and small arts organizations throughout all five boroughs. At the age of 40, Schmidt Campbell was sworn in as the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs October 1987 by then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch. With an annual $172 million budget, the Department provides operating and capital improvement funds to 32 major institutions—including museums, theaters, zoos, and botanical gardens—and grants program money to hundreds of neighborhood arts groups. A few weeks into her tenure, the stock market crashed, whereupon the city government made major budget cuts. The Department's budget was initially cut by $7 million, but Schmidt Campbell was able to minimize the cuts to $1 million. One of her main accomplishments was organizing and fundraising "New York and the Arts: A Cultural Affair," a campaign focused on promoting cultural activities throughout the city and encouraging attendance. Other accomplishments included a pilot program focused on introducing the arts to low-income youth. In 1989, she was reappointed by Mayor Koch's successor, David Dinkins. At her swearing-in ceremony in 1990, she proposed that the city's budget on drug education should be reallocated to her department for cultural and recreational programs for schoolchildren, saying that "if our children can be addicted to the power of language and the excitement of ideas, if they have the benefit of the time and attention of creative adults who have only the highest expectation of them, if excellence and discipline are the standards set for them, they will rise to the occasion." In May 1990, the Smithsonian Institution named Schmidt Campbell to be the chairwoman of a 22-member advisory board to study ways to exhibit the heritage of black Americans on the National Mall, which laid the groundwork for the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. NYU Tisch School of the Arts On October 1, 1991, Schmidt Campbell was named dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. During her tenure, Schmidt Campbell expanded the school's arts profile, including digital media in addition to theater, film, and television, increased the recruitment of a more diverse faculty and student body, and led an unprecedented capital campaign for the school. In 2008, Schmidt Campbell established the Tisch Talent Identification Process, a program that recruits high-performing, high-need students to the school. Tisch also founded new disciplines and departments, "including a moving image archiving and preservation program, the