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Constance Gee soon to fill multiple roles
by Elizabeth P. Latt
Gee
Last October Constance Gee attended a Vanderbilt-sponsored seminar on "Social Theory, Politics and the Arts" -- an area of study to which she has devoted much of her career. Though the program was held at a nearby hotel, she spent time walking around the Vanderbilt campus.
That was her first visit to the campus, but not her last. She came to campus that fall day as a scholar. Two weeks ago she returned both as a scholar and as the wife of Vanderbilt's Chancellor-elect.
Balancing her roles as a faculty member and wife of a university chief executive is something she has had plenty of practice doing. She was the director of arts policy and administration and an assistant professor of art education at Ohio State University when in 1994 she married Gordon Gee, the University's president who had been widowed several years earlier. She continued in those positions throughout his presidency at Ohio State, and when her husband assumed the presidency of Brown University in 1998, she was named an assistant professor of education and public policy. "It's been a real challenge," to be both a professor and a university's "First Lady," Gee said last week in a telephone interview from Providence, R.I.
"They represent two full-time jobs. It's not unusual for many professional women to have two different jobs, but the fact that they are two different jobs on campus, I guess, is a bit tricky at times. To be taken seriously as an academic and to be the wife of the president and to serve in that capacity, it is, as I said, a little tricky."
Even in the months leading up to her and her husband's move to Nashville, Gee will be balancing the demands of a scholar and the Chancellor's wife. She will be researching and writing in order to complete two publication projects, while she also will be visiting Nashville regularly to become acquainted with the community and to monitor the progress on a renovation of the Chancellor's residence. She hopes the home, located several miles west of campus in Belle Meade, will serve as a center of social and intellectual activity for the University.
As an associate professor of public policy and education in Peabody College's Department of Leadership and Organizations, she will continue her work in arts education policy, which she describes as a small, emerging field.
Whether considering arts programs at the primary and secondary level, the college level or in the community, "the questions that you ask as a policy analyst are: Who pays? Who benefits? What is the quality of arts programs? What are the consequences, intended or unintended? What sort of impact does a program have on this particular population?
"Those kinds of very traditional policy questions really haven't been explored very much with the arts community or arts education community until the last 15 years or so. It is a field I find fascinating because these are important questions for any professional field to ask."
A painter since childhood, Gee received her bachelor of fine arts with a major in painting at East Carolina University, not far from her hometown of Raleigh, N.C. She spent a summer studying sculpture at Los Angeles' Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design before entering Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she received her master's in fine arts. For a time she worked in advertising and marketing in New York City before returning to Pratt Institute as director of the Pratt National Talent Search. It was that position that led her into the field of arts education.
"I was hired to organize and develop a scholarship program there. It was a wonderful initiative and through it I met some wonderful secondary arts teachers across the country, and I started to become very interested in arts education."
Eventually she returned to school for a doctorate in arts education, which she received from Penn State University. Rather than concentrate on becoming a professor of art, Gee said she found herself "immediately drawn toward the administrative and policy end of things."
While she was pursuing her studies, a very public debate on arts policy took place. In the summer of 1989, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee unanimously approved a five-year funding ban on two art groups which funded controversial art exhibits, including the works of Robert Mapplethorpe.
"I was fascinated by the intensity of the controversy and questions that were being asked about public support of the arts -- should government support the arts? That lured me in and sort of sealed my fate."
In the intervening years, she has published and presented around the nation on the subject that has so fascinated her. She plans to do more of the same once she relocates to Nashville. And she hopes she may even have time to pick up a paintbrush again.
"I have not painted since I started writing my dissertation. It's kind of odd because I've always painted - my entire life. It's been over 10 years since I've painted, but I definitely want to begin again and hopefully that is something that I can add back into my life in the next year or so."
