NEA Calls UCI Study Inaccurate : Endowment: A professor’s critique of grants to minorities fails to show progress and contains a figure that’s ‘just plain wrong,’ a spokeswoman says.

A National Endowment for the Arts official said Tuesday that a UC Irvine professor’s study criticizing NEA grants to minorities contains inaccuracies and fails to reflect “real progress” made by the endowment in the past five years.

UCI sociology professor Samuel Gilmore reported last week that minorities aren’t getting their fair share of federal arts dollars. According to Gilmore, NEA grant funding to minorities was proportional to or greater than the percentage of minority population in only six of the 50 states. Nationally, he found that while minorities represented 28.7% of the population during the years he studied, only 22% of NEA funds went to minorities.

Called for comment, the NEA issued no reaction to Gilmore’s study last week. But Tuesday, Eva Jacob, an NEA policy and planning officer who provided Gilmore with some data (and who was on vacation last week), said his figure of 28.7% minority population is “just plain wrong.”

Jacob, who said she hadn’t seen Gilmore’s report but was responding to published accounts of it, said that in examining U.S. Census Bureau figures, Gilmore evidently came up with an inflated number of Hispanics. She surmised that he had counted those who identified themselves as Hispanics, and then erroneously boosted the total by also including as Hispanics those who had checked off “other.”

She added that she is “concerned” about the quality of research that apparently “passes muster” at UCI.

The accurate percentage of minority population, she said, is closer to 25. She said she does not think the difference between 25% population and 22% funding is significant.

Gilmore said he had no immediate reaction to Jacob’s assertion.

Further, Jacob acknowledged the NEA’s mandate of fostering cultural diversity but added that the endowment does not and should not determine grants by ethnic population or “give out grants by quotas or by state.

“We are not an entitlement program,” she said. “Our job is to encourage, through national competition, the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in the United States.”

She also said Gilmore’s report failed to note that the NEA’s overall funding to minorities rose by $7.6 million from 1986 to 1990, the years covered in his study, even though the endowment’s grants budget did not increase.

Similarly, she objected that the study fails to emphasize that the NEA panels of artists and administrators who made grant recommendations have become more diverse. More than 33% of all panelists were minorities in 1990, contrasted with 23% in 1986, Jacob said.

Aware that “standards of (artistic) excellence are not simple and unified” but vary widely among different cultures, the NEA is working to further increase its panels’ diversity and “to make sure staff and panelists fully understand the merits of each application,” she continued.

Responding to Gilmore’s assertion that the NEA should do more to get applications out to minority artists and groups, Jacob listed several ongoing and new NEA outreach activities.

She said the endowment recently commissioned a survey by NuStats, a minority-run research organization, that resulted in the addition of several minority arts groups to its application mailing lists. The NEA also will send the names to “policy-makers and funders” in various fields throughout the country as an advocacy effort, she added.

Gilmore said that such remarks “miss the point.”

He defended measuring percentages of grants against percentages of population, asserting that it “shows there’s a variation in the (correlation between) minority artists and arts organizations in different communities.”

Furthermore, increased efforts notwithstanding, “the lack of uniformity in the distribution of funds suggests that what we have here is a (lack) of outreach to artists and organizations that have not yet been given a chance to compete,” he said.

“The NEA has made some great strides in the last couple of years,” he acknowledged, “but I think there’s a lot of room to do more, especially because we’re in a political climate where there’s a danger they might do less. The NEA has to not sit back on its laurels, but pursue a really aggressive outreach effort.”

“We are friends of the issue,” Jacob said. “We know we are carrying out our mission in a changing society, and we need to do more.”