Tom Eccles Quoted in the New York Times

Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard, was quoted in an article by the New York Times about how new proposed federal guidelines are threatening graduate arts programs. The planned future guidelines by the Education Department would require an earnings test that, according to the government’s calculations, would punish nearly half of all graduate programs in visual arts, music and performance based on the income of recent alumni. The Times reported that the new guidelines would apply to all university programs, and institutions whose alumni fail to meet them twice in three years could lose their ability to enroll students using federal loans, threatening their future in education. “They are taking a DOGE approach to education,” Eccles told Zachary Small for the Times. “They are deciding what the metric is, as though there were an objective way to measure the value of an arts education.” 

The Center for Curatorial Studies is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies. It includes the Graduate Program for Curatorial Studies, an intensive course of study in the history of contemporary art, the institutions and practices of exhibition making, and the theory and criticism of contemporary art since the 1960s.

Post Date: 06-10-2026