However, skepticism of public arts funding and higher education has forced cutbacks in many public institutions, including land grant universities. This makes it difficult for less pragmatic, and subsequently less advantaged programs, like art departments, to meet rising class sizes and software costs. Survival will likely hinge on forging internal and external collaborations. Some departments are taking measures to ease the economic strain by forming technology partnerships to maximize increasingly scarce delivery dollars. This provides one answer to the catch phrase of the '90s-do more with less.
People learn in different ways, and some information is conveyed best in specific ways.
We are helping students to prepare themselves for their future, not our past. The University of Idaho, where I teach, has taken a progressive stance toward computer technologies by making them accessible to all faculty, staff, and students. Thankfully, colleagues in the art department and at UI Educational Technologies Services have enthusiastically supported an electronically enhanced sculpture curriculum. To date, UI has a fully integrated Web site and is in the process of easing layout and 3-D modeling programs into delivery. This better equips them for the profession and alleviates capitol outlay for expensive equipment that some departments, like UI's, may be unable to furnish or replace in the future.