Eight Professors Ask Arts Groups

An eminent eight-man faculty committee has urged the appointment of a Faculty Committee on the Visual Arts to "encourage cooperation between the parts of the University which have to do with the visual arts."

The eight-man group recommended that this advisory-type visual arts group be created instead of a Division of the Visual Arts, recommended by last year's Visual Arts Committee, headed by John Nicholas Brown.

At the same time, moreover, the faculty committee, headed by Kenneth B. Murdock, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, gave its full support to the creation of a Harvard Theatre, one of the Visual Arts Committee's other major recommendations. The theatre, in fact, is one of the priority items on President Pusey's "A Program for Harvard College."

The eight-man group was set-up to consider the more than sixty recommendations made by the Visual Arts Committee, and more specifically, those recommendations that concerned educational policy.

The Visual Arts Committee, after surveying all facets of the visual arts at Harvard, said, "Our major recommendation, from which all detailed recommendations emanate, is the establishment of a Division of the Visual Arts. The division would consist of the Department of the History of Art (the Fine Arts Department); the Department of Design: the Harvard Theatre; and all of the teaching collections, such as museums, and art collections."

This division would be an administrative organ "concerned with planning and internal communication and cooperation between the four subdivisions described previously."

The eight-man committee, representing men from all the areas affected by the Visual Arts Report, said it did "not subscribe to the recommendation for the establishment of a Division of the Visual Arts." It believed that such a Division "would add an unneeded and probably cumbersome administrative mechanism."

As well as giving its approval to the construction of a theatre, the eight-man group approved the recommendation for a Design Center. But it asserted that a new field of design to replace Architectural Sciences was not needed. Such a field "would go too far toward making pre-professional art school work a possible major," it said.