Remembering Bill Safire, a True Blue Leader in Arts Education

When I heard the news about the death of Bill Safire, it just took by breath away. It was the very same way I felt when I had read that George Carlin had died. In these moments, it often takes me a bit for my intellect to catch up with what I was feeling.

I thought a lot about all those years I had regularly read his column in The New York Times. All those years I watched him on Nightline, and countless other news programs. And of course, it got me to thinking, and thinking hard about how fortunate we are indeed, that he had staked out his claim as a leader in arts education when he became Board Chair of The Dana Foundation.

I knew the Foundation just a little bit before Bill Safire became chair. It had done great work, but nothing to speak of in arts education. I had heard about Safire becoming chair, and then I recall learning from my friend Jane Polin that Dana was going to take up arts education. I asked Jane how that came to pass? I remember her saying that it was Bill Safire's doing, and she just smiled. I had long thought that the key to equitable access to quality arts learning for all children would come from bridges built to those outside the field as traditionally defined. Bill Safire and arts education? Well, how about that!

There are, of course, a lot of foundations supporting arts education. Not enough, mind you, but still, a fair number across the country. It says a lot that under Safire's leadership, and by extension his empowering of people like Barbara Rich and Janet Eilber, that the Foundation was not only to undertake unique work, as in the case of brain research and arts education, but work that is sorely needed and of the very highest quality. While some may think that approach is the norm, believe me, unique, needed, and quality, are not always things that go hand-in-hand in philanthropy.

I heard Safire speak at two different Dana Foundation conferences, and had the chance to talk with him a little bit, just to thank him. It was my brief moment of fandom. Did I get his autograph? I got the impression that he would have shooed me away had I asked. Looking back on that moment, I should have asked.

He spoke matter-of-factly about the importance of arts education and his personal interest in Dana's approach to this issue as a foundation. At the most recent conference last spring on Arts Education and Neuroscience, he was clearly more interested in hearing from the scientists than he was in trumpeting himself or the Foundation.

Beyond its groundbreaking work in arts education and brain research, The Dana Foundation has helped advance the field of teaching artistry, in particular through the funding of work that is enhancing quality, developing deeper practice, and building community. It strikes me that their approach to this work is from a practitioner's perspective.

A change in leadership at any organization is always a cause for concern. I hope that everyone will take the time to write to The Dana Foundation, to thank them for their work, and to strongly encourage them to continue the legacy in arts education established so beautifully by Bill Safire.

For those of you who wonder whether such a thing is appropriate, go ahead and drop whatever issue of propriety you might be mulling over, and just do it!

So, what was I really feeling when I heard that Safire had died, just as I had experienced with the similarly sudden passing of Carlin? I felt that I knew them, that they had a place in my life. I also wondered, who would teach us? In the case of Carlin, who would tell us how idiotic we were?

With Safire, it's very much the same, except his touch, quite a bit kinder, ultimately displayed the touch of a teacher. I tend to think of him as an everyday intellectual or perhaps better put, an everyman intellectual. Perhaps this is why he was such a fine advocate for arts education.

What could be better than to leave this entry with an excerpt from the Chairman's Letter from The Dana Foundation's 2008 Annual Report:

Learning, Arts, and the Brain

Since the industrialist and legislator Charles A. Dana launched his foundation nearly sixty years ago, education has been an active area of its support. At first, construction of auditoriums at colleges was our primary contribution. This was followed by grants from providing fellowships and scholarships to helping disadvantaged students meet the daunting challenge of college calculus. In the past eight years, we have focused on a field of great need: the revitalization of the teaching of the performing arts in our public schools. Whenever local school budgets tighten--in good times and in today's harder times--one of the first activities to be curtailed has been children's education in music, dance, and drama. That's a big mistake, not just because study of the arts attracts young people to remain in school, and not just because an appreciation of our cultural heritage enriches their lives during and long after school.  We see other reasons as well: arts study encourages creativity, the precursor to economic productivity; it stimulates the imagination, opening new vistas for scholastic achievement and interesting careers.

Five years ago, a light bulb went on in our heads: Since we were so deeply involved in spreading the gospel of brain science, might there not be a way to determine whether there is a connection between the study of the arts and the development of the brain's ability to learn? To perceive through the senses, to store memory in areas like the hippocampus, to quickly retrieve that information through the neural circuits--aren't those arts-related functions of the organ inside the skull? And could it be shown that the study of the arts has a direct effect on the ability to concentrate, to focus, so as more easily to learn math, science, and the humanities?

Wishful thinking, said skeptics who preferred more easily measureable academic subjects. Art for art's sake, said some purist critics who disdained any "practical" benefit from studying and performing in their fields. And yet some cognitive neuroscientists, newly equipped with technology to see what was going on in the living and learning human brain, wondered: Why did so many musicians excel at math? Why did children who eagerly performed dance and welcomed its difficult training shine in the seemingly unrelated world of spatial relationships? Why did so many actors have such good memories?

Under the guiding hand of "the father of cognitive neuroscience", Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D., of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dana put up $2 million to undertake a three-year study, drawing on the top cognitive talent in the faculties of seven leading universities taking a serious look at the subject so central to cognition and to early education. Their March 2008 report, titled "Learning, Arts, and the Brain" (available in full on our Web site, along with media commentary), was careful not to use the word "causation"--not enough evidence yet to make such a sweeping claim--but found "tight correlation" between facility in an art form and achievement in other domains. "In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation," and in grown-ups, "Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness, which in turn is influenced by dopamine-related genes." The scientists of the Dana Consortium on Arts and Cognition concluded: "An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition." 

 In June 2008, Dana awarded a grant to a member of the consortium, Harvard's Elizabeth Spelke, Ph.D., to follow up the music-geometry connection with a larger sample, and to investigate whether a musical tone is represented as space in the brain.

Throughout our study and its aftermath, we were hopeful that other educators and neuroscientists would join us in moving this important field of study ahead. Sure enough, in the fall of 2008 the Johns Hopkins University School of Education asked us to join its Neuro-Education Initiative to plan a conference on "Learning, Arts and the Brain." That was the title of the Dana Consortium's report; in a fair exchange, we plan to adopt the Hopkins use of the neologism neuro-education. (An aside: As a combining prefix, neuro- is hot, now including neuro-economics; I thought I had coined the term neuroethics in 2001, but it turns out that the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Dr. Anneliese Pontius used it in a published paper on child-rearing in 1993. Ah, well.)

The Hopkins gathering is now set for May 6, 2009, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Its purpose, in their words, is "to discuss what is known about arts and cognition, explore research priorities and opportunities, and develop methods of effective communication of findings to educators and stakeholders." Guy McKhann, M.D., professor of neurology and neuroscience at Hopkins and Dana's senior scientific consultant, and I will be among the speakers, along with Dr. Spelke and two other members of our original Consortium: Michael Posner, Ph.D., of the University of Oregon and Brian Wandell, Ph.D., of Stanford. Dana support in addition to Dr. McKhann will include Barbara Rich, Ed.D., head of our News and Internet Office, and Janet Eilber, our director of Arts Education. Dana Press reporters directed by Jane Nevins and Nicky Penttila will cover the proceedings on our Website and in our publications Brainwork, Brain in the News, and Arts Education in the News. 

The next day, in nearby Washington D.C., a "Learning, Arts, and the Brain Summit and Roundtable" will take place, part of a two-day Learning & the Brain conference.  For the past five years, we have worked with the dedicated educators of Learning & the Brain on these semi-annual gatherings, which often draw up to 1,000 teachers, administrators and scientists; Dana Alliance members, and Dana staff and consultants often participate in their panels.