Educators educate. That’s their passion. It doesn’t matter much whether it’s coaching or master classes or regular faculty work. They also, like every other person who needs food and shelter, need to maximize their income within the limits of what’s appropriate and what their primary employers allow.
Let me use an example of how some employers see similar quandaries that arise in another altruistic profession.
Academic physicians are constrained by their hospital/medical school employers from interacting with drug company reps in particular ways. Solid research evidence shows that the most self-aware physician, one who is quite attuned to ethical problems (never eats a drug company sponsored lunch, sits on no boards, does not accept free travel to luxury locations in order to be ‘trained’) even that physician is more likely to prescribe a drug if its name is on any pens, post-it notes, mugs, or tote bags in her environment, whether or not that swag belongs to her. Since what we want is for patients to get the best care they can from their doctors (and students to get the best training they can from professors and attendings) with no bias toward one treatment over another, we cannot pretend that familiarity in and of itself does not have a subconscious influence over judgement. As a result, many hospitals (particularly children’s hospitals) do not allow drug company representatives into their buildings at all.
I doubt anyone will argue with the statement that student who has been coached by a particular professor will have a very different experience auditioning for that professor than a student who is unfamiliar. The professor will, in turn, have a different perception of that student. The exact financial transaction and its size are not what’s relevant. It’s the familiarity that seeps into the audition room. It’s the affinity that knocks the playing field off its axis.
However, it is up to academic institutions to set limits for their employees. If a conservatory wished, it could disallow outside teaching, or one-on-one coaching of future applicants. The school could require that any professor who has coached a particular applicant recuse himself from adjudication of that student’s audition. The schools can address what is, at least to some, an appearance of impropriety in this area by establishing ethical guidelines for faculty behavior. Just as easily, a school can clarify for all that these extra-curricular transactions are permissible and that any influence they have over admissions is deemed negligible and irrelevant. For all we know, those discussions may have been had many times over at these schools and the lines are already drawn where the schools want them.
The reason this is such a thorny topic for fine arts programs is that these professors are involved in admissions decisions in a way that doesn’t correlate to other majors. The psych professors are not weighing in much less making final decisions on potential admits, nor are the historians or the literary lions, as far as I am aware. Artistic judgements are completely subjective and there is no way to examine how the knowing and being known influences the student’s performance and the professors’ perception of it. In the absence of objective measures (standardized Shakespeare testing, anyone?) there will never be a clearcut methodology for determining how classes and coaching impact outcomes. But the familiarity they foster will certainly change the temperature in an audition room.
