Bad Impressions

The Kansas City Art Institute's inquisitors arrived the first day of October. The five administrators journeyed from Creighton University in Omaha and art schools in Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine and Pennsylvania. Their job was to decide whether the degrees the Art Institute was awarding were worth the embossed paper they were printed on.

The first night, the visitors shared drinks with faculty, administrators and board members at a reception in their honor at the H&R Block Artspace. They spent the next three days exploring almost every inch of the school -- tracking through the dust of the ceramics department, negotiating the rabbit warren of a painting department, where each student has a few square feet of studio space delineated by roughly built partial walls. They riffled through stacks of paper in the administrative offices -- budgets, course plans and student files. They met formally with the student senate and the faculty assembly. They knocked on doors at the freshman dorm and wandered through the cafeteria. They chatted with anyone who was interested, from janitor to dean.

A university's accreditation process is basically a peer review. It's voluntary -- but crucial if a school wants official validation of its program. The Art Institute accreditation team members wrote up the results of their visit and delivered them to Kansas City Art Institute President Kathleen Collins on January 8.

It was not a report card Collins would be excited to show off. Though the school would keep its accreditation through the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges, the report spent 52 pages detailing the school's problems.

No one closely associated with the 116-year-old school was surprised by the report's contents -- not Collins, not her vice presidents, not the faculty, not board chairman Roger L. Cohen and probably not the few students who bothered to read the report at the library.

It told them what they already knew: that the Kansas City Art Institute no longer is a trend-setting art school with an array of well-known artists on the faculty and inspired students raving about its attributes.

Specifically, the report says the teachers don't get along with administration; that financial problems threaten the school's future; that enrollment has dropped significantly; that several of the major programs are struggling; that the sculpture department, which once held national prominence under the leadership of Dale Eldred, is jeopardized by faculty turnover; that the school is making no effort to recruit minority faculty and students; and that it is not accurately measuring whether its graduates have the skills to succeed in the art and corporate worlds.

Though she would quibble with some of the details, Collins doesn't argue the report's accuracy, calling it a "frank assessment" of what is going on at the institute. She portrays the report as a comprehensive accounting of the problems. "That's all there is," she says. "There is nothing you are going to hear beyond that."

And Collins has done her best to keep it that way, at one point banning a Pitch reporter from a campus otherwise dedicated to nurturing free expression. When the Pitch began asking questions about the accreditation report, Collins wrote a letter alerting the faculty and encouraging them to "speak affirmatively of this college." She then spent most of the letter railing against the person who had dared provide the Pitch with a copy of the report, which she had given to selected faculty and staff and left in the library for students to read but not copy.

"I broadly distributed the document with confidence that every individual faculty member receiving it would handle it with respect," Collins' letter reads. "I find it unconscionable that one faculty member has betrayed our trust. I feel confident that each of you, save for one, would share in this sentiment."

In fact, several faculty members, both on and off the record, say many things that Collins wouldn't characterize as "affirmative."

Some senior members of the school faculty say the accreditation report went easy on the school, that the reality of the situation is even worse.

And as accreditors have noticed for at least a decade, a destructive mistrust between the faculty and administration has been festering for a long time.

Creative tension at the Art Institute is nothing new.

For more than a century, the school has been a part of Kansas City's soul, a crucial piece of culture that complements our simplistic love of sports and barbecue. Each year it brings a new class of energetic young artists to town and gives local artists a reason to stay -- those artists become some of Kansas City's most interesting residents. Of the 8,032 alumni registered with the school, 1,288 still live in the area.

Some labor in studios, unveiling their work to the sound of clinking wineglasses at the growing number of Friday-night gallery openings downtown. Some join the ranks at Hallmark, where their creative efforts see mass production and distribution in drugstores across the country. According to the school's records, 41 percent of its graduates end up using their design and graphics skills as business artists. Slightly more than a quarter of them are full-time fine artists, and 18 percent teach. Others merge with the rest of us, retiring their art to avocation status and picking up hammers, waiting on tables or shuffling papers in offices.