NYU’s Clive Davis Institute Chair on 20 Years of Growth: ‘How We Get There Today Will Not Be How We Get There Tomorrow’

Clive Davis was feeling proud.

In early April, the chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment addressed a gathering of more than 500 members of the New York University community and music industry who had gathered in Brooklyn to celebrate the 20th anniversary of NYU’s Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music, the school that the legendary music executive had endowed.

“It’s really incredible to see how far the program has come and how successful the students have been,” Davis told the crowd in a video message (noting he had a schedule conflict with a friend’s wedding). “There are students winning Grammy Awards in major categories, actually dominating the Billboard charts and occupying major positions at record labels, agencies and management companies.

“It’s great to see how my original concept for a new and original music program has become such a successful reality,” Davis added.

“What is my fond hope for the future? I hope students continue to find success and really emerge as the leaders in the 21st-century music business.”

As if to highlight Davis’ assertion, earlier that same day in April, one of the most successful alums of the school, Maggie Rogers, announced her first arena tour, in support of her album Don’t Forget Me, which peaked at No. 6 on Billboard’s Americana/Folk Albums chart.

Among those gathered for this celebration of the institute, which is part of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, were Allyson Green, dean of the Tisch School, who said: “For the past 20 years, the Clive Davis Institute has fostered some of the industry’s most exciting new musical artists and creative business minds. Our outstanding faculty, leaders and staff cultivate an exciting learning environment that allows for both the freedom to experiment and the tools to navigate the competitive music world.”

Successful alumni have included not only Rogers (whose career was memorably jump-started by a viral video of Pharrell Williams’ awestruck reaction to her recording of “Alaska” during an institute master class in 2016), but also Grammy-nominated producer Dan Knobler; Noah Yoo and Sedona Schat, aka Elektra Records act Cafuné; production duo Take a Daytrip’s Denzel Baptiste and David Biral, who earned album and record of the year Grammy nods for their work on Lil Nas X’s album Montero and single “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” respectively; singer-songwriter Nija Charles, who shared the album of the year nomination for her contributions to Beyoncé’s Renaissance; and Grammy-winning producer Andrew Watt.

The institute accommodates about 250 students who work toward a bachelor of fine arts in recorded music. Its Brooklyn campus, which the program moved into in 2020, offers a seamless flow of spaces designed to inspire creativity and collaboration. Facilities include Oscilloscope Laboratories, the Beastie Boys’ studio formerly located in Manhattan that member Adam Yauch’s widow, Dechen Wangdu, gifted to the school.

The school also hosts its share of guest speakers and performers — Davis, Williams, Alicia Keys, Benny Blanco, Chris Blackwell, Jay-Z, Mark Ronson, Paul Simon, Rihanna and Stevie Wonder among them.

Nick Sansano, chair of the Clive Davis Institute, recently sat down with Billboard to describe the school’s program, which, like the music industry itself, is constantly evolving and rooted in a bit of rebellion.

How involved is Clive Davis in the institute?

What he did was lay out the design and the idea of this holistic curriculum where someone would not just learn about an instrument or be a studio rat or only study music business or legal affairs. His idea was to take everything out of their silos so you have this program that is about music, about music production, about music business — but really what it’s about is leadership, entrepreneurship, thinking holistically, about the future of the industry.

I don’t think he imagined how successful the whole thing would be and how much he would get out of it. He definitely feels that authentic pride, and once in a while he’ll even call with ideas out of the blue. He’s so checked in, and that has been a game-changer for us.

How has the curriculum expanded over two decades?

We’ve always had this ethos around here to push change through and ask questions later, because it could take forever to change curriculum at a university and by the time you do it, you need to go to the next one. It was hard to navigate in the beginning. But the university understood ultimately that we needed to move at our own pace. And we proved ourselves competent. The more we handled our own affairs, the more room they gave us.

The curriculum is always changing as new topics come up and others become irrelevant. New this fall are Reggaetón Revolution, the history of reggaetón, and Creating a Narrative in Audio, a podcasting class from the editorial and journalistic side.

We’re now at a point where we’re very realistic, very pragmatic about what we teach. We have to go beyond the topic at hand and look at it on a really macro level. In the beginning we were trying to set modalities in stone, but we emphasize objectives now more so than specific methodologies because how we get there today will not be how we get there tomorrow.

Much of that evolution, I imagine, is driven by your faculty.

We have a very experienced full-time faculty — a lot of us have been here since the beginning or first few years — and a lot of adjuncts, who will come and go based on what we need. When we do a hip-hop course on the Art of the MC, we have Black Thought from The Roots come in. If we have a Lou Reed class, we go to a biographer. [Author-critic] Will Hermes has taught a number of classes for us. We’re always looking at “What are we offering? Where are the holes and who are the experts in the field or on that very specific topic?”

It’s also a great way to find full-time faculty. When people realize the vibe of the place and sincerity of it… Good people are incredibly difficult to find, and we’ll do whatever we can to keep them here.

Isn’t that how you became part of the institute?

I’m a music producer, mixer and engineer, and I came in the first year to give a talk about my work with Public Enemy, Sonic Youth and other New York-centric artists. It was a wonderful experience. The students were asking really thought-provoking questions and getting emotional about it. I said to [the institute], “I’ve never taught before, but if you want to take a chance…” The whole thing was a big experiment. I wasn’t the only experimental hire.

How engaged is your alumni network?

One of my priorities was to change the relationship with the alums, and we’ve made a really conscious effort to reach out. I want alumni to feel as if they never left. When we have an event, when we have guest appearances, we invite all the alums — and the reaction to that has been incredibly positive. We now have 20 years of alums. We have people who have some real influence, and our students definitely benefit from that.

What has been the biggest benefit of moving the program to Brooklyn?

Space, and having all our spaces consolidated. When we were in Washington Square and our Mercer Street location [in Manhattan], we had classes all over the city because we kept running out of space. It was all decentralized. And not only was it expensive, but our students were running all over the place.

Our goal was to centralize everything. We have rehearsal spaces, we have edit suites, we have studios, we have piano practice rooms, we have musicianship labs. We have The Garage, a 100-­capacity venue, on the first floor, and we have access to a 200-seat auditorium. We are very self-sufficient at this point, and we designed the space the way we wanted to design it. We began five years before moving in. We saw potential and convinced the university to allow us to hire our own acoustic designers and studio builders.

We had a very specific vision. We want you to walk in and feel as though you are part of a professional environment, and that should dictate what you say, how you act and so on. A place you are proud of. The university loves it. We are the showcase; everyone comes here.

Still, a lot of learning also takes place outside this building. What’s the experiential component like?

We require a minimum of two internship credits, but most students are doing way more than that. It runs the gamut from the obvious major labels to some recording studios to smaller publishing companies. We have someone working full time on establishing and looking after these relationships.

We did a partnership with Atlantic this past year, and part of it was — along with some songwriting camps and some A&R sessions and field trips to their offices — a certain amount of priority internship opportunities for our students. We are trying to solidify more of those executive internship programs.

We prefer when a student comes with an idea and then we vet it. We don’t immediately say no to anyone. And we closely monitor [internships]. There are [labor] laws and there are NYU-mandated requirements, and you could run afoul of both. It doesn’t happen very often, but that doesn’t mean we don’t watch.

The institute’s offerings don’t come cheaply. The NYU website says the university’s general cost of attendance — tuition, food and housing — for the 2024-25 academic year is $87,488. How do you justify that cost and ensure a diverse student body?

We don’t just give people the sticker price and then that’s it. The university works with them, Tisch works with them, and then we as a department work with them on a very personal level. Most of our students who apply for financial aid do get substantial aid. And something new that’s just kicking in this fall is an NYU-wide policy that covers full tuition for students whose families make under $100,000 a year, which is a huge help.

Being so aware of the sacrifice many families make to get their kids here — it affects the overall tone of the institute because we realize that’s how much we need to give back. But we also have to deal with student issues we wish we didn’t, like students who can’t sustain. There are a lot of factors that go into it, including just living in New York, and we get involved with things like housing and food. We have supporters and financial donors that help us with professional development. We are able to do showcases; students are able to travel, to get concert tickets, to go to an exhibit. We just took eight students to Milan for a week. The year before, we took them to Norway. In January, we’ll take them to France. We’ll go that extra mile and subsidize.

Ultimately the goal of the department is to be free, through a large endowment, which we know is possible because we’re seeing it happen. We saw it at NYU Medical School, and we’re seeing it at other universities. [NYU Medical School became tuition-free in 2018 after raising the majority of the endowment needed to sustain the program.]

How else does the institute use financial support to bolster the program?

A priority here is equity having to do with women and music. We’re working with the history that, for so long, women were excluded from production and some other business areas. It’s important to rebuild a certain amount of trust that has eroded over the years.

Our classes now are usually more than 50% women. We have a student-run organization called PAM, which stands for Producers Against Misogyny, and our Audio Engineering Society student chapter is run by women. We support these student groups and their events.

We also host a Future Music Moguls program, which is fully funded for high school students. It’s a whole-day affair on a Saturday during the spring semester where we give a mini version of our curriculum. Engaging with high school students is important to us — and a great way to recognize future talent.

How do you view the overall role of the institute in the music business?

Our ultimate goal is, we would like the music industry to change for the better, but we are not going to do that by banging on the walls and asking to get in. We’re going to do that by busting it out from the inside. Meaning, our students will infiltrate the industry — and we’re seeing that change now.

This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.