Profile; Interview with Victor Swenson; Interview with Michele Forman; Interview with Alex Aldrich

He has changed Vermont in subtle, yet profound ways. Victor Swenson has gotten more people, thousands of them thrilled about reading for the first time. He's also gotten people thinking and discussing the world of ideas while creating community throughout our state and across the country. Stay with us for a conversation with Victor Swenson, the first and until recently, only Executive Director of the Vermont Council on the Humanities, next on Profile. 28 years ago, scholar and Johnson State College History Professor Victor Swenson accepted a position as Executive Director of the newly formed Vermont Council on the Humanities.

Since then, the Council's resources have grown from $140,000 to a current $1.4 million, one of the largest budgets for a state Humanities Council in the country. Swenson's success stems from a passion for literacy and for the mind-expanding potential of culture and public discourse. Swenson was raised in Indiana. He received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College, an MA in history from George Washington University, and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins, where he specialized in the Middle East. After teaching at Oberlin and the University of Massachusetts, Swenson took a position at Johnson State College, where he taught history and was founding President of the Johnson Friends of the Arts Performance Series. In 1974, he started a new job to promote Humanities in Vermont from a small hide-park office furnished with a picnic table and a folding chair. In the ensuing 28 years, Swenson created numerous literacy programs for adults and children, references, speaker series, and library reading programs that have become national models. He's just retired, leaving quite a legacy, and a grateful state.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's very nice to be here, friend. It's great. I want to go back to when you chose to take the position at Johnson State College. Now, what drew you there and to the state of Vermont? I had my teaching career started in Massachusetts. I taught for four years at the University of Massachusetts, and then I had an opportunity to teach at Oberlin for a year, but it was just a one-year assignment. In the course of that year, looking around for my next assignment, the position at Johnson State was available, and I had friends who knew Vermont that told me about it. My family and I had always really wanted to come to Vermont. Looking at the map, I mean, we hadn't traveled in Vermont all that much, but here's Johnson way up by Hudson's Bay, it would seem like, and we just thought, this is it, so we came up.

My first visit to Johnson was in June of 1970, and I remember coming down the little Johnson Gulf on Route 15 into Johnson and seeing the lilacs in full bloom, which in Ohio had wilted weeks ago and thinking, wow, this is really a different place, so, but it was delightful. Johnson was a modest place, but very serious, and we settled in, and it's more cosmopolitan now than it was perhaps in 1970, but we loved it. Well, and you certainly got involved in your faculty senate president and a lot of things, but then you chose to take a switch. That's right, I started getting interested in things which had kind of a statewide character to them, or which were different from teaching. Working with the Johnson Friends of the Arts was kind of a performing art series and a lot of fun, and then helping working with people from other campuses, St. Mike's and Castleton

and so forth to work on a statewide chapter of the American Association of University Professors. I got interested in things beyond the campus horizon, and the provost of the state college system at that time was Robert Babcock Sr., and he'd become a friend and acquaintance, and he was also a founding member of the Humanities Council, and he encouraged me to apply for the position. When I had to confess, I'd heard a little about this idea of Vermont Council on the Humanities Grant Making Statewide when I was a professor, and I was thinking, this is a nutty idea, it won't go anywhere. But when I met the founders of the organization, David Littlefield from Middlebury, Tim Pitkin, from the retired president of Goddard College and others who were working on this, they really had a passion for the idea that the Humanities could make a difference in Vermont, and I

got one over by them. So you took this position from ground zero in essence. What did you set out to do? How did you start? How did you begin? Okay, and I think it's really important to emphasize that I was brought in to a work that had already had 14, 15 months of energy by this wonderful board of trustees. In 1973, they held eighteen hearings around the state to help get public input into how this organization should be set up and what it should try to accomplish. So the board really had ideas about what it wanted to do, and they picked me really to help them implement that. And that has always been the relationship between the staff and the board. I mean, the organization has grown back in those days. I mean, it started with me and then me in a part-time secretary and then me in a full-time secretary.

But now, you know, we have a staff of eleven people, so the character of the office is a lot different. But the notion always was that the board and the staff would work closely together, and that this was an organization where the imagination, talent, creativity of everybody associated would be brought to bear on trying to figure out what we would do next. And we hit the ground running. The first board meeting, I believe, I started January 1st. I worked New Year's Day, you know, brought that picnic table in. And the first board meeting was January 15th, as I recall. And there were a bunch of grant proposals, and those days really all we did was to make grants. So my job at the beginning was to travel to state, talk to interesting people, explain this newfangled Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues, as we were called in those days, and encourage people to send us grant applications that would support programs that would bring the humanities to bear on the consideration of current topics of interest.

Back in those days when the National Endowment had set up the state program, their kind of equation was that the humanities by themselves might not attract an audience. But if you had the humanities connected to topics of interest that people were really concerned about from the public policy point of view, then you could bring an audience. So the topic would bring an audience, the humanities would give depth to the considerations so you'd get sort of behind the headlines into serious conversation. And conversation was always the central goal of the humanities council that had hired me. They saw libraries as central to the program and local community discussion as really what we were aiming at. And you found that the humanities alone, without necessarily this public policy piece, worked as fine.

Well, sure. And that was a national discovery too. And so after a few years, I mean, that's true. But also on the Vermont organization, the conviction always was and still is that the humanities should be useful to a broader purpose, that the humanities and public issues, original purpose, lives on in the work that we do, so that we are always testing the relevance of the humanities to life and trying to think of the humanities as they are, more of important guide to how we live and think rather than just some kind of a thrill. Now you connected that idea to work on the elimination of a literacy, which is a major push for you. How does a literacy even happen? We have a public education system. So who falls through the cracks first?

Boy, that's complicated. And I mean, the trajectory for us was that in 1978, we started funding library-based reading programs for people who are readers. And that idea caught on. It's one of the staple programs that we do. We do, you know, 300 programs in a year. And, I mean, just recently, they were doing a Middle East fiction readings in Cabot. They were doing Jane Austen's series, where was that somewhere, like, that further, yeah. Right. And so those programs really thrived. And the interest in literacy began in the 1980s, after the reading programs had really become established. And we got a letter from Julie Landry and Morrisville, who described one of her adult basic education students who'd been through one of the library programs. Actually, it's Centennial Library and Morrisville. And she got us thinking about the idea that there are all these people in Vermont who don't

read very well. And we didn't know that. So this was a beginning of an education about literacy. And I will get to your question in a minute. But so we started to think about what kind of, how could you do the reading and discussion experience? Where you're treating, you're dealing with beautiful language, interesting ideas, the opportunity to talk about these ideas and a discussion that's led by a master teacher that's good at leading discussion. And we developed a series we call them connections programs that use children's literature to introduce worthy ideas that you can read about and think about. And adult basic education teachers and their students read together and then come together at a library or the learning center or wherever and join in the discussion. And at first, our idea was that, you know, we're a humanities council, our job is to serve the state.

Okay. And here's a population of adults that we didn't even know existed. And it's our job to figure out how to serve them. We did not want to be an organization that said we're for everybody, but really meant or only for people that can make use of our programs with, right, right. And what we found is that books and reading and discussion change people's lives. They develop a sense of fascination in books and reading. They develop self-confidence. They reach out to libraries and they read to their children. And so kind of from that beginning, we began to think more and more about the problem of literacy and I'll give you a few statistics on that. I believe that literacy, nationally and in Vermont, is our number one social educational economic, international, global problem.

Literacy is it. It connects to health, it connects to education, it connects to education reform, everything. And then humanities helps people actually be interested in reading. So it isn't the burdensome thing that some people think it is, is that the connection that you're making? Yeah, right. I mean, what, I mean, our approach to reading has been to say, you know, okay, here's French. She doesn't read very well. She's working with a teacher and we say, you know, here are a set of books on friendship, say, you know, frog and totor friends or Charlotte's web or other books in that series. Let's read them together. You're not obliged to love these books, but we think you might and if you don't find it interesting, let's talk about why not or let's talk about the ideas in this and it gives people, it's not that people don't have a whole swath of motives for learning to read anyway. I mean, some people want to read the Bible. Many people want to help their children or grandchildren.

Many people want to improve their ability to get promotions at work, you know, reading often is what sticks you at a level and you can't go higher than that. And or you've even taken connections into the corrections facilities. Right. How, how, what gave you that idea and what kind of a difference have you made there? Well, all of these programs change people's lives around. They don't change everybody's lives around, but they change a lot of people's lives around. And if you think historically, I mean, Frederick Douglass, the slave in Baltimore, what's his rescue? It's learning how to read and he bribes little white children to help him learn how to read. And then it's a book, the Colombian Orator, which has, among other things, a dialogue between a slave owner and a slave where the slave makes all the reasons why you shouldn't keep slaves and the slaveholder is so persuaded, he'd set some free, you know. It's a book that changes his life. For John Steinbeck, it's King Arthur and gave him King Arthur and it changes his life.

And we see that in the correctional facilities. And it's partly because it gives people a window into experience other than their own. So if you're incarcerated and you're reading a book about somebody that's got a life full of problems, you're thinking about somebody else's life full of problems and it kind of achieves a counseling purpose without ever calling it counseling and without ever having to counsel anybody. And we know from Tom Giffin and Rutland and others in the correctional facility that this really does transform people. Now, literacy and the need to be able to read is pretty easy to understand. The whole concept of explaining why the humanities are great and how they improve life, which you've given us a bit of here, just a little bit more about the humanities and how they can change people.

I mean, is it leadist? Is it, as some people would say, very stereotypically, would say blue-collar people aren't interested in the humanities? It seems that you found something very, very different, it's true. I mean, you asked me earlier and it's connected to this about how we can have an educational system that produces so many people that are weak readers. And in the United States, in the lowest two levels of reading at which you can hold a complicated job, half the population, a little bit less than that, falls into that category. Vermont does a little better, we think, but in levels one and two, 47% of the American adult population falls. Level three is the level where you can earn good money, hold a complex job, and a third of the population is in level three. 10% each are in levels four and five, and I trust that that adds up. You may get mail on that. But compared to the other high-income countries of the world, Canada, Sweden, Norway, England,

France, there's a new study coming out from the Educational Testing Service, which says that the American Educational System produces the reading system in the United States is characterized by inequality and mediocrity. Our best readers are as good as any, but there aren't very many of them. Our worst readers are the worst of any, and the gap between people that read well and that don't read well is the widest compared to other countries internationally. And it appears to be growing, and those level three readers, which right now are capable of reading to a degree where they can hold well-paying jobs, we're under a lot of global competition from European countries that are investing a lot in human capital. And the level three may not be good enough in another 10, 20, 50 years.

So it's a real challenge we face. Even the skill to express our own and well-thought-out opinions is a whole piece on public discourse. Much less literacy seems to be suffering. There's a lot of concern about critical thinking and debate in schools as well. Is this a medium of television creating a problem around people having their own opinions about wanting to read, or where does the problem lie here? I think the first thing you have to say is that it's complex, that it's not a simple problem. I think one of the central issues is that if you've got an important number of adults who don't read confidently and don't read and don't read to their children and don't understand how important conversation and reading and so forth is with kids before they get to school. Commissioner McNulty recently spoke to the legislature, legislative committee, and said a third of the children coming into kindergarten really haven't had much of that experience.

I mean, the good news is that two-thirds have, but the bad news is one-third have not, and that's a big number. So they come to kindergarten, they may not know their colors, they don't know characters and books, they haven't had the experience of reading or not much, and so they already feel like they're behind, and they never catch up. And the reason is not that the schools don't care passionately about this, but they're swamped by the magnitude of the problem. So kids come into kindergarten, people do the best they can, they start going through the grades, they get to high school, they drop out, they don't read, they get shunted off into programs. I mean, one of the things that fascinates me is who is it that says, all right, the good stuff in the humanities, you know, the odyssey and, you know, literature and things like that, are for friend, but not for Victor. Victor's headed into this other program and we're not going to challenge him with stuff that's interesting to read and think about.

And it really has to be for everybody and we have to work with the adults, which we are doing with programs that we place in the field, to read to their children, even if they don't read very well, use books and conversation and interact with kids, the agency of human services is really big on this as they should be and are wonderful allies in this effort. So that when kids get to school, they're confident and have enough experience that they can catch on, learn to read, become avid readers, get the Harry Potter craze and thrive. Speaking of some books for some people and some for another, another thing that you really push is excellence for all, whether it's, it's not just good books and good teachers, it's fabulous literature, it's experts in the field coming, whether it's artists or scholars or other things, seems to be another, so good teachers are one thing, but they aren't enough. There's this other drive that you have.

Tell us a little bit about that, that I think brings in your speakers, everyone. I'm thinking about that because, I mean, you can use the term great books, you know, the great books program out of the University of Chicago and I've always thought that, you know, we're the good books program and the interesting books, the appropriate books, the relevant books and, and basically our view is that you should read everything. You may not like everything so, and you don't have to finish every book you start, but, but certainly, what's central for us is a really wonderful, lively, stimulating experience. So whether you're reading Jane Austen in the Jane Austen series or, you know, Middle Eastern novel from Egypt and the Middle Eastern series or whatever, that you're challenged by the work and challenged by the others who've read it and the discussion leader to really think deeply about it. And this, we think, is the, you know, essential experience of the humanities.

Well it seems that it's not just the very little preschool children, but also you have programs for teens at risk and other things. So how do you capture that population that everyone's so concerned about drug and alcohol and other risk problems? How do you capture that population? As is true, I think in everything we do, we work with people that work with those populations. So I mean our, our, the key program that we've developed for children at risk of alcohol, abuse, violence, things like that is something we call humanities camps. And we use the children's books that began in service for adults learning to read and still are in service with them. But you know, the, the first one that we tried several years ago was in Bellow's Falls where the Middle School in Bellow's Falls did King Arthur in Bellow's Falls. And it was a wonderful program.

The kids read lots of books, were able to keep them. We give the books on the stories of King Arthur to the participants in this program. But you give away thousands of books, right, Council? Oh, really, yeah. We give away close to 30,000 books a year and over the years we've lost track, but somewhere between two and three hundred thousand books. And there are many households in Vermont where there was no reading material before where now there's a new bookshelf full of books from people that have taken part in this program many times over. But working with those kids to love books and reading, to do a play, to produce it, to carry it out, to design the swords and shields and costumes and so forth, it's, it's a very nice week-long kind of day camp, but it's the school teachers who bring it to life for those kids. So we work in alliance with them. Engaging. How did your Midwest upbringing influence what you have accomplished here? And what, what were you, what was on your bookshelf at, at home, how did, well, my mother was

a great reader and her father who was a physician was a great reader and we had tons of books. And my mother loved things like Alice in Wonderland and had a great love of that and she and my grandmother and my father, and my, I have an older sister who has a great imagination and then she would tell me stories or she read the Scarlet Pimpernow one time and she was a great mentor on all of this too. But it was in high school I think with a teacher named Arthur Erickson who was our debate coach and I conceived a great love of literature and the spoken word and speaking that spoken word and so forth from him. So. Indeed. I'm sure that people in Washington, D.C. have their eye on you. You've been doing consulting work for them before, the National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William Ferris sees you as a national leader in the humanities and think you're a great

voice of the nation and a real treasure. What is the status of the humanities in Washington? You know, how is it doing in the political arena? You know, it's a little hard to tell right now Bill Ferris has his term of office expired last November and Bruce Cole who is an art historian teaching. He actually is an Oberlin college graduate and taught art history of Indiana University in Bloomington is the new chair of the endowment and you know from the point of view of the leadership of the endowment this looks like a good and positive transition as far as congressional funding is concerned. After 1995-96 when the endowment was really slashed by a third, there's been some effort to rebuild that and how that's going to go in current circumstances.

You might be a part of it. Unfortunately, we're already out of time. We've got to go. We'll keep our eye on you here in Washington teaching whatever it's going to be a tough job for anybody to follow in your footsteps. Thank you for joining us today and best to your future. Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. I'll see you next time, Profile. Late last April in the White House Rose Garden President Bush presented the 2001 Teacher of the Year Award to Michelle Foreman, a social studies teacher at Middlebury Union High

School. Join me and one of the finest teachers in our nation for a discussion of education and the limelight. Since beginning her duties as the 51st Teacher of the Year last June, Michelle Foreman has had a busy schedule, acting as a spokesperson and advocate for the teaching profession across the country. She is the first remanter to receive this honor. Foreman earned her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University, worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, and then came to the University of Vermont for a master's degree in teaching. She spent six years with the Vermont Department of Education's Drug and Alcohol Curriculum before taking a position at Middlebury Union High School in 1986, where she clearly became a very popular teacher. Foreman has been an active Vermont NEA member and a volunteer for hospice and court diversion programs.

A mother of three adult children, she lives in Salisbury with her husband Dick. Congratulations, and thank you for fitting us in. You're a very busy schedule around the country. Thank you. It's an honor to be here, especially in Vermont. Yeah, great. Now, since you've been named Teacher of the Year, you've been offered some very interesting opportunities, including space camp at NASA and carrying the Olympic torch. What have been some of the highlights so far? There have been so many highlights since April that it's actually hard to isolate two or three, but you've got a couple of them there. I spent two weeks in Singapore working with the Ministry of Education in September, and as you mentioned a couple of weeks in Japan traveling around in November. But for me, the highlights have really been the people that I have met in the almost constant traveling I've been doing. Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, from Los Angeles to Southern California, and lots of places in between. And the people I've met, the teachers, the parents, the community, and business people, have been the real highlight for me. So it's not just teachers you're meeting with. You're meeting with administrators, communities, students, the whole gamut, right? That's right.

My schedule includes meetings and speeches and committees with a wide variety of people from across the country. Now you believe in continuous professional development for yourself, as well as for your colleagues, and some seven years ago decided to study and learn Arabic. Why did you choose Arabic? I mean, it makes sense today. People are very interested in the Arab world, but seven years ago, why did you choose this? Yes, it does. I mean, I recognize that it was a major language, a billion people in this world speak Arabic. Many of us realize that now, as you mentioned. But I had become interested in world history, not the type of areas studies in Western civilization that was around when I was in college, but the new field of world history of global connectedness. The more I studied, the more I realized how important Arab civilization had been in the world's history, and the spread of Islam. And as I became more and more interested in those, I realized that I would need to learn some Arabic in order to understand them. As it began to study Arabic, though something happened. Unexpectedly, I fell in love with the language.

It's a beautiful language. So I wanted to study it further. But it's tough. It's got a whole different alphabet. It has some strange sounds to us. It's not easy. It's also beautiful. And I was helped by having expert teachers, superb teachers, particularly at Middlebury College's summer programs. The other reason I kept studying Arabic and going back, you see, was that my students kept catching up with me. And so I had to go back to learn more to teach them. They learned a lot faster than I do. Now this was interesting. You offered Arabic as an extracurricular activity at 7.45 a.m. in the morning. And not only did students sign up, but it's filled up, and there's a waiting list for this class. Why is that? It's hard to explain. At first, I began teaching Arabic as part of my regular world history classes. Just a few phrases here and there. And the students loved it. And they would walk down the halls in the morning saying, Sabah al-Hair in Arabic to one another, good morning. And soon they asked me if I would teach them a little outside of class, what teacher could say no.

And since my students really began that class, and when we first held our first program that first year, we didn't know how many students would show up, more than 20 showed up. And many of them continued with us through the year. So I was thrilled to offer that, and we've expanded it to three mornings a week. Do you think it's because it's so strange and different or why is there such an interest? I think that learning languages in and of itself is fun and addition to being incredibly important. And I think my students have come to realize that. The mastery of a language brings with it its own rewards. And as I mentioned, Arabic is a beautiful language and very, very important one. And that's something my students discovered before the current crisis of September 11. Sure. Now, you founded the student coalition on human rights with some students at Middlebury Union High School very early in your career there, actually. To what degree do you think sensitivity to issues of human rights may have had to do with your being brought up in Biloxi, Mississippi, and some later teen years in Georgia, and even coming of age during the civil rights movement?

I think it had a great deal for me, but I want to give the credit to my students. For it was they who had the idea to start that organization after a Martin Luther King celebration on Martin Luther King Day. As you know, our state does not really have many official celebrations. And this is 15 years ago when my students put on a parade in Middlebury for Martin Luther King Day. It was such a success that they decided they wanted to have an ongoing organization. And they selected the name, the student coalition on human right or score. And they've kept that organization going, concentrating on human rights issues for the past 15 years. Wow. You're known for your support of diversity in the classroom, but not just diversity of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, but also of intellectual ability, of economic differences. Why is diversity so important? I've hit on something that's very important for me. I believe that each child, each young person has the potential to be a powerful learner. And as a teacher, my job is to help each child find a way to access that power. I would never choose to give a lesser or weakened curriculum to a child because I thought that

child was a weak learner or could not learn. I have seen students achieve so much, so much, far beyond what I thought some students could. That day in the White House, as you mentioned April 23rd and a brief speech, I said, to be a teacher is to be an optimist. For we are each day in the presence of the enormous potential that each child holds. And I fully support alternative methods of acquiring knowledge. We shouldn't ask all students to learn in a lockstep manner because none of us do that. Learning doesn't happen that way. And it's so important that we allow students to learn as individuals. Something very powerful happens in the classroom when we have a wide mix of individuals. Learning becomes more exciting and it becomes even easier in a way to learn. But that's tough for some teachers to handle, you know, how to keep the really bright students interested, occupied, and the slower learners from feeling discouraged. I think that all students are powerful learners, as I said, and our job as teachers is to help

find and access those ways. If we limit our students to one narrow way of mastering material, then of course we will sift our classes out into powerful learners and weak learners. But if we allow students to approach it from different ways, for example in a history class, art can play a very powerful role. So can simulations or plays play powerful roles. Some students are great writers. Other students can learn to be very persuasive speakers. And so as students approach it individually, other students learn from them. They learn from one another, and I, incidentally, learn a great deal from my students. Indeed. We all do when I teach. President Bush at one point pledged to put education at the top of his agenda. But part of Jefferson's complaint was that he did not. A bill was signed just this week that increases money for literacy programs, for school transfer, brought in testing. What do you think of Bush's plan and his commitment to education? I law the president's commitment to education.

However, within that commitment, I have both some praise and some concerns. The emphasis on literacy is very important, as you know it s a major problem in our country at every age level with students. I am concerned about what I consider to be an over emphasis on a type of testing, what we call high stakes testing, that is testing that would prevent a student from graduating or from moving to another grade based on a multiple choice test. And as a Vermonter, like most Vermont educators, I support a variety of assessments of student learning. There is no one way that we can assess student learning. We must, as we must teach with different methods, we must allow students to demonstrate their learning to us in different ways. And no multiple choice test can tell us what a student does not know. It is a very rough measure, so that emphasis concerns me and the time and resources devoted to testing every child every year. I don't think it s going to help us advance.

What is? What is going to help us advance? I mean, I think you believe in portfolios, and I know that the state of Vermont is very concerned about how much money this new testing is going to be, et cetera. What is an alternative to really have a sense of where our students are and when they re ready to move on? As I have traveled around the country and indeed outside of the country in Asia, I have been struck to the degree to which other states and other countries see Vermont as a model for assessment, because we have taken a broad approach. We are saying there are different methods of assessment, which may be used here. And we approach each child as an individual learner. We don't attempt cookie cutter learning in this state, and we are admired for that. That portfolio assessment may include a standardized test, by the way. But it would almost certainly include samples of student work, of writing, of projects, presentations, of videotape, perhaps, or CD-ROM, that would demonstrate how students learn. And this broader assessment gives us a much better picture. It's not just a series of snapshots, but it is a concerted effort to look at a student's

learning over time and to see how students have progressed. You see a lot of the testing that goes on with multiple choice. Ranked students, number one, number two, number three, is a teacher that's useless to me. And number two, number 20, my job as a teacher is to take that student where he or she is and move him or her forward, and regardless of the relationship to other students. So this broader richer portfolio of assessments that we do in Vermont, I think, is a much healthier and a much more important for learning for students. Well, that's going to be interesting, seeing as the legislation that just came out. Speaking of President Bush, you certainly got caught up in a bit of politics when Senator Jeffords was not invited to the White House for your ceremony. How did that controversial snub affect your day, your special day? I mean, did you know this was going on on that day? We, of course, knew it was going on. It is customary for the congressional delegation to be invited, and indeed our congressional

delegation of three would hardly have crowded us in the Rose Garden. I must say, first of all, that President Bush and Secretary Ron Page were gracious and welcoming and warm, and it was a wonderful, beautiful day with a wonderful ceremony, not just for me and my family and the other Vermonters there, but for all of the state teachers of the year. We were welcomed into the Oval Office, I spent perhaps 10, 12 minutes conversing with President Bush there, and in the Rose Garden, the ceremony itself, that was wonderful. Of course, I missed having my congressional delegation there, and immediately following the ceremony, we went to Senator Jeffords office and spent about an hour talking with him. And we all understood what had happened, however, that the absence was extraordinary, but it did not in any way spoil the day. What about Senator Jeffords concerned for special education and- I echo that concern and have great respect for the Senator and his work on the Education Committee, and particularly his chair of it.

And he's quite right, since the 1970s when that program was initiated, it has never been fully funded to the extent that it should have been. And despite the fact that people in special education, the parents and community people and professionals have long and hard work to get that funded, which is only fair and only right for those children, it has yet to see that. And it continues to plague us at the state level and at the local level, because we must come up with so much of the funding. Sure, and might have to sacrifice other things to make those pieces happen. What can be done to improve the teaching profession? It's critical that we improve the teaching profession just now. I think that we must raise the standards that all teachers must meet. Throughout this country I have met and I have been deeply impressed by the many, many thousands of extraordinarily fine teachers that we have in every state in the country. We should be proud of those folks. But we must make sure that we have high standards throughout a teacher's career.

You know, the national board for professional teaching standards has given us a model for access for evaluating teachers in a fair and meaningful way. And we know that when we set those high standards that teachers can certainly meet them, and particularly concerned in our state and in other states throughout the country, that with the crisis, the teacher shortage, which is coming, by the way, in the next 10 years, we're going to need at least two million new teachers, and we don't know where they're coming from. Unfortunately, many states are answering that by allowing unlicensed, uncertified, unqualified people to teach in the classroom. That concerns me deeply. We must support teachers financially and in other ways, not just with higher salaries, but of course we must do that. But we must continue to give them the community support that they need to do their jobs. But what do you say to young students who might consider teaching, but it's underpaid and undervalued in this country, what do you say to encourage them to come into this profession?

I mean, is it a good one? This is a fabulous profession. And first of all, we know from a number of studies that people do not enter it for the money. Sadly enough, some must leave it because they cannot make a living off of it. But I love teaching. I tell them I wouldn't trade my job for anything because each day I learned something new. In my classroom, every day I laugh, and somebody said, cry. But when I wake up in the morning, I know that I have one of the most important and rewarding jobs in the world because there is no job more important than being a teacher. The irony of your position as teacher of the year is that you aren't teaching this year. Do you miss it? I miss it terribly. It is the hardest part. Of course I miss my family, my husband also, but I miss my students terribly. You know, just last month, as I was opened up my email, I carried a computer with me everywhere, I noticed that long string of red flags, one from my advisory, and at our high school, each teacher has twelve or thirteen students who remain with us for their full four years

as an advisory. And I recognize this email from my advisory, and I opened it up, and it said in wonderful fashion, was foreman, we miss you, we love you, and attached to it was a photograph that they had taken. They had piled into one big corner, one big puppy pile, and there was a photograph. It brought tears to my eyes. I was halfway across the country, and I realized how much I missed them. And you know, when this wonderful year is over, my turn man is on May 31st. In September, I shall return to my classroom in Middlebury for a month, because professionally, that's who I am. Wow. That's where I belong. And that must really keep you going with what you're doing to see that puppy pile. Oh, yes. And it must seem ironic to take a teacher out of the classroom to represent teachers. But then on the other side, who better to represent and speak for teachers and advocate for teachers than one who is a teacher herself? Sure. And who loves it so much? What's the greatest hindrance that you see to a really good education for our kids? I think when we look at that nationally, we are everywhere in a time of great reform and

great change, which means we are very vulnerable. Any time of reform and change, mistakes are made, wonderful new discoveries are made. And I was impressed by the way when I visited Singapore and again when I visited Japan and spoke with the ministries of education and their staff, how much they look to us for this innovation and change. And talking as an historian, America has always, in education, been a place where new developments change and reform have happened. But as I said, this is a time when we're very vulnerable, and more than ever before, we need support, and we need to place our trust and confidence in the educators who are working with our children. Certainly, that must be deserved, and they must meet those high standards to show that they deserve that. But we must allow for them to be part of this process of reform because they are the ones who are closest to it, and they are the ones who most understand students' needs. And that support is what I see, and support is sometimes financial, of course, but is much, much more in that.

Support is shown through involvement, not just by parents, but by community people. Come into your schools, introduce yourself, ask if you can sit on our class, ask how you can help. Even if you work full time, you can still be a mentor to a student who would very much appreciate that. So that kind of support and involvement, I think, is extremely important as we move forward in this time of reform and change. So are we vulnerable because we're going through a lot of reform, or because of some of this legislation that you can transfer to another school and schools that aren't really making it, might lose money, and then what happens to them? What is this vulnerability and time of change? The vulnerability goes well beyond school choice. I am concerned nationally, and this is not strictly a governmental problem. But what I see is an almost punitive attitude towards schools which are struggling. And I have found almost no teachers across this country who don't care about their students. I mean, teachers care very deeply about students and about teaching.

They may be frustrated, they may be overwhelmed, but they still care deeply. And I'm concerned about the attitude that says, if this school doesn't measure up, if this teacher doesn't measure up, we're going to punish you, we're going to punish you by taking away resources. Well, that's the very last thing we should do in our neediest schools. We should develop them. We should offer them our best support, our best teachers, our best administrators, because clearly their need is so great. We don't take our very sickest patients physically and give them to our youngest, least experienced interns. Yet we do that in some of our schools and areas of deep poverty, for example. Sure. Sure. Actually, in some of those areas, and even here in Vermont, there are problems with drug and alcohol. And you spent six years working with curriculum there. The dare program is very controversial and not in a lot of schools now. What is a successful approach to this real serious problem for our youth? I think you put your finger on something very important. There is no one successful approach.

Of course, we recognize that drug and alcohol abuse reflects a much wider and larger societal problem, that we cannot pull the schools aside and look at them in isolation of our society and our culture. And the biggest drug pushers in our culture, many of them are through the advertising of alcohol and cigarettes, a tremendous amount of money is put into convincing Americans to drink a lot of alcohol and to smoke a lot of cigarettes. And of course young people aren't immune to that, nor are they immune to the influences in their homes and their communities. So it's very difficult to pull that out and address it. Health education has come a long way in the last 20 years and recognizing that we cannot simply give information and facts to young people, rather we must help them thoughtfully analytically make decisions on their own behalf, not just with drugs and alcohol, but with many, with nutrition, with sexual behaviors, with almost anything in the area of health. This approach certainly yields better results, but it is a long-term approach and is very time-consuming and that's where we're hopefully looking now.

And is it the role of schools to teach students to be good citizens, to be good human beings, rather than just reading writing and arithmetic or critical thinking? What is the role of schools or is it all of that? I think that there seems to be this not a clear line between what families are to do and schools are to do, or do we draw a line or don't we? I think her society tries to draw that line. Many years ago in the late 60s, as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village in far western Nepal, I made a discovery that influenced my teaching and my attitudes profoundly. I was in Nepal for two, three months before I could sort out which children in my village belong biologically to which family. You see if a child fell and was hurt, the nearest adult comfort of the child. If a child was hungry, he ran it or she ran to the nearest house for food, the child needs discipline, the nearest adult would discipline the child. What they recognized in that village is that they are all our children. They are all the responsibility of all of us.

Now clearly we live in a different culture in the United States and in a different society, but that lesson has stayed with me. When you ask about teaching citizenship, that is obviously a community, a family, a school, a church, it is throughout our institutions. We all must play a role because we can't teach it in one place and ignore it in another. And it is so essential to a democracy that our young people be educated in the ways of citizenship and in our government and in our history. And that's a job that we all have. Our students don't come to us, even in kindergarten, with a lack of knowledge about history, about citizenship. They know. And they learn democracy from the time they gather in circle in nursery school. So it's something that we all share and must share in an ongoing fashion. It's too important to leave out. Well speaking of what students know about history or don't know, this is an incredible year for you to be teacher of the year because you are so interested in involved in world history in your Arab studies. How has that played into what you've done and the dialogues you've had with people that

the United States is suddenly in a very vulnerable position from a world view as well? As a teacher, I have grave concerns about that. By the way, I was in Singapore on September the 11th, which made that experience very surreal for me. And my response was to go and find a classroom of 10th graders that I could talk with them and together we could try to make sense of the incomprehensible events of that day. As someone who cares deeply about the Arab world and the Islamic world, I felt the tragedy had special dimensions, of course. Two things occurred to me. I was thinking, what do I want my students to know and remember? In my head kept echoing the words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963. Kennedy said, if we cannot end our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. You know, as a teacher, always the optimist, I believe that we can. And I thought, what do I want my students to understand as I began to watch the backlash against people who were Arabs and who were Muslims, find wonderful, totally innocent people.

And I thought my students must understand in Arabic, kuluna, muhatanun, fi alum, wahet. We are all citizens of one world. Of course we are Americans. And of course we must seek justice and demand justice. But we must remember that we are also global citizens joined together. Wonderful. And see why you are a teacher of the year. How are, you are also a Vermont teacher of the year? Yes. That's a prerequisite. How is Vermont doing? You say we are a model in some ways. How are Vermont teachers doing? Vermont teachers, of course I am prejudiced. I know Vermont teachers better and have closer networks with them, although I do have many close friends from across the country. We have many advantages as educators in Vermont, as I am fond of saying, Vermont is the place where teachers die and go to heaven, it's Vermont. Because we do have community ownership of schools, we care deeply about education in Vermont.

I'm not suggesting in other cities that they don't, but there is something about the scale of a very large urban district which can isolate communities from the feeling of ownership in their schools. But that's not so in Vermont communities. We are very much in touch with our schools and their very education is very important to us in this state. Look at our investment in it. We know the reason that many teachers leave the classroom is because of working conditions. And for almost all teachers at the top of working conditions comes class size. In Vermont, we are very fortunate to have small classes. When I visited Clark County, Nevada, they have classes of 40, 45 students. Because they can't hire, they're growing so fast, they can't build the classrooms, they can't hire the teachers enough. But it's common throughout the country to find classes, especially in high school, 30, 35 students. Now, those size classes dramatically change, I think, for the worst, the way that you must teach. Any teacher will tell you when you can have 18, 20, 22 students in a class, you can indeed teach them as individuals. That's one of our strengths in Vermont, and we have held on to our small schools. And unfortunately, we're out of time.

I already know what you're doing when you finish your stents, you're going to go back to Middlebury Union high school, lucky for them. Thank you so much for being with us today, Michelle Foreman. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Have a nice, unprofile. Thank you. For two decades, Alex Aldrich has separated arts organizations and events nationwide.

Five years ago, he brought his enthusiasm and political savvy to Vermont to take the helm of the Vermont Arts Council. Join us in a conversation about the state of the arts in Vermont and beyond on profile. Politics, business, and art go hand in hand for Alex Aldrich, executive director of the Vermont Arts Council. His love of musical theater was evident early on. At Harvard, he was involved in the Glee Club, Choir, and Harvard Crocodillos. He graduated with a McCord Prize for dedication to the arts and humanities. Alex managed several small arts organizations and went on to get an MBA at Yale School of Management with a concentration in the nonprofit sector. His first position out of grad school sent him to Washington, D.C. as a program director of the National Institute for Music Theater.

Then he became executive director of the Arlington Symphony Association and moved on to the National Endowment of the Arts to assist and direct the musical program there. The Atlanta Olympics drew Alex further south, where he produced music programs for the 96 game celebrations. He was business manager of a new performing arts center in Atlanta when he took the current post that brought him back to New England. Welcome Alex. Thank you. It's great to have you here. Oh, great. It's great being here. Now you moved around a lot. Had a lot of very interesting jobs along the way, but certainly your focus has always been on the arts. It's never wavered. Why did the position to head up the Vermont Arts Council appeal to you? Two reasons. One is professional and one is personal. The professional reason is that I had gone through a series of production and presenting type positions with organizations that were either old and established or brand new start up.

I was looking for a change. I was looking for something that would stretch me, something that would stretch me in areas that I hadn't really been exposed to, in particular, the sort of advocacy, lobbying, political realm was an area that has been a very strong part of my family life historically, and I always had an affinity for that and never had an opportunity to exercise that sort of muscle. The personal reason was because as I crept further and further south, as you noted, I was at a time that I was nearly married, I was interested in having a family, and we got to Atlanta, and after a few years there, we suddenly had triplets on our hand, and we were a thousand miles away from home, which is the northeast, and we decided that we needed to be closer to home. My wife's from New York, I'm from upstate New York, so this position at the arts council seemed to meet a lot of the criteria professionally and personally. Close enough.

Close enough. Five years ago was a pretty rough time when funding for the arts experienced some major cutbacks. How did it affect Vermont, and how did you deal with those cutbacks? My first annual meeting of the arts council was the first meeting where the new plan was being put into effect, which reflected the 40% cutbacks of the NEA funding, as well as the sort of much more conservative approach by the Vermont State legislature to supporting any activities that were considered non-essential, and it was a real challenge to internally create a new attitude that this isn't the beginning of the end, it's the beginning of the beginning, and you saw the five years ago was sort of the end of the words to the culture wars that were happening nationwide, and since then recent events, notwithstanding, there's been a real resurgence of cultural activity, art making, not just here in Vermont, but nationwide,

so that in effect, I came into the arts council at the bottom, and it's been nothing but growth ever since. Well, why has there generally been such strong resistance to government support of the arts, and why do you think that's changing? I don't think it's changing, I think there still is a lot of resistance to government support of the arts, and I think that's mainly out of ignorance more than anything else. Once people have a chance to experience what the arts can do, not just in and of themselves, which those of us who are in the world of the arts understand intuitively, but once you explore the impact of the arts on the economy or the impact of the arts locally in communities and how they draw together different groups of people to work together to create positive change, then you begin to understand where the role of the arts is from a public sector standpoint.

There is a public benefit to supporting the arts that goes far beyond just helping a painter paint a picture or a composer write a song or what have you. Well, we're relatively speaking, we're still a very young country, so I think I like to think that it's something that will take place over time, and you only can make small changes on the margin as you grow and develop as a society. I think we have taken significant steps backwards in the last half century for a variety of reasons, but I think overall what was said early on by people like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson about the role of the arts in a new country still ring true today and resonate well with a lot of people. Now the Vermont Arts Council is unique in the United States, I'm not sure whether to call it an agency or department or what because it's also a nonprofit membership organization. You've put your finger on it, that's it.

We are the only state agency, state arts agency in the country that is its own private not-for-profit, 501C3 organization. The founding fathers of the Vermont Arts Council, Judge Billings and his colleagues, recognized I think early on in 1964 actually that it might be good to separate art from politics to the degree that the arts organization who was going to receive federal and state funds to impact the arts community might run into a political problem somewhere down the line, as in fact the NEA did, as in fact many other state arts agencies have. So they created the arts council in 1964 and made it a not-for-profit and then had legislation passed that simply designated this nonprofit as the vehicle through which those monies would pass and it's worked, I think pretty well.

There's some disadvantages but it's worked pretty well. Interesting. Now most people would agree that the arts make a major contribution to the cultural life of the state, but does it also have an economic impact? It's often the economic impact that is the only thing that people understand. In fact, that's often how I introduce the importance of investing in the arts. The way I look at it is the arts are not something that cost taxpayers money. The arts are something that the state and the taxpayer invests in because the ultimate return is not only very easy to count in terms of dollars return back to the state's coffers and to communities in general, but it gets into that intangible area where you're adding value, aesthetic value, psychological value to how a community works together and with itself. And I think that's a really important point to make. I have a lot of statistics on these pieces of paper here that I just assumed not wave

in front of you about the impact of the arts economically in terms of how many jobs it creates, how much tax revenue is returned, how we compare not only within New England but nationally and so on. I think it's important to point out that only recently has the private sector begun to understand that there is a sector of the economy called the creative economy and it is a massively misunderstood and misrepresented sector of our economy and that it needs a lot of study and work and support because it has a huge impact on many other sectors of the economy, including biotech and medical and so on and so forth. So that's part of your job now. It's absolutely part of my job. It's really explaining how this helps, especially this unique state in a way. I know that partnerships and collaborations are very hot right now.

And you've had a major one with tourism and marketing and tell us a little bit about that. Tourism and marketing started, that collaboration started out before I even came to Vermont. The National Trust for Historic Preservation identified cultural tourism or they called it Heritage Tourism. Arts organizations began calling it Cultural Tourism. Now we call it Cultural Heritage Tourism, big surprise. They identified this sort of niche marketing strategy as a way to further focus attention and awareness on the importance of our cultural infrastructure as something that attracts and retains visitors and so on to the state. Law and behalve the Department of Economic Development sort of went, well wait a minute. That branding study also is the same as our branding study that shows that businesses are attracted to Vermont because of culture and quality of life and the other brand attributes of Vermont.

So it became pretty clear that we had an opportunity to focus a lot more coordination around what is cultural heritage tourism and what can it do in Vermont to support the infrastructure that exists, create more jobs, create a greater awareness of culture as an expression of who Vermont is. So that brings people in, getting back to the people who are here. How do you go about getting people in all parts of this very rural state to participate in, get them interested, get them supporting the arts? That's a good question because I think it depends on who you ask and what the opportunities are that exist in particular communities. It's not the same, you can't apply, so you can't say, here's the model, go and do it. My rule of thumb is, you really have to do it, the best way to do it is one on one. I can't explain, if you know nothing about the arts and their importance and what they

mean and you're kind of in fact scared of them because you know how people make music or paint pictures is a mystery to you, you're going to be very defensive probably. If I come to you and say, hey the arts are really great, let me explain to you how you might, your reaction is likely to be okay, maybe if I however come to you and say, I have a ticket to this show at our town hall, you want to come, you want to have a cup of coffee afterwards or something, you're much more likely, first of all, to go with me to that and if you experience it for yourself, the reaction you are likely to have intuitively will obviate the need to have an explanation for me after the fact, you will get it, you will have that aha moment and that is I think the most effective way to communicate the importance of the arts to people who don't get it and I'm not saying that Vermonters don't get it or outsiders don't get it, it's something that we have lost a great deal of knowledge

around is how to get people prepared to understand the arts. Well are, are there school programs or are they effective enough to get people interested in the arts locally and is VCA kind of helping the schools to teach our children and young people what the arts can be for them in their life? The answer to that question is yes and no, there are some schools that do a really good job of communicating the importance of the arts and how the arts fit in to the curriculum. There are other schools that don't have that opportunity because of money issues or what have you. One of the things that we have been really, right from the beginning we've been involved in education programs, originally just bringing in artists into the school and helping to pay for that. Over time we've become aware that that's not really sufficient to maintain the kind of political interest in supporting arts programs in schools, that we have to be doing something

else with communities to enable them to justify keeping the arts in the school budget because as you know the arts are almost always the first thing to go and it's a shame. My approach has been within the last three or four years to advocate not for the three hours of school reading, writing, arithmetic which you'll notice two of which aren't ours at all, their eggs, but is to go for the three a's of school work and that is academics, athletics and the arts because if you are not an academic performer or if you are not an athletic standout, you don't have any other means of joining the community that is your school, you are a part because you aren't part of the regular academic day at a school. The arts in all of their infinite variety provide an enormously effective vehicle for people

to express themselves, for people to understand that their role in their community is an important one. It's not that the art, the artist in them is being forced to stand out as an artist, but they are forced to be brought in. It's a very different kind of mindset and if we could simply convey the importance to school boards across the state and to our new Commissioner Ray McNulty that the concept of academics, athletics and the arts not only could apply to entire school systems but you can even make it apply to the individual student. It is the appropriate combination of those three things to engage and provide a healthy learning environment for a student. We would be far more effective in advocating for a healthy mix of activities in schools. We've lost that. We've had two generations of school children going through that have sort of lost where the arts fit in.

Well even the Vermont Council on World Development had a summit two years ago with three major initiatives, one being youth at risk, rural youth at risk and they asked you to be a part of that. Is this where some of these ideas came out of or are there any initiatives from you that have come out of that summit? One of the conditions of my employment at the arts council was that I get to as many tables as would make a place for me to sit and that's what I've been doing. I've simply started going to the meetings of the Travel and Recreation Council to the meetings of the Council on World Development. I began to meet the same people at the same places. I'm sure you know, Vermont's a small state. And I think people got to be, began to be comfortable with having me there. I'm not sure which, you know, it's a chicken and egg situation as far as that particular summit is concerned. I think I was invited to participate in that because I was representing a certain line of thought that was missing in previous summits like that.

Unquestionably, what is it? The Washington County Youth Service Bureau has a very powerful arts track within its social service sort of lexicon of things they do for kids, for youth at risk because they recognize how important the arts can be in raising self-esteem, reducing recidivism, lowering the expectation that kids are going to be on drugs if they're not in school. You know, I can't. There are a lot of other things that kids do that are very healthy and engaging and the arts are certainly among those. Well, certainly this is a very political position as you brought up. It's too bad to be. I don't think I expected it to be quite this typical. And even as a part of that, some projects which you've spent a lot of time on get dumped in the end. I mean, the state song was one. Here's a lot of hoopla. Great stuff goes on in the end. Can we roll the tape on the phone?

We had a... Oh yeah, that was one of the ball moments. I mean, that must really be tough. It was. The worst part about the state song. Now, remember, the state song ultimately did get passed. We have a new state song. I will send you a copy of it, in fact, after the show. But the worst moment of all was sitting there with the composer in the state house and watching as people, again, who didn't understand. That was my fault. I did not make sure to go around and corner them and say, you know, I don't care if you don't understand. This is the state song. This is a symbolic gesture. This represents... It's trying to represent who Vermont is, what we care about Vermont. Listen to the lyrics. Listen to the music and see how you feel about it. Now, only one or two people in the state house didn't like the song, but they didn't like it enough that they really cared about it one way or the other. Other people just objected to it because they were worried about the rights issues. You know, okay, fine. We fixed that.

There are legal issues. I'm sure I come in all the time. It must be very irritating. Now, it seems that the design of the Vermont quarter was very successful. Well, you... But was it? And is it easy? I mean, how hard was coming up with that design? It was easy, in the sense that, you know, the way the arts council does these things is that we pull together people who actually know what they're doing. I'm not... I mean, my background is in music and theater. I wouldn't... I wouldn't pretend to lay claim to knowing a whole lot about the visual arts, but we bring together people who do to make suggestions about how we might do a call to artists, how we might run a competition like this, and then we do it. My personal preference was for a different quarter, but that was purely on the basis of certain design things. What looks beautiful on a large scale picture of, you know, a farmer checking his stat buckets with a camel sump in the background is really ineffective. In fact, I have a quarter in my pocket to show you how ineffective it is when it's translated down to something this size, whereas there was one design that was much more abstract

that hinted at certain elements of the Vermont dare I say brand again in this context, but it hinted at some of these qualities that we know and love about Vermont that I think in the end would have been a better design, but I totally respect Governor Dean's unwillingness to buck the public trend because he was going through civil union legislation at the time, and it was a way to sort of, you know, there were very good political reasons to choose that particular design. A lot of compromise going on, always, always. What has been one of your very favorite accomplishments on this job because they're tricky things, the highway construction thing? Yeah, I actually would put, you mentioned that. I would say that that's been one of the most exciting things, not just because of what it's doing, to orient the listener here, we have a partnership with the Department of Transportation, and for two dozen years they've been trying to rebuild Route 2 through

the town of Danville, and when you say Danville to someone in Vermont, they generally think traffic tickets. We're trying to, among other things, it's a beautiful town. This is, no, it's true, I mean, it is true. So, you know, they'd redone Route 2 up to the outskirts of the village, but they'd never been able to get the town to sort of talk with them about what do we do in the village. A lot of talk about a bypass, a lot of talk about the green, a lot of talk about parking, and all these issues. They could never break through this sort of communication barrier they had. So Mick Glitman, who I credit with so much of the effectiveness behind this partnership, asked me and said, could you help us, because she had been aware that a lot of public works projects had been facilitated in other parts of the country by the artist's community. And she said, look, as it sounds like you have nothing else to try, you can't hurt, right?

And by putting together a local review committee where the artists were involved, and able to reach what they call a 502 hearing within a year and a half, which is almost unheard of, there are several significance. One thing about this one was, this was a process in which the artist was front and center. And it's important to say that, because what an artist brings to a public discussion is unique. No other city planner, city counselor, librarian, whatever. But all those people were involved as well. They were all involved as well, but what the artist brings is not only a familiarity with aesthetic considerations and how to express them and how to convey them, but a working comfort with working in a process where the outcome is unknown. Think about that. You're a town planner, and you don't want to say yes or no until you know how much it's going to cost, what it's going to look like, where it's going to go, and who's going

to pay for it. Suddenly, you're brought in on this thing saying, well, we know we want to fix a three quarter of a mile stretch a highway. We know it's going to cost approximately X, but it could cost a lot more if people don't want it, and they fight as legally, and they fight as tooth nail every step of the way, which happens a lot. So what can we do? So the artist comes in and says, well, for this amount of money, we could do this, and they create an image. They make an aesthetic treatment become real to people. They also are comfortable in letting discourse happen. We have lost the art of discourse in this country. We can't disagree with someone without coming to blows. We can't disagree without having huge editorial fights, and the arts enable you to have a discussion where you disagree, and do it in a way where you still have respect and concern and a mutual desire for a positive outcome at the end. And if we continue to lose that, we're getting into the 9-1-1 issues that are important

to me now. Well, why don't you talk about that for a minute? Has 9-1-1, what kind of impact September 11th have for your organization? Well, on the surface, at this point in time, very little, I don't think we've even come close to assessing the longer term impact on our national psyche on all of our infrastructure. The one thing that I am terribly afraid of is that if the result of the 9-1-1 and the war in Afghanistan is that the infrastructure that supports our cultural institutions is destroyed because people are contributing money elsewhere or the economy tanks, then we will have lost the war on terrorism. They will have succeeded because it is that infrastructure that carries the heart and soul of who we are as a people forward and leaves the legacy of that culture to future generations.

And I'm worried about it. Part of the future are these four wonderful children. You have a set of triplets and a two-year-old. What is life like when you have four toddlers? And I know this is a question everybody wants to know. And how do you envision their exposure to the arts? We have only about 30, 20 seconds left. I would just like to say that one of my children is already an artist and believe me, he had no encouragement to that end by his parents, our physician notwithstanding. We obviously have all of the appropriate crayons and drawing things and it's very important for that kind of creativity early on that my son Flynn distinguished himself by picking up a pan and just saying, I'm an artist and he's drawing. I can't comment on this talent, but it's there. And we have to encourage that and all of our children, thank you Alex Aldrich so much for being here today.

It's been a pleasure, thank you. Thank you for joining us.