Coming Full Circle
Ahead of the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music’s opening next month, Executive Director Bob Santelli ’73, ’14HN reflects on bringing the project to life—and what he hopes visitors will take away.
Bob Santelli ’73, ’14HN has spent decades helping shape institutions that take music seriously, from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to the GRAMMY Museum to the Experience Music Project in Seattle. By his count, the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, which will open at Monmouth in June, is the 10th museum or cultural institution he has been part of. It’s also the first time he has guided a project from idea to opening.
He’s clear about what the new facility will and won’t be.
“We’re not a museum,” says Santelli. “We throw that term around internally because it’s easier to say, but we’re an archives with exhibition space and a public program theater.”
The work won’t stop at the building. Exhibits, public programs, and collaborations with other institutions are designed to extend the Center’s reach well beyond campus.
A GRAMMY Award winner, Santelli has worked as a music historian, curator, and journalist. But he tends to describe himself more simply: a teacher. He taught at both the middle school and university levels, and that perspective still shapes how he thinks about institutions like this one.
He sees the Center as a place where people can learn in different ways, whether they are students, scholars, or music fans. It reflects his long-held belief that American music deserves to be studied and understood with the same depth as any other art form. In that sense, the Center is designed to be not just a destination, but also a hub for research, dialogue, and public programming around American music.
For Santelli, the project is also personal. As a student at Monmouth, he was part of Springsteen’s earliest audiences and has watched the musician’s connection to the area endure for decades. Helping bring the Center to campus, he says, is both a professional milestone and a way to give something back to the University, his home state, and the artist who has entrusted him with his legacy.
When the Center opens its doors next month, Santelli says, “I want people to walk out with more information and more inspiration than what they came with.”