STAGNATION IN THE POGG

The Student Council has written a damning criticism of what the Harvard Fine Arts department gives its undergraduates. It has damned it for over-emphasis on detail and chronology, for its failure to treat the Fine Arts as one of the humanities, and above all for its utter lack of an integrated educational policy. Daring for the first time to criticize a department, the Council has fulfilled its highest function of canalizing student opinion and supporting it with careful research. And it has asked for the reinstatement of Robin Feild.

Feild's dismissal symbolizes the stagnation of a once progressive arm of the University. From the outset student opinion has been nearly unanimous in his support. Eighty per cent of the undergraduate concentrators in Fine Arts petitioned the Administration to reinstate him. But not a word of explanation, let alone any hint that the request might be granted, has been heard in the Fogg Museum or University Hall. Probably this plea too, will fall on deaf ears.

Feild has stood for stimulating, thought-provoking teaching, and for a unified policy in a department that is groping in the past. But while the department has stood still, the world has moved forward to new techniques, new forms, new social forces. The recent establishment of a fellowship for the study of modern art is a hollow mockery when the one man that can save the department from its past must leave.

But if Feild must go, the Fogg will stay though condemned by its students. Despite its brilliant exterior, it is a rotting hulk aimlessly floating on a sea of meaningless and unrelated detail. The study of fine arts has become largely a matter of identifying pictures. This is fine for embryo museum experts. But when it comes to aiding undergraduates to relate fine arts to the life and thought of an epoch, particularly the epoch we are living in, the department is inadequate, barren, and moribund.