The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association

7. Mentoring the Profession: Career Development and Support

129 Purpose 12. To encourage qualified students to enter the arts as a profession and, to this end, to seek ways and means of establishing scholarships, fellowships, and awards for academic achievement or creative ability and promise. Purpose 15. To assist members of the profession and institutions in locating and filling positions on the staffs of colleges, universities, art schools, museums, foundations, government agencies or commissions, and other organizations engaged in art activities or programs consonant with the purposes of the Association. Central to the mission of a learned society is the nurturing of those who are the future of its field of study and of the professions that promote and enliven that field. Through the years the College Art Association has pursued this mission by creating, expanding, and, as time passes, elaborating on or modifying a great range of programs, services, and activities for its members and for the institutions that employ them. From concerns with the curricula of academic programs for art professionals, through services for appropriate employment and continued career development, to support and recognition of accomplishments at each professional level, CAA has addressed the needs of the field and of its members in an ongoing manner throughout the 7 Mentoring the Profession Career Development and Support ofelia garcia 130 ∏ Ofelia Garcia decades as these needs came to be recognized. By creating opportunities, providing services, and seeking to encourage the highest level of scholarship, the association has fostered a collegial, intellectual, and often lifelong community for its members. placement services and career development In the early years, members generally served as faculty in American colleges and universities. Many of the concerns and interests expressed in the minutes of the board of directors and in the organization’s publications regarding the academic profession are consistent with the broader issues found in the development of American higher education. Artists and art historians who taught at colleges and universities shared many concerns with their colleagues in other academic fields, though to some extent they also had the task of arguing for the appropriateness of the inclusion of the visual arts in the general education curriculum, at a time when a classical education included Greek but not art. CAA’s publications discussed the value of the study of art for students in colleges and universities, and the variety of careers to which such study could lead.1 The selection of young scholars for positions in museums, as well as on faculties , particularly in private colleges, depended primarily on the strong mentoring relationships between students and their (usually male) professors.2 Beginning in the 1920s, articles on career development began to appear in the organization’s publications, discussing qualifications required for college and university teachers and the three main areas of museum work—administrative, curatorial, and educational—in addition to desired qualities in art critics and cataloguers of private and public art collections. Concern for standardization of art education suggests that the association might become a “clearing house” for this purpose, and a Committee on Research Work and Graduate Teaching was created in 1918 to address the matter.3 The earliest published advertisement for a job was featured in Parnassus in 1929: a Midwestern museum was seeking a “young man with personality and knowledge of the history of art.” Replies were to be sent to the education secretary at CAA.4 Other association records indicate the creation of a part-time position within the association’s staff for support work regarding placement.5 But it was in 1940 that there was the first mention of a placement bureau, and early in 1941 an ad appeared in Parnassus describing the “enthusiastic response” to the recent announcement, while at the same time the United States Civil Service Commission listed positions for “general art work” in both “defense and non-defense government agencies.”6 Placement bureau services were newly described as a “privilege” of membership, and association records and publications detailed an ongoing interest and concern in the combined issues of the development, and, to some extent, control of the field and Mentoring the Profession ∏ 131 its career opportunities, and the increasingly larger, more complex, and important placement bureau.7 (Though while interest in the placement bureau was increasing , the number of participants during the decade of the 1940s was modest by any measure.) One of the most important moments in American higher education in the twentieth century was the authorization...