In Thursday’s (7/23) Philadelphia Inquirer , Peter Dobrin reports, “Former Philadelphia Orchestra president and CEO James Undercofler has accepted a full professorship in arts administration at Drexel University, where he will also develop an institute exploring new models for cultural organizations. Undercofler, 63, will begin teaching courses in arts leadership, development, organizational structure, and arts education in September at Drexel’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. The move represents a full-time return to academia for Undercofler. Before serving as president of the orchestra from August 2006 through January 2009, he was dean of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. This last academic year, he taught Leadership Issues in the Performing and Visual Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. … Undercofler’s work at Drexel is part of a larger movement in arts administration to investigate how strategies in other sectors might be grafted onto cultural organizations. … ‘Students graduating MIT have any number of investors ready to invest in their ideas, but graduates in the arts don’t. We think that there are new models,’ Undercofler said recently.”
Posted July 23, 2009
