At a headliner luncheon today, Max Borders argued that the UNC School of the Arts should be privatized because it fails to provide a public good (even using a generous definition of the term.)
I agree. The UNCSA confers benefits almost exclusively to the few students who attend.
At the luncheon, J. Peder Zane argued that since increased consumption/production of art (which transcends barriers and flows throughout the community) is a worthy goal, the state should continue to fund the UNCSA.
But even if we work from Zane’s premise, the UNCSA should still be privatized; subsidizing art directly would be a much more efficient way to increase availability of the fine arts while also ensuring that most of the benefit stays in North Carolina. I’m sure the NC Symphony, Carolina Ballet, The Opera Company of North Carolina, the Contemporary Art Museum, and the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival (just to name a few) would be able to create a lot more art with $30M than the UNCSA does–$30M will pay a lot of dancers and buy a lot of artwork.
