Paul
Cox

When I began working at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the mid-1990s, I inherited a concert hall in need of major renovation and a modest programming budget — but also something far more consequential: the trust of a community. My boss, the Czech organist and curator Karel Paukert, understood this instinctively. Beloved by colleagues and audiences alike, he had spent decades building Gartner Auditorium into a place of genuine pilgrimage. Every January, he performed Olivier Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur on the hall's 4,000-pipe McMyler Memorial organ, and audiences returned year after year for the experience — particularly the final movement, "Dieu parmi nous" ("God among us"), in which the instrument filled the room with sublime sound, something that felt to many listeners genuinely close to what that title promised. People left changed in ways they had not anticipated when they walked in. Watching that happen, season after season, shaped everything I have done since, and it forms the foundation of what I believe arts organizations owe the people they serve.

The question of obligation is not abstract. It arises the moment an organization solicits a donation, applies for a grant, or simply opens its doors and asks a community to trust it with its time and attention. In each of these transactions, a social contract is formed. To neglect it is not merely an oversight — it is a betrayal.

Access as a Non-Negotiable

The first obligation is access. An arts organization that serves only those who can afford premium tickets, who live in the right zip codes, or who already possess the cultural vocabulary to feel welcome has not fulfilled its civic purpose — it has merely reproduced privilege. I spent a decade as Dean of Creative Arts at Cuyahoga Community College, where our students came from every neighborhood in Greater Cleveland. Many were the first in their families to study music, graphic design, or theater. Many were managing jobs and childcare alongside their coursework. The fact that they could study at all depended on institutional choices: affordable tuition, programs designed around real schedules, faculty who understood that artistic excellence and open doors are not in tension but are, in fact, the same thing.

The Creative Arts Academy, which grew in part through support from the Cleveland Foundation, extended this logic to students who had not yet reached college age. More than eighteen hundred young people moved through its jazz, dance, and vocal programs each year — some on campus, others through outreach into Cleveland neighborhoods where rigorous arts instruction was otherwise scarce. Their participation was often physically and intellectually demanding. Arts organizations owe their communities this: the removal, wherever possible, of the barriers — financial, geographic, social — that keep people from the hard work of making art.

Genuine Representation, Not Tokenism

Access, however, is not the same as representation. A community's stories, histories, and aesthetic traditions must not merely appear in an organization's programs as seasonal additions or diversity initiatives — they must animate its identity. When Karel Paukert and I built the Aki Festival of New Music at the Cleveland Museum of Art, we were working within a long institutional tradition: the Museum had been presenting contemporary music since the 1920s, when composer and curator Douglas Moore first established that commitment, and visiting artists over the following decades — Bartók, Ravel, Messiaen, Boulanger, and even Elliott Carter and John Cage — had deepened it. That history gave us both permission and responsibility. New work, we believed, grows from specific places and specific people, and so we programmed the music of distinguished regional composers: Randolph Coleman at Oberlin, Donald Erb and Margaret Brouwer at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Greg D'Alessio and Andy Rindfleisch at Cleveland State University and Sebastian Birth at Kent State.

Years later, working to launch Sitka Fest in Alaska under an NEA "Our Town" grant, I watched something similar unfold at a different scale. The festival gathered the Sitka Summer Music Festival, the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, a Tlingit-influenced Native Jazz Quartet led by Ed Littlefield, and more than twenty community partners. It was not a curated showcase of local color. It was a festival shaped by the rhythms of the place itself — timed to the brief Alaskan summer, when the weather finally allowed people to venture out to a concert or a spruce-root basket-weaving demonstration. Cultural life was treated as essential to the season, not as an amenity. That is what genuine representation requires: not the invitation of community members into a pre-formed institution, but the redesign of the institution around the community's own life.

Education as a Core Function, Not a Side Project

Arts organizations are, at their best, institutions of learning. This is something they sometimes get lost behind the language of entertainment or prestige, but the educational function is not optional — it is written into the legal code of nonprofit status and, more importantly, into the implicit promise every arts institution makes to its public. A concert is incomplete if the audience leaves without some new understanding of what they experienced — of its history, its context, the choices that produced it. A gallery is impoverished if visitors pass through without being invited to look more slowly, to ask questions, to disagree, to pause and think.

For much of my career I have worked at the intersection of arts presentation and arts education: writing program notes and museum publications, giving pre-concert lectures for the Cleveland Orchestra, teaching music history at Oberlin, Case Western, and the Cleveland Institute of Music. I do not think of these as supplements to the "real" work of programming. They are the real work — the work of building an audience that is not passive but ready to learn. An arts organization that neglects education is, over time, consuming its audience without replenishing it.

The Obligation to Take Risks

Communities also need arts organizations to take risks on their behalf. This means programming work that challenges, unsettles, and occasionally fails. It means commissioning new compositions when a revival of established repertoire would be safer and less expensive. It means committing early to artists whose visions have not yet been ratified by critics or markets — as Aki did with eighth blackbird and the Pacifica Quartet before those names carried the weight they do now, and figures like John Luther Adams whose work remained too adventurous for most American concert halls. And it means, sometimes, making programming decisions that the board does not immediately understand.

The ASCAP/Chamber Music America awards for adventurous programming that Aki received in 1997 and 1999 were gratifying, but the more important measure was always the audience in the room: people who had not known they wanted to hear a particular kind of music until they heard it. That is what arts organizations owe their communities in the domain of risk — the willingness to introduce audiences to their own latent desires, to say, in effect: we believe you are capable of more than you have been offered.

Accountability and Transparency

None of the above obligations can be met without accountability. Arts organizations are entrusted with public money — through government grants, tax exemptions, and philanthropic dollars that might otherwise have gone elsewhere. They owe their communities honest stewardship of those resources, transparent governance, and a willingness to measure their own impact against their stated goals.

In practice, this means more than filing clean 990s. It means genuine community engagement in institutional planning — not the pro forma public comment period, but the kind of sustained listening that can actually change what an organization does. It means disaggregating attendance data and asking hard questions about who is not in the room. And it means, when institutions fall short — as they always do — acknowledging the failure honestly and changing course.

The Social Contract

I have spent thirty years in and around arts organizations of different sizes, missions, and constituencies — an internationally respected museum, a community college, a small festival in a rainforest town in Alaska. What unites these experiences is the recurring discovery that the most vital institutions are the ones that understand themselves as genuinely responsible to the communities they serve. Not merely responsive — which implies only reaction — but responsible: bound by an obligation that precedes any season, any grant cycle, any strategic plan.

The arts do not exist to redeem their communities. That impulse — patronizing in its assumptions, exhausting in its demands — has done considerable damage to institutions that might otherwise have done good. What the arts actually offer is at once more modest and stranger: they make visible what a community already contains but has not yet found words for. The complexity, the grief, the arguments a neighborhood has with itself, the beauty it keeps walking past. Karel Paukert knew this. He did not play Messiaen in January because he thought Cleveland needed saving. He played it because he believed that people sitting together in the dark, inside sound that large, would recognize something in themselves they could not have named before they walked in. He was right, year after year. They always did.

That is the promise — not transformation imposed from above, but recognition rising from within. The organizations charged with keeping it owe their neighbors access, representation, education, risk, and accountability. What they receive in return cannot be manufactured and cannot be replaced: the trust of people who have learned, from experience, that something profound will happen here.

Early in graduate school at Case Western Reserve University, I encountered a particular kind of discomfort that humanities training never lets you escape: the discomfort of the unresolved. I learned that the most important questions — about meaning, identity, power, and purpose — resist clean answers. But part of me wanted pat, provable answers. Whenever I offered a tidy answer to any idea in a graduate seminar, there were five classmates ready to school me on the perils of "presentism," applying a modern moral framework to the past. I was eventually trained by my wonderful dissertation advisor not to flee that discomfort but to sit with it, examine it, and move toward a sensible reply that demonstrated I was open to learning. It turns out this is also, at its core, what good strategic thinking requires.

When I approach organizational strategy, I am reminded of my own habits formed long before I knew what a strategy deck was. The close reading of texts taught me to treat any document — a mission statement, a personal letter, a reorg announcement, an all-hands transcript — as a layered artifact, not a transparent window. What is being said here? What is not being said? Whose voice carries authority and whose is translated, summarized, or silenced? Humanistic training makes one a critical reader and a permanently suspicious interpreter of organizational language.

Ambiguity, which so many organizational frameworks treat as a problem to be eliminated, is something humanities scholars are taught to treat as information. A poem that resists a single interpretation is not a failed poem. A historical event that cannot be reduced to a single cause is not an unsolved mystery — it is an invitation to think more carefully about contingency, agency, and context. I carry this mindset into strategy work. When an organization cannot agree on its priorities, or when a change initiative produces unexpected resistance, I am not inclined to rush toward a tidy resolution. The ambiguity is telling me something. It usually points toward a deeper tension between mission and values or an unacknowledged historical wound, or a gap between the organization's espoused identity and its lived one.

This is where organizational culture becomes legible. Culture is, in the most literal sense, a humanistic subject. It is composed of stories, rituals, symbols, and inherited interpretations — the same materials that literary critics, therapists, anthropologists, and historians spend careers learning to unpack. When I enter an organization, I am listening for its narrative structure: What counts as a founding myth? Who are the heroes, and what did they sacrifice? What failures are spoken of freely, and which ones have gone underground? These are not soft questions. They are the load-bearing structures beneath every strategy, every values initiative, and every attempted transformation.

The humanities also instill a healthy suspicion of the universal. Every framework that claims to be generalizable; every management theory presents itself as the discovery of a timeless principle. But historical and literary training teaches you that context is not a footnote — it is the argument. A strategy that worked brilliantly in one cultural moment, one industry ecology, one organizational biography, will not automatically translate to another. This is not pessimism; it is precision. This is why I love the work of Dan Coyle. His books, like The Culture Code and Flourish, explore case studies from a myriad of disciplines: sports, military, music, film, and education. As such, it is easy to find themes that directly relate to the organization at hand. Nevertheless, the same interrogation is essential: Is it the right fit for this case?

Finally, there is the matter of consequence — of taking seriously that organizations are made of people whose interior lives, moral commitments, and need for meaning are not incidental to the work. The humanities are fundamentally concerned with what it is like to be human in a particular situation, under site-specific pressures, with high-value stakes. That concern does not disappear when you walk into a conference room. If anything, it becomes more urgent. Strategy executed without that awareness tends to produce technically correct plans that die after the first annual review.

Deep disciplinary training in the humanities does not make you a softer strategist. It makes you a more exacting one — harder to satisfy with surface explanations, more alert to the stories an organization tells itself, and more committed to the difficult, necessary work of listening and understanding before advising.