Corporation Picks Harvard-Radcliffe Arts Coordinator

The Corporation approved last Monday the appointment of Myra A. Mayman, former acting director of Bryn Mawr admissions, as the first coordinator of the arts for Harvard and Radcliffe.

Mayman's post was created on a recommendation made last Spring by President Bok's committee to investigate the status of the arts at Harvard.

That committee, headed by James S. Ackerman, professor of Fine Arts, also recommended that the Faculty establish full credit courses in the practicing arts.

Mayman, whose appointment will last three years, will focus on the extracurricular arts. In addition she will supervise the budgets and staffs of Radcliffe's ongoing programs in dance and pottery. She will work out of an office in Radcliffe's Agassiz building.

"I am not coming in to take over things but to provide some basic coordination for extracurricular arts activities," Mayman said last week. "At a place like Harvard there are usually resources that people aren't taking advantage of. I would like to establish a central information source so that when I find out what undergraduate needs and interests in the arts are, I can try to act on them."

Mayman said that her first project will be to compile an inventory of all arts equipment and spaces which exist in the Houses, the departments and such facilities as the Loeb Drama Center and the Carpenter Center.

Mayman said she also plans to increase the contact between students and artists in the greater Boston area.

"It would be nice to have fellows in the arts each year," she said. "The more artists who can come for an afternoon, or for a seminar or for a year, the more exciting an arts community you will have."

Mayman said, however, that her budget will only cover the office's operating costs and that she will have to raise funds for special projects.

"I am assuming that students are interested," she said. "I don't see that my job is to stimulate interest in the arts. When I was in college, students were more interested in political action, but I think that this is a time when they want to learn about things in the arts."

Mayman, a 1966 graduate from Bryn Mawr, worked for two years as an administrator with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She received her M.A. in comparative literature from Columbia in 1969.

She worked as assistant to Bryn Mawr's director of admissions for two years before serving as the office's acting director last year.

Mayman has also been appointed an associate of Dunster House for next year.