Culture Change Agenda Is Not New for a2ru
Apr 14, 2026
a2ru’s Executive Director Maryrose Flanigan on advancing a2ru’s mission amidst uncertainty
It is a strange time to be in the arts, especially in the arts in higher education. Except that I don’t think of a2ru’s place as being confined either to higher education or the arts. The “arts”(1) are everywhere, for everyone, which happens to be a recurring theme of many arts initiatives in town, city, and university contexts. But we are all beholden to how things are structured and funded. a2ru’s mission of attending to arts integration makes our work uniquely challenging to fund, so we rely on a band of arts deans, interdisciplinary center directors, and the occasional vice president of research or provost to pay the dues that sustain this work. It is challenging to fund because arts integration, and the interdisciplinarity it requires, crosses boundaries, but that challenge is anything but new.
We all recognize the emerging narrative—the fallout from 2025’s twisting dread of cut budgets, denied student visas, and grant terminations—as an opportunity for systemic change. But culture change was always on the agenda for our members. A primary question that led to the founding of our organization in 2012 was “What is the role of art-making and the arts in the research university?” That question has generated a chorus of game-changing replies, research, and clarity around issues like how we collaborate with other knowledges, convergent research, and how we do research as artists. Even more, those in our network surface how public scholars agitated to compensate community collaborators, revisiting what “counts” as research, and puzzling through exactly how students can work effectively in multi-disciplinary teams to get to a transformative transdisciplinary space.
Amid this extraordinary year, there have been many weeks when I found myself trying to see if our members could continue to pay dues. I’ve been in this situation before relatively recently, trying to collect dues during the pandemic’s uncertainty and budget freezes. We fell into deficit then. We worked hard to rebound by diversifying our revenue streams, streamlining, salary cuts—all that—just in time for this rumbling not-so-distant thunder as our members turned in 5 and 10 percent budget scenarios for FY 26. But this time, fortunately, our members continue to invest at the highest levels they can afford—along with increasing individual members—because now it’s evident that our unique mission devoted to arts-integrated spaces is going to pay off big.
We see the payoff, for example, in how many a2ru students have experienced a transformative, transdisciplinary breakthrough in our Emerging Creatives program, established in 2014. They are the future. An account from one of the alumni encapsulates how we can all best all serve the mission of arts integration in support of our desired future:
“It was inspiring to be around so many creative, talented, and hard-working people. … I loved getting to hear everybody’s ideas and all the cool things that they are doing. Trying to realize a project in such a short amount of time, with people from different disciplines …was an exciting challenge and was incredibly rewarding. I learned a lot about myself and about the process of collaborating. It was an exhausting, whirlwind of an event that I left feeling encouraged and fulfilled. I now want to seek out more people that I don’t know from other disciplines and see what conversations and, potentially, what exciting new work might come of it”
We just finished another summit in March (with similar reflections). These students witness and voice the outcome of serving our mission to holistically connect those across disciplines toward complex, societal problems. We have been paying into the promise of these methodologies: that new complex and flexible structures can be applied in the higher education sector and beyond. Preparing for jobs that don’t yet exist amidst disruption to the workforce by AI adoption, for example, takes creativity and all the novel thinking, comfort in ambiguity, ability to work across difference, and self-efficacy we can muster. But fostering these skills is not a pivot for those who value arts integration and working across disciplines. It is not at all new. It is what we do as evidenced by our Emerging Creatives and their commitment to finding and cultivating interdisciplinary habits.
Our organization aggregates those who send these students to Emerging Creatives: experts, experimenters, and activists in our network who were already doing our mission work splendidly. We just needed to connect them to one another and weave a coherent enough narrative, so they’d continue to come and find one another. We join the elements that are necessary to fuel innovation to better meet societal needs: for convergent research; to productively address the reality of artificial intelligence; or to foster social cohesion, among others. Our working groups and committees are teed up with researchers and educators who were attracted to a2ru’s mission in the first place because they have holistic perspectives and deep research credentials that can meet any of these emerging, cross-disciplinary societal questions. The network is self-funded and self-sustaining for the most part because its mission is so valued and deeply understood by those we serve. 3
The promise of our collaborative network activities is reflected in its working group topics. For example, a2ru itself is like the Interdisciplinary Centers and Institutes working group—not only in our undefined position as far as funding goes—but that the work they do is parallel to a2ru’s because it connects across boundaries and it sees the arts as a vital player. The questions they ask cannot adequately be answered without reaching beyond the offices, studios, and labs of any single school or college. Our ID working group exemplifies passion and activism because their work by nature is not insular and self-focused. They exist as long as they are innovating and connecting ideas and people—meeting the moment—and they are the model for the future in the arts and higher education.
If we are no longer marching to the drum of federal funding guidelines, where are we going? For us, it’s continuing along the same path. Our work has never had a clear funding stream because what we do defies categorical borders. a2ru was not established as an answer to any set of guidelines but rather from an original research question to better define the arts in the research university and intentionally connect the arts to other disciplines. The founders knew that the full potential of the arts was unleveraged in higher education. a2ru sometimes creatively funds itself through occasional grants and consulting services. But for us at our national scale, a2ru mostly relies on an infrastructure of people who understand the mission and continue paying in, adding their bit to a larger whole.
Those that engage in the arts are processing the present in real time while designing and imagining the future. And in this long, challenging moment we need to be doing that, shedding static identities and getting to the dynamic, real work of connecting, collaborating, and building. The integration of the disciplines—especially the unique catalytic power of the arts—are needed to secure our future. People in our network are doing more than talking about the concept of arts integration. They are doing the difficult work of how it can and does happen now. This is our moment to do what we do best.
1 Inclusive of arts and design, architecture but also all those disciplines that engage in artistic methodologies and perspectives in practice, research, teaching and being human.
2 The Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) advances arts- and design-integrative research, curricula, programs, and creative practice to acknowledge, articulate, and expand the vital role of higher education in our global society. a2ru’s work, in partnership with an international network of leading higher education institutions, allies, and partners, envisions a world in which universities—students, faculty, and leaders—explore, embed, and integrate the arts in everyday practice and research.
3 Although most of our budget is from dues and conference registrations, we are grateful for support from several funders along the way (ACLS, Mellon, ArtPlace America, NEH, NEA, and individual gifts as was as some general funds and generous in-kind from the University of Michigan).
Image above: Students engage in one of the final installation projects at this year’s Emerging Creatives Student Summit at the MSU Museum. Photo Credit: Molly Taylor, Arts MSU).