Culture Activities

Universities continue to function as institutions in which the cultural heritage is preserved and transmitted to a new generation, but during this period of growth a large number of universities also took on new roles as centers in which the arts were performed, exhibited, and created. As part of their task of teaching skills as well as knowledge, universities added active writers, composers, musicians, painters, sculptors and other artists and performers to their teaching staffs. A number of universities established or expanded museum, music and theater programs as the means of training students and also of improving the cultural environments of their cities and states. Among the most notable examples of such programs was the Tyrone Guthrie Theater associated with the University of Minnesota, which became nationally known for the high quality of its stagings and performances. The new cultural activities of universities served in important ways to decentralize cultural production in the United States and make live performances of the arts available to a far wider audience.

Government support for the arts also took the form of aid and planning for new cultural centers in the nation's cities. In the course of extensive urban renewal many cities sought to concentrate or revive their cultural institutions by constructing centers for cultural activity in inner city locations. New York City established the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, with facilities for opera, theater, music, film, and other arts, and Los Angeles developed its Music Center. In 1971 the federally sponsored John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was opened, to mixed critical reception, in Washington D.C.

Both privately and publicly supported cultural institutions have become increasingly involved in the cultural and social issues of society as a whole. Although the cultural activities of universities were not directly affected by the political controversies and turmoil on many college campuses, the resulting cutbacks in state aid and private donations placed a strain on the financing of higher education that curtailed the growth or sometimes even threatened the survival of many cultural programs. Museums and cultural centers in inner cities suffered declines in attendance and revenues because the patrons became reluctant to enter high-crime areas in which these centers were located.