About CAA
Summary Situational Analysis
Workforce issues
We have identified workforce issues of particular importance to our members. This strategic plan places emphasis on workforce matters and the needs of our members in that area, so we list these as a separate category:- Job market: CAA is the hub for academic job listings in art and art history, while the American Association of Museums (AAM) serves a similar function for the museum world. A decrease in the number of jobs posted in 2003 and 2004 indicates difficulties for our members
- Use of part-time or contingent faculty: There remains a trend to employ part-time faculty—in art history alone, almost one-half of undergraduate teaching positions are part-time, nontenure-track. There is also a growing trend toward increased numbers of full-time, non-tenure-track positions within the arts and humanities
- Inadequate access to affordable benefits: Independent artists and scholars, freelancers, and part-time faculty have inadequate access to affordable health insurance and other benefits
- Tenure standards and criteria: Tenure and promotion committees, especially within liberal-arts institutions, need guidelines to ensure appropriate assessment of the creative, scholarly, and service contributions of studio-art faculty. Art-history faculty face a sharp decrease in venues for publication of scholarship (both books and articles) and a sharp increase in the cost of reproductions and image rights in publications. Standards are also needed for evaluating the use of emerging technologies in scholarship and art production and for museum catalogue essays in tenure and promotion reviews
- Status of the MFA as the terminal degree in studio art: CAA recognizes the MFA as the terminal degree in visual-arts education, but numerous institutions, in particular community colleges, do not acknowledge the MFA as a terminal degree
- Studio health and safety: Guidelines are needed for studio safety protocols for individual artists, studios, art departments, and art schools, including compliance with OSHA and EPA standards for workplace safety and waste management. Training for faculty, maintenance staff, students, and independent artists is needed
- Educational and career development: There is sometimes a gap between the training of visual-arts professionals and their postgraduate job opportunities. In addition, midcareer professionals often need new skills, both technological and conceptual, to maintain their competitiveness in the workforce
- Diversity: Both diversity and affirmative action remain ongoing important principles in higher-education hiring. CAA asserts the value of these principles
General issues
In addition to workforce issues, we have identified many matters that have significant impact upon the fields of art, art history, and visual studies in general, and therefore on our planning decisions. The strategic plan establishes the relative importance of these, and sets forth CAA’s response to them over the next five years. They include:Publishing:
- Fair use and copyright
- The crisis in scholarly publishing
- Library budgets for book and journal acquisition and e-licenses in the arts
- The effect of digital technology on teaching, learning, and publishing
- The studio curriculum, balancing the teaching of conceptual expertise, technical knowledge, and health and safety
- The importance of visual understanding within the humanities
- The role of critical theory in the teaching of art and art history
- Fields of specialization in studio art and art history—are they changing?
- The growing student population and decreasing institutional resources in the arts and humanities
- The impact of outcomes-based assessment on curriculum, budgets, and hiring in the arts and humanities
- The need for standards for curatorial-studies programs/training for museum work
- The trend to deaccession artworks and collections for financial reasons, especially in colleges and universities
- Legal trends toward censorship of art practice and display
- Decreased, insufficient, or insecure funding for public cultural agencies and institutions
General Organizational Observations
As CAA addresses current issues and needs of the field and takes a leadership role in identifying future ones, our own organizational strengths and challenges will have an impact on our efficiency. Our planning therefore began with an assessment of these in the fall of 2003. Our plan considers all of them.Strengths:
- CAA is made stronger by its very diverse membership. We are diverse in professional interests and specializations, age and stage in career, and type of employer (although this is a more narrow range, i.e., predominantly higher education and museums), with concomitant professional needs
- Our endowment and finances have been well managed. CAA has weathered several recent years of economic stress better than many comparable organizations
- Our revenues are drawn from varied sources, providing stability
- CAA has strong relationships with and is well respected by many decision-makers in the foundation world
- The Art Bulletin and Art Journal are recognized worldwide as extremely important, influential art journals—their influence and readership extend far beyond academia, into museums and the general art public. With the publication of caa.reviews during the last strategic plan, CAA became one of the first scholarly societies in the humanities to launch an online scholarly journal
- The participation of studio artists in the Annual Conference as attendees, presenters in sessions, and participants in exhibitions continues to grow, making the conference an important venue for creativity and scholarship across disciplines and fields
- Through its fellowship program, CAA helps to diversify the community of artists and art historians.
- CAA’s career-development services have little or no competition from our affiliates or ACLS area-studies associations
- CAA’s mentoring services enable graduate students, emerging professionals, and midcareer scholars and artists to conduct themselves more effectively both in the job market and the workplace
- CAA is an active and effective advocate for the arts and humanities. We focus our efforts well, on issues of freedom of expression, federal funding, and intellectual-property law, among others
- CAA’s network of more than fifty affiliated societies is a resource that we have only begun to tap
- We must determine if we will increase membership by increasing the number of members in fields in which we already have strength, or by reaching out to fields and areas where our membership is small
- CAA’s main sources of revenue—dues, conference registrations, advertising, booth and interview-table rentals, contributions, and the endowment—have all been affected by the recent economic downturn. Slow or negative growth in endowments is reducing the funds available to colleges and universities, museums, foundations, and CAA itself. Foundations are choosing to support fewer organizations, fewer new initiatives, and, in some cases, fewer arts and humanities projects
- Many art journals have ceased or reduced publication and many scholarly and commercial presses have canceled or reduced their art and art-history publishing programs. This weakens the fields; the more outlets for publication of scholarship and the more funding for fellowships and grants the better
- Artist members continue to be underserved in some areas of CAA’s programming and services
- Communications throughout the organization need improvement: among the membership and the board and staff, within the board, between board and staff, and peer to peer within the membership. Our website, newsletter, conference activities, workshops, and other communication devices need greater attention, more resources, and better coordination
- As the organization has grown in scale, scope, and ambition, our governance structures have not been updated adequately. Among areas that need revision are the composition and structure of the board, method of nominating and electing directors, ongoing development for board members, means to develop future lay leadership, and the role, formation, composition, and number of committees
- Field data collection and analysis are an urgent need and present an important opportunity for us to take a leadership position. We have not yet fully developed a research program
- If advocacy is an important CAA initiative, then we must have a means of responding quickly in developing situations
- Academic and museum salaries in the arts and humanities have declined in real dollars over two decades, professional perquisites (e.g., reimbursement for association dues and conference fees and travel) have decreased, and demands on professional time (e.g., research, writing, and publication expectations) have increased
- We must determine if we are a US organization that welcomes membership from around the world, or an international organization, and plan accordingly in both our membership-growth initiatives and our programs.
- CAA is perceived to have a bias toward the Northeast US
- CAA allocates resources to both members and the general fields and public, but we do not have a clear policy about our focus
- CAA has an ongoing mandate to maintain a high level of discourse at our conferences and in all CAA-sponsored programs
- Conferences held in the largest cities (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) are much better-attended than those held in other cities (Toronto, San Antonio, Seattle)
- As CAA has grown, so has the number of special-interest affiliates, many of which also convene scholarly and professional meetings, which offer competition to our more general Annual Conference.
- CAA’s small professional staff does not currently have the capacity to expand programs and services
