Equal Opportunity
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Middleton says his personal tale is “just one of those old, ordinary stories–about maturation and growing up and accepting self–but the living of it was not ordinary, nor is it for anybody who has to go through that, even today.” Still, “the issue has always been, What does this have to do with how I do my job? And the answer is nothing.”
Middleton was formally installed this week, but he’s been on the job since last summer and has already spearheaded a strategic study that will lead to cutting some of the school’s 126 degree programs. (No announcement yet as to which ones.) He wants Roosevelt to focus on its strengths, which he sees, for example, in its music and theater conservatory, its new doctoral program in clinical psychology, and its master’s program in computer science. He hopes to build an innovative program in urban health care and is looking to other urban private schools like Fairleigh Dickinson, Pace, and Northeastern (in Boston) as peers. He wants to increase enrollment at both campuses–the 25-year-old Schaumburg branch is home to 47 percent of Roosevelt’s 7,300 students, and Middleton says Roosevelt is serving as diverse a mix of backgrounds and ages there as it is in the “urban village” of the South Loop.
The distribution of those jobs is just about the same as it was seven years ago. Seventy-eight percent of them are located in the Chicago area, divided about evenly between suburbs and city; 22 percent are found in clusters elsewhere in the state. Distribution is extremely uneven, notes iMapData, Inc., the firm hired to conduct this study, with some state house districts having 130 times more arts-related jobs than others. IAAF, an arts advocacy group, declined to release the cost of either study, but neither involved gathering any raw data. iMapData extracted its information from Dun & Bradstreet’s on-line database, using computer software to slice and dice it. They’ve set up a link at www.artsalliance.org that’s supposed to allow members to identify arts-related businesses and jobs in any town or legislative district and get the answer to questions like “Who is my senator?”
Folks from Los Angeles-based A.S.K. Theater Projects will be in town this week to get the lay of the land. This year the private foundation will award the first of a half dozen annual $45,000 fellowships to midcareer theater professionals all over the country; in 2004 they’ll start giving an annual $25,000 prize for the “original, noncommercial American theatrical production that best advances the art form.” Details at www.askplay.org.
