with the exception of studies 
(Ehlenz ) that call for a new indicator to be used about community development and social 
innovation for evaluating the ways that universities act as anchors, but this largely tends to be 
more place or neighborhood-based with a focus on gentrification (McGraw, ) and 
placemaking. There is not a great deal of information on anchoring with DEI and 
underrepresented student populations in how to address data that shows the difficulties for 
students from marginalized backgrounds to pursue careers in entrepreneurship or innovation 
or how to support workforce development needs for different communities and 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

27 

intersectionalities, and there is limited information about how undergraduate and graduate 
curricula in the arts address these concerns (Cuyler, ). One of the study subjects 
commented, “We are very clear that we need to do a better job. We are working toward figuring 
out where the curriculum isn’t supporting social justice, equity, and even access” (Participant 
, fall ). 

This may be a growth opportunity since this is often a focus of universities through the lens 
of student success and retention, and it’s the topic of many university associations and 
convenings (see Association of American Colleges & Universities  virtual conference on 
diversity, equity, and student success). This kind of focus is also happening outside of the 
university as practitioners and applied researchers suggest the importance of supporting artists 
who work in these marginalized communities (Louis & Burns, n.d.) as well as marginalized 
artists at different points of their careers in training (Louis & Burns, n.d.; Americans for the 
Arts, ; Americans for the Arts, ; SMU Data Arts, ). 

This focus is starting to shift through public policy reports (Schildt & Rubin, , p. .) 
that are championing an approach of “economic inclusion for low-income residents and 
communities of color,” or through having anchor institutions buy from business owners and 
entrepreneurs in underserved areas (ICIC, n.d.), or in helping nurture entrepreneur-driven 
immigrant communities (Abello, ). Markusen and Gadwa (, p. ) suggest that an 
equity focus would “greatly strengthen” research in arts and economic development to address 
questions of impact, opportunity costs, and access at different geographic scales, and we can 
apply this to the university anchor conversation as well. As Harris () notes, “the soft 
underbelly of the university'' shows a disconnect between the university and community 
research and engagement priorities. There are opportunities to think about how we can 
measure, plan, support and communicate to reach these underserved audiences. We would also 
suggest that, given the changing demographics of the US, it is important to consider how to 
support these different constituencies and that this is connected to different aspects of the 
anchor concept. We think this is a ripe area for research to explore how the anchor concept may 
support this focus. 

Finding : A Typology for Anchor Positioning 

Our data shows that there are different stages of anchor positioning. There are four broad stages 
or opportunities as an anchor: dormant, aspirational, accidental, and intentional. They are 
driven by their awareness of what an anchor can do—which involves both identifying and 
sharing the narrative of building blocks of an anchor—and by their activities to invest in arts 
and culture elements. We suggest that this is part of the general anchor evolution in the ways 
that universities contribute to the economy that are standard and require very little activation; 
however, there are ways that the university can become a more advanced anchor through 
strategic narratives and investment. 

Based on interviews and literature from general anchor studies, arts economic 
development research, university arts evaluations, and arts and cultural anchors, we have 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

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identified four university anchor types for arts and culture. The y-axis denotes whether 
university administrators are aware of how they anchor arts and culture in the region, and the 
x-axis denotes the extent to which the university has invested in arts and culture. This is a 
conceptual drawing to help universities figure out where they sit and to give them information 
about how to move to different phases (figure ). 

 

 
Figure 2. Arts and Cultural Typology for University Anchor Institutions. Ashley & 
Durham, 2019. 

We suggest there are four broad categories: ) Aspirational anchor institution: These are 
universities that have high awareness and interest about what it means to be a contemporary art 
and cultural anchor, but they have limited resources to invest in the ways they would like. These 
universities might have a few initiatives or strategies in play, but they are unable to harness the 
resources (political, financial, administrative) to become an active or intentional anchor and are 
looking for ways to do so. ) Intentional anchor institution: These are universities that have high 
awareness of what it means to be a twenty-first century arts and cultural anchor, and they are 
actively engaged in investing and supporting their capabilities because they are able to harness 
significant resources. ) Passive anchor institution: These are universities that have low 
awareness about how to identify the building blocks of an arts and cultural anchor and don’t 
know how to communicate or narrate their story. However, they have made significant 
investments in arts and culture. This is a missed opportunity to fully communicate their role or 
help make a case for the importance of arts and culture for economic, community, and 
workforce development. ) Dormant anchor institution: These are universities that do not 
know how to identify the building blocks of an anchor institution, and they can’t convey their 
narrative or story; they have made limited investments in arts and culture. As one study subject 
observed, “my perception from the university level is we [in the arts] are tolerated rather than 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

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embraced (Participant , spring ). 
We see these anchor types deeply aligned and connected to the impact assessment tool that 

we discuss below. The assessment tool offers universities the opportunity to identify its 
strengths while recognizing aspects of its programming that might benefit from strategic 
redesign.  We take inspiration from Cathy Davidson () who writes, 

We need educators and administrators themselves committed to redesigning ethical, 
democratic, pragmatic, forward-looking education. . . . We need individuals and institutions to 
work together to rejuvenate an antiquated system for our accelerating times and to ensure that 
the solutions we craft address the real problems rather than just generating new ones. 

The alternative university setting has the potential to move from treating the anchor 
concept as a “given” and to consider ways to energize its opportunities through active reflection. 

Application: Impact Assessment Tool 
Our research underscores that universities typically do not think of themselves as art and 
cultural anchors, or they think about it in marginal or incomplete ways. As a result, they do not 
seize the opportunity to evaluate or communicate their contributions, and they are not able to 
make good choices about arts and cultural investments so that they strengthen their anchor role 
and realize their potential. To help university leaders perceive their role in influencing the 
artistic communities in their vicinity and to help them become aware of their cultural assets, we 
have created a pilot impact assessment tool. This will give them the knowledge to enhance their 
universities’ reputations and distinguish their universities’ identities while enhancing the 
reputations and distinguishing the identities of their home cities. Universities attract significant 
artistic talent to their faculty ranks, and those uniquely skilled faculty, in turn, attract students. 
Without the university’s presence in a region like the Intermountain West, artistic labor would 
be scarce for a variety of industries. This would allow them to start to measure the creative and 
economic contribution they have. We want them to identify the key aspects of being an anchor, 
and we have designed the pilot test to help with this stage. We suggest that there are three parts: 
) being able to identify the key aspects of being an anchor, ) being able to tell the anchor story 
through narrative frameworks, and ) then investing in and developing partnerships based on 
an evaluation of performance or based on the mission of the institution and its different 
units. This exercise is useful for universities in any locale, but it may be especially critical for 
universities in the Intermountain West that are experiencing tremendous growth and that have 
not historically had deep and highly developed artistic resources. The impact assessment tool 
and its overview are found in the appendix. 

Conclusion and Future Work 
Universities in the US are touted as great patrons of the arts largely due to their investments in 
bricks-and-mortar projects and their academic programs that train emerging artists in the 



ARTIVATE 10.2 

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traditional arts. However, this patronage status overlooks the ways that universities anchor arts 
and cultural activity as part of the regional creative ecology. Our research shows the breadth and 
depth of this anchoring to overcome the fuzziness of the concept and to help university and 
economic development stakeholders understand the powerful role that the university plays in 
the regional creative ecosystem or in the regional arts and cultural ecology. Our research makes 
seven central points. First, the university is an important and diverse arts and cultural anchor 
as a knowledge center, landowner and real estate developer, major employer and facilitator, and 
as a social developer. Second, there has been a shift in how the university acts as an art and 
cultural anchor from the traditional patronage approach to a contemporary model where the 
university is an investor, innovator, and facilitator. Third, there are four broad stages or 
opportunities as an anchor (dormant, aspirational, passive, and intentional) that are driven by 
their awareness of what an anchor can do, which involves both identifying and narrating the 
building blocks of an anchor and by their activities to invest in arts and culture elements. Fourth, 
university leaders, both in the arts and in general leadership positions, are largely unaware of 
how to explain and communicate the ways that universities can act as anchors or how their 
specific institution does. Fifth, the anchor concept is limited in its focus on a standard treatment 
of regional economic development and overlooks the ways that the university anchor 
contributes to social development in the community, which leads to extrinsic outcomes. Sixth, 
the arts and cultural anchor institutions in the Intermountain West show that context matters 
as the geographic, political, and cultural development of this region influences the ways that 
universities can perform as anchors creating both opportunities and limitations. Seventh, DEI 
is not a central part of anchoring conversations, but it could be in the future. 

These findings demonstrate a disconnection between theory and practice, which leads to 
missed opportunities to invest in ways that respond to evidence-based strategies. To help 
ameliorate this disconnect, we marshalled our data and analysis to design and create a pilot 
“University Anchor: Arts and Cultural Impact Assessment Tool” for chairs, program leads, 
program coordinators, and deans to employ to help them identify the building blocks of a 
university arts and cultural anchor so that they can narrate their value to relevant stakeholders 
and to provide support around investment discussions and decision-making. This assessment 
tool, coupled with our typology of anchor status, gives university leaders more information to 
help make decisions in the difficult funding and political climates surrounding HEIs. We hope 
our applied research helps universities see how they can move from being an arts patron to an 
arts investor, innovator, and catalyst. 

Our work also suggests the need to expand the anchor concept from a purely economic 
development angle about regional growth and shrinkage to include the social role or the “social 
purpose credo” that universities play in their place-based communities, as noted by Taylor and 
Lutner () and Ehlenz (). This work is also part of innovation and entrepreneurship, 
but often from a socially engaged perspective. Our future work centers on pilot-testing the 
assessment tool with select university communities to determine its applicability and to create 
a tool that is easy to implement so that we can continue our efforts to align research and practice. 



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Appendix : Assessment Tool Background 

Intentional Arts Anchor Assessment Tool 
What It Is 
A series of questions developed in response to data collected while creating university case 
studies in the Intermountain West after interviews with national arts education leaders and as 
a result of synthesizing current work on anchor institutions broadly conceived, arts economic 
development, and the st-century university. 

As one considers the questions, they gain a richer appreciation of the assets on their campus 
and in their community, and they have the opportunity to view them through a broader lens of 
the multi-dimensional components that an innovative arts anchor might have. 

The questions are in four parts:  integrative arts training, supporting integrative arts 
training beyond the curriculum, investments and infrastructure, and university/ community 
connections.  While these four pieces form the core of the innovative arts university, it is also 
possible to focus on one of the four areas for analysis, work, and investment. 

What It Does 
Maps local arts and community features in the context of what an innovative arts anchor can 
be, regionally and nationally. It builds awareness of key anchor features, ensures self-awareness 
of university assets and how they relate to each other, and the results provide an essential tool 
for promoting the importance of arts on campus and in the community. 

It helps university arts leaders tell the story of their artistic innovation, cultural relevance, 
and economic impact to their various stakeholders, including faculty, students and parents, 
campus fundraisers, potential donors, upper university administration, and community 
stakeholders in the arts and in a variety of industries. 

Who Might Use It and in What Contexts: 
The tool will be of value to individuals and teams.  It can be used as an independent “desktop 
exercise” or in a workshop or meeting.  Multiple university perspectives (from administrators, 
faculty, professional staff, and community partners) will likely maximize the tool’s impact, but 
a solo investigator can also use the tool effectively if they assemble some relevant institutional 
data. 

The Benefits: 
It helps universities assess where they should invest precious resources 

● To fills gaps in a developing or established arts ecosystem 
● To highlight and advance identity-building strengths that already exist 
● To forge deeper community connections aimed at advancing social good 
● To create a vibrant creative workforce prepared to meet the challenges of twenty-first 

century employment 
● To accelerate the economic impact of the arts in the local community  



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Appendix : Intentional Arts Anchor Assessment Tool 

Part  Focus: Integrative Arts Training:  Key Components and Skills  
A. Fundamentals of arts training Yes No Unsure NA 

 Is your program nationally accredited? (NAST, NASM, 
NASD, NASAD) 

        

B. Interdisciplinary exposure         

 Do your students have learning opportunities within at least 
one of your field's subdisciplines?  

        

  Do your students have learning opportunities across artistic 
fields? 

        

  Do your students have exposure to arts management or arts 
administration? 

        

  Do your students have exposure to arts entrepreneurship?         

  Do your students have exposure to arts technologies?         

  Do your students have exposure to creative placemaking?         

  Do your students have exposure to arts as social practice?         

  Are interdisciplinary experiences integrated into your 
degree requirements? 

        

  Are interdisciplinary experiences offered as supplements to 
your degree requirements? 

        

  Are interdisciplinary experiences credentialed through 
degrees, minors, certificates, or badges? 

        

C. Applied learning         

  Do your students have internship opportunities in non-
profit arts? 

        

  Do your students have internship opportunities in 
commercial arts? 

        

  Do your students have internship opportunities in the 
education sector? 

        

  Do your students have internship opportunities in the 
government sector? 

        

  Do your students have internship opportunities in 
commercial sector beyond the arts? 

        

  Do your students have service opportunities where they 
utilize their artistic skills? 

        

  Do your students have service opportunities that include a 
social justice component? 

        

  Are there study abroad programs focusing on the arts?         

  Do your students have opportunities to participate in 
faculty-developed research projects? 

        



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  Do your students have opportunities to participate in 
student-developed research projects? 

        

D. Skills articulation         

  Do you ask your students to recognize their creative 
thinking? 

        

  Do you ask your students to recognize their critical 
thinking? 

        

  Do you ask your students to recognize their skills in 
teamwork and collaboration? 

        

  Do you ask your students to recognize their ability to 
respect diverse perspectives? 

        

  Do you ask your students to recognize their capacity for 
empathy? 

        

  Do you ask your students to recognize where their skills will 
be in demand within the arts? 

        

  Do you ask your students to recognize where their skills will 
be in demand beyond the arts? 

        

Part  Focus: Supporting and Extending the Integrative Arts Curriculum 
A. Admissions Yes  No Unsure NA 

  Do general university recruiting materials feature the arts?     

  Are there recruiting materials specially designed for 
prospective arts students? 

        

  Is there arts focused recruiting of under-represented 
student groups? 

        

  Are there arts focused recruiting events locally?         

  Are there arts focused recruiting events regionally?         

  Are there arts focused recruiting events nationally?         

  Is there arts focused orientation?         

B. Arts experiences         

  Is student work shown on campus?         

  Is student work sold on campus?         

  Is faculty work shown on campus?         

  Is faculty work sold on campus?         

  Is the work of community-based artists shown on campus?         

  Is the work of community-based artists sold on campus?         

  Is the work of non-locally based artists shown on campus?         

  Is the work of non-locally based artists sold on campus?         

  Is the work of artists from under-represented groups shown 
on campus? 

        

  Is the work of artists from under-represented groups sold         



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on campus? 

  Do students have free admission to arts events on campus?         

  Do students have free admission to arts events off campus?         

  Do faculty have free admission to arts events on campus?         

C. Advising         

  Do academic advisors for your department's students have 
an arts background? 

        

  Can academic advisors for your department's students 
articulate the skills a student is likely to gain through the 
arts degree? 

        

  Can your department's academic advisors articulate the 
skills a student is likely to gain in particular arts courses? 

        

  Are your department's academic advisors familiar with 
classes that would complement the standard arts 
curriculum? 

        

  Are your department's academic advisors knowledgeable 
about applied learning opportunities? 

        

D. Career Services          

  Do Career Services staff have an arts background?         

  Do Career Services staff recognize the range of skills arts 
students have? 

        

  Do Career Services staff recognize the range of industries in 
which arts skills would be applicable? 

        

  Is Career Services well connected to nonprofit arts 
employers? 

        

  Is Career Services well connected to commercial arts 
employers? 

        

  Does Career Services have an established record of placing 
arts students beyond the arts sectors? 

        

  Do they host job fairs or industry showcases focusing on 
artist employment? 

        

  Can Careers Services staff help students with application 
materials targeting arts sector jobs? 

        

  Can Careers Services staff help students translate arts-based 
application materials for non-arts jobs? 

        

E. Alumni          

  Does the alumni association track and promote arts alumni 
successes? 

        

  Is there an arts alumni board?         

  Are there events for arts alumni networking?         

  Are there professional development events designed for arts         



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alumni? 

  Are there structures for connecting arts alumni and current 
students? 

        

Part  Focus: Investments and Infrastructure 
A. Facilities Yes No  Unsure NA 

  Does the number of performance venues meet the needs of your 
department? 

        

  Does the number of performance venues meet the needs of 
community presenters? 

        

  Does the number of exhibition venues meet the needs of your 
department? 

        

  Does the number of exhibition venues meet the needs of 
community artists? 

        

  Do the sizes of performance venues meet the needs of your 
department? 

        

  Do the sizes of performance venues meet the needs of community 
presenters? 

        

  Does the number of maker spaces meet the needs of your 
department? 

        

  Does the number of maker spaces meet the needs of community 
artists? 

        

  Do facilities have current industry-standard technology?         

  Are maintenance funds allocated to update technology regularly?         

  Are arts facilities accessible by public transit?         

  Is parking readily available at arts facilities?         

  Do faculty artists have studio space or discipline-appropriate 
creative space on campus? 

        

  Is there a living/learning community for arts students?         

  Are there on-campus accommodations for visiting artists?         

B. Advancement and Fundraising         

  Is there at least one development director focusing on the arts?         

  Does scholarship funding for students in your department align 
with funding levels at peer institutions? 

        

  Are there endowed chairs for arts faculty in your department?         

  Are the arts a focus in major university fundraising initiatives?         

  Are arts spaces named for donors?         

  Are arts programs named for donors?         

  Does the university seek support for the arts from corporations 
and foundations? 

    

C. Faculty         



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  Does faculty staffing in your department follow accreditation 
guidelines? 

        

  Are faculty salaries at or above CUPA averages?         

  Do arts faculty serve in administrative roles beyond their 
departments? 

        

  Are promotion and tenure policies attentive to and respectful of 
artistic work products? 

        

  Do promotion and tenure policies recognize interdisciplinary 
work within the arts? 

        

  Do promotion and tenure policies recognize interdisciplinary 
work beyond the arts? 

        

  Do promotion and tenure policies recognize community-based 
work? 

        

  Do promotion and tenure policies recognize work done in 
collaboration with students? 

        

  Do promotion and tenure guidelines recognize entrepreneurial 
work? 

        

  Are there professional development opportunities designed 
specifically for arts faculty? 

        

  Are their policies to counteract bias in faculty hiring?         

  Are there programs designed to retain under-represented faculty?         

  Is there a dual career policy used to recruit faculty artists?         

D. Research         

  Does anyone in the research office have arts expertise?         

  Do college-level administrators who support research have any 
arts experience? 

        

  Is there proposal development assistance for arts faculty?         

  Does the research office publicize opportunities for external 
funding in the arts? 

        

  Does the research office have internal funding programs designed 
for artists? 

        

  Does the college have research opportunities designed for artists?         

  Are there opportunities for arts faculty to reduce teaching load in 
order to concentrate on research? 

        

  Are there benchmarks for productivity of arts programs and 
faculty? 

        

  Is F&A typically reinvested in externally funded arts projects?         

  Are activities in the arts promoted by the research office in their 
publications or on their website? 

        

  Are activities in the arts promoted by the college in their 
publications or on their website? 

        

E. Marketing and Branding         



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  Are the arts featured in the university's marketing materials?         

  Are there recognized areas of excellence in the arts?         

  Are the arts part of the university's strategic plan?         

Part : Focus: University/Community Connections 
A. University expertise in the city Yes  No Unsure NA 

 Do arts faculty in your department work in the local non-profit arts 
sector? 

        

 Do arts students in your department work in the local non-profit arts 
sector? 

        

 Do alumni from your department work in the local non-profit arts 
sector? 

        

 Have arts faculty in your department founded local arts entities?         

 Have arts students in your department created new local arts entities?         

 Have arts alumni from your department created new local arts 
entities? 

        

 Do department faculty work in the local commercial arts sector?         

 Do department students work in the local commercial arts sector?         

 Do department alumni work in the local commercial arts sector?         

 Are arts faculty from your department patrons of local arts entities?         

 Are non-arts faculty patrons of local arts entities?         

 Are arts faculty from your department donors for local arts entities?         

 Are non-arts faculty donors for local arts entities?         

 Do faculty researchers analyze or evaluate local culture activities?         

B. City expertise at the university         

  Do locally based artists serve as adjunct faculty in your department?         

  Do locally based artists participate as artists-in-residence at the 
university? 

        

  Do locally based artists serve on industry advisory boards for the 
university? 

        

  Do locally based artists volunteer their time in support of university 
arts programming? 

        

C. Economic Impact of the Arts         

  Does the university measure the economic impact of its arts activities 
in the city? 

        

  Does the city count the university's artistic activities in its assessment 
of local arts economic impacts? 

        

 


