COVER STORY
Chancellor James B. Milliken Expands the Arts in Education at CUNY
The following is excerpted from The City University of New York Chancellor James Milliken’s Leon M. Goldstein Memorial Lecture at Kingsborough Community College on May 09, 2016.
The arts are a signature industry in New York, but too few of our students have had exposure to them, as well as too few opportunities to build careers in museums, theater, and the other performing arts. We have launched an ambitious CUNY Cultural Initiative this year, and partners have been signing up enthusiastically to give our students access to institutions that most have never visited, or even imagined visiting. The first major institutions to welcome CUNY students, at no charge, were the Whitney, the Cooper Hewitt, El Museo del Barrio, the Jewish Museum and others. We are working with our partners in New York’s cultural institutions to expand arts curricula and programs and to create internship and job opportunities. BAM, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and others have agreed to work with us on this initiative. The expanding New York movie and television industry offers many opportunities and last fall we opened Brooklyn College’s Feirstein graduate school of cinema in Steiner Studios in the Navy Yard. We will bring diversity to an industry that has been conspicuously lacking in it and open the door to high-paying jobs for our very talented students. It is the only such school in the country in a working studio, another example of what I mean by the great opportunities in leveraging the assets of our partners.
James B. Milliken is Chancellor of The City University of New York, the nation’s leading urban public university. Milliken was appointed Chancellor and Distinguished Professor of Law at the CUNY Law School by the CUNY Board of Trustees, effective June 1, 2014. Prior to his appointment at CUNY, Chancellor Milliken served as president of the University of Nebraska for a decade, where he also held appointments as professor at both the University of Nebraska’s College of Law and the School of Public Administration. He previously served as senior vice president of the 16-campus University of North Carolina. He is member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Economic Club of New York; the Executive Committee of the Council on Competitiveness; and the Business-Higher Education Forum. He is a past board member of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the American Council on Education. He has been a national leader in innovation and economic competitiveness, global engagement and on-line learning. #
