Reformulating Our Mission
Cynthia Crump Taggart
The College Music Society moves into its second 50 years with a new mission statement as its guide. In February, the CMS Board of Directors adopted the following mission statement: “The College Music Society promotes music teaching and learning, musical creativity and expression, research and dialogue, and diversity and interdisciplinary interaction. A consortium of college, conservatory, university, and independent musicians and scholars interested in all disciplines of music, the Society provides leadership and serves as an agent of change by addressing concerns facing music in higher education.” After considerable discussion, the Board added the bold portion of the statement, positioning the Society to take a more active leadership role in addressing the new and continuing challenges faced by music in higher education. CMS is poised for action as it moves into the future.
What does this mean and what form will this take? It means that vital and engaged participation from the CMS membership is more important than ever. If CMS is going to be a leader and serve as an agent of change, it needs all of its voices at the table so that the Society can articulate the concerns of the membership accurately, as well as determine the best courses of action to address those concerns. Howard T. Prince II, Director of the Center for Ethical Leadership at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, who served as consultant to the Board of Directors at its fall 2003 meeting in Miami, Florida, spoke to facilitating the process of change. He believes that central to this process is asking followers where they want to go and listening carefully to their concerns, beliefs, and value systems. Further, he noted that organizations must, “Create an attractive, even compelling vision of the future that reflects the perspective of the followers. This vision should engage the stakeholders in the central values and possibilities that define the group and its niche in society.” CMS needs to pursue every opportunity to listen to the voices of its membership so that together we can articulate a clear and meaningful agenda for our organization. This means that CMS needs to provide opportunities for this type of scholarly discourse to occur.
Conferences are excellent venues for disseminating research and for sharing time with colleagues, and CMS’s national conferences excel at offering these opportunities to its membership. Over the past several years, CMS conferences have been attracting a larger portion of the CMS membership and have been vital and compelling. Yet, because they tend to be based around a “talking heads” approach, they do not facilitate discourse particularly well. Many academic organizations are re-thinking their approaches to conferences in an attempt to facilitate dialog, and CMS has been engaged in this discussion as well. The Board and Program Committee are sensitive to the importance of providing venues for scholars to present their research. In fact, unless scholars have opportunities to present their research, many will not be able to attend the conferences. Especially in these challenging financial times, conference attendance is funded by institutions only if it is tied to research presentation at the conference. Yet, the CMS Program Committees have been struggling to find a balance between “stand and deliver” research presentations and opportunities for discussion within and across disciplines. This fall in Portland at the National Conference, there will be a plenary discussion during which the attendees will be breaking into groups over lunch to discuss strategies for helping individual music faculty members and music programs and units thrive in these challenging economic times. Can we begin to articulate the challenges that are facing music in higher education and start to develop strategies to help us address these challenges? Obviously, this discussion will only be a beginning, but listening to the discussion will help the Board of Directors move forward into policy-making discussions with the voices of the CMS membership ringing in their ears.
If CMS is going to serve as an agent of change, it needs to provide opportunities for its membership to focus intently on specific topics in depth. Only such in-depth engagement can result in shared understandings that are based upon the best scholarship on a topic and in meaningful action by individual CMS members and CMS as an organization. In light of this need, in January 2010, CMS will be holding its first CMS Summit. The topic of this Summit will be entrepreneurship and infusing entrepreneurship education into professional music training. Participants will address entrepreneurship philosophically, strategically, and operationally, and will consider models for programs and tools for implementation. The outcome of the Summit will be action agendas based upon the Summit’s discussions and deliberations. If this Summit is successful, it could be the first of many, each focused on a specific topic that has “bubbled up” from the CMS membership as one that needs to be examined critically and addressed.
CMS publications are another venue for discourse and sharing of ideas. Currently the Newsletter shares the vision of the organization with its membership through articles that have been written by leaders in CMS, whereas the Symposium is a refereed scholarly journal that includes both disciplinary and inter- or transdisciplinary scholarship. Both of these publications primarily serve as a means of dissemination rather than encouraging and supporting on-going discussion. At its meeting in the fall, the Board will be considering CMS publications and how they can best serve the membership. With the myriad of electronic possibilities available to us as an organization, should we expand or reconfigure our publications to promote more meaningful dialog within CMS? The publications and their delivery need to be reconsidered as they relate to the newly articulated mission of the society.
As the only organization that represents all music faculty members, CMS provides leadership related to music in the higher education community and beyond. This has always been the case, but the reformulation of the mission statement makes CMS’s leadership role more explicit. The new mission statement focuses on the active role that CMS as an organization must play in setting the agenda for music in higher education, but this is only possible if the CMS membership accepts its role in articulating that agenda.