State of the Arts

In June, 1973, President Bok's Committee on the Practice of the Arts dropped a bomb-shell on a long-standing Harvard tradition. In its "Statement of policy," the six-professor committee wrote:

[W]e believe that the function of arts instruction in a liberal arts curriculum a not simply to supplement and support the academic disciplines. It is to introduce students to forms of learning and communication which have their own power, validity, and application, and which offer alternatives to the symbolic modes of words and figures and to the ways of knowing and feeling that they can convey.

In other words, the arts should be taught along with traditional scholarly pursuits. Not an earth-shaking pronouncement on the national scene, but it bucked centuries of Harvard policy that shunted aside arts instruction.

Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III noted in his 1972 study of the arts at Harvard, the notion of a "university" is based on ancient Greek ideals, "in which reason and verbal discourse were far more important than manual skills and creative imagination."

Epps concluded, "[I]f the environment of a 'liberal arts' college such as Harvard is not openly hostile, it is not hard to see the many barriers that stand in the way of a committed artist who finds himself confined within our walls."

The respected former Dean of the Faculty Franklin Ford said in the Epps' report, "Unfortunately, to my way of thinking, the conflict between the opportunities for scholars and artists in the University is a function of the nature of art and the nature of the University..."

President Bok and his Committee on the Practice of the Arts took the opposite view. "Of course, there's been a very long debate over whether people should get credit for performance," Bok said last week.

"I came to the conclusion fairly early on that it seemed to me not very productive to continue those debates, but [instead] to try to seek some creative alternative to them," Bok continued.

"The alternative which always appealed to me was to see whether there are ways that people can combine formal learning and performance in a single course, in ways that would be mutually reinforcing."

In the 13 years since Bok took office, Harvard has nearly doubled its tenured artist-professors (from five to nine). The number of courses involving the practice of art--be it music or painting, creative writing or drama--has increased from 31 to 85. Enrollment in these classes has spiraled upwards from 660 (by Epps' count) to over 2000.

Bok can rightly boast, "If you total it all up, whether you measure it in terms of space or pianos or number of courses or number of students involved, or whatever, the opportunities have increased very substantially in the last decade."

But the artist-professors want more:

* Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies Louis J. Bakanowsky says he is pushing for a fellows program "as a euphemism for graduate students."

* Professor of English Robert Brustein, director of the Loeb Drama Center, says he is actively seeking funding for a "drama conservatory" for graduate-level students to study with his American Repertory Theater.

* Leon Kirchner, Rosen Professor of Music, says he still advocates the performer-in-residence program he proposed to President Bok in the 1960s. He claims the idea was watered down into the "Learning From Performers" series, which brings people to Harvard only for a day or two.

* The longtime head of the Dance Office, Claire S. Mallardi, says she gave up years ago "wasting time" trying to get dance courses into the Harvard curriculum, even though "every other Ivy League college to my knowledge. . . has gone in one form or another into some form of credit for dance."

* Monroe Engel '42, director of the English Department's Creative Writing program, says. "We're not providing as much as we might" in the way of classes for students with little or no creative writing background.

Every art program at Harvard wants more funds and more teachers. But every program at Harvard wants more funds and more teachers. Why are the artists' demands any more important than anyone else's?

Aside from the merits of each request, there seems to be an underlying motive uniting the hopes of the various arts programs. They all say they want respect. (Creative writing may be all exception. Says Engel, "Students who take creative writing are not ghettoized.")

'''Arts and Letters' is the familiar formulation all over the world." says Bakanowsky, who authored the 1978 Faculty-approved guidelines on course credit for performance in the arts. "At Harvard it's 'Letters and Arts.'''

"I don't think there has traditionally been sufficient respect at Harvard for the arts," says Brustein, a theatrical director who brought the American Repertory Theater with him from Yale in 1979. "But I don't think it's an unchangeable situation. It's changed a lot in the last five years. A lot of people have discovered the awe of the arts."

But a lot of people have yet to be convinced. As Myra Mayman, director of the Office of the Arts, explains, there is a strong bias against performers as academics. "The typical comment of the critic is. 'Talk to an artist? Why? They don't know what they're doing. Mayman says.

This view has been promoted through such works as the play and film "Amadeus," according to Kirchner, which portrays the composer Mozart as "an idiot with a divine gift."

In fact, some, including Bakanowsky, have given up on this generation of non-artists. "It's well-meaning people who have not had this as part of their life experience, so they are suspicious," Bakanowsky states. "They just don't understand, and I don't think it's worth the energy to try to convince them. Focus on the next generation."

Already, Brustein says, "Harvard is beginning to attract a different kind of generation of Harvard students" more interested in the arts.

Despite Brustein's comment, of course, a lack of academic arts offerings didn't seem to deter dedicated Harvard and Radcliffe students in the past. Without University sanction, students founded the Pierian Sodality (now the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra), the Glee Club, and a multitude of other art performance groups.

John U. "Jack" Lemmon '47 attended Harvard, as did Frederick L. 'Grandy '70 ("Gopher" on "The Love Boat"), Susan W. Stockard-Channing '65, Frederick H. Gwynne '51 ("Herman" on "The Munsters"), John A. Lithgow '67 ("The World According to Garp"), among other actors.

Not to mention composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein '39 and cellist Yo-Yo Ma '75, writers John H. Updike '54 and Peter B. Benchley '61, poets T.S. Eliot '10 and George Santayana '99, and a multitude of others.

All this while Harvard maintained an official posture of distaste for the arts.

It was as late as the 1920s that "Discernment and the cultivation of taste, plus the scholarship of art, became the subject of proper study for gentlemen and women," writes Mayman in a recent issue of The Radcliffe Quarterly. "Making paintings was another matter."

Before the 1920s, according to Mayman, even the study of art was considered an effeminate and unworthy undertaking. Harvard's first professor of Music--and the first in the country--was John Knowles Paine, tenured in 1875. Art historian Charles Eliot Norton was tenured in 1874. Playwright George Pierce Baker, Class of 1887, taught as a Professor of English and later of Dramatic Literature from 1905 to 1924. Both were firsts in their field at Harvard.

Not until the 1960s, though, did Harvard's attitude begin to change drastically. The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts was built in 1963. The Music Department started a Ph.D. program in Composition to supplement the Musicology program.

In 1969, VES replaced and expanded on the Architectural Sciences program, and Music 180 introduced music composition to the undergraduate curriculum.

In 1971 Bok arrived.

It is against this backdrop of discrimination first against art in general, and later against the practice of art, that Harvard's artist-professors have had to fight.

Despite Bok's professed enthusiasm for their cause, these professors say they have still encountered obstacles. Several of the recommendations of the President's Committee on the Practice of the Arts have yet to be implemented.

For example, the committee proposed curricular offerings in Dance and urged "that the University seek funds to endow Fellowships in the arts"--funds which the University is still seeking 11 years later.

In addition, the committee assailed the belief that "credit courses in the arts can be justified [only] if the context of instruction is theoretical or historical...."

But the "Bakanowsky guidelines" on course credit for performance in the arts basically institutionalized this context, stipulating that "the practical work must have a related theoretical and/or historical dimension".

Other committee recommendations, such as the creation of a Standing Committee on the Arts and an Office of the Arts, have been implemented.

But as the first generation of tenured artist-professors nears retirement age, the question of the practice of the arts as a legitimate academic discipline is still a subject for debate.

In Music, where the scholar-practitioner divide yawns as it does in no other department, the debate is as nasty and all-consuming as ever--each departmental appointment is made in the context of the running feud.

"We have an emphasis on scholarship at Harvard. There is an emphasis on performance at the New England School of Music across the river. . . . You have to capitalize on your strengths," says Christoph Wolff, chairman of the department.

"We are right now in a better balance than ever before [in the department], and I think this balance is coming close to the ideal balance," Wolff adds.

Predictably, the composers disagree. "There is still a problem for a Harvard undergraduate who is a really outstanding musician to get the proper help and guidance," says Kirchner. "It's unfair to say, 'Go to Julliard."'

Bakanowsky notes that VES courses are routinely oversubscribed--an indication, he believes, that more classes should be offered.

"I know a lot of people who are bright, well educated, have a lot of degrees, but who can't see--in a selective way, I mean," says Bakanowsky. "They look but they don't see."

Brustein adds, "Most people don't realize how starved they are aesthetically until they have a genuine aesthetic experience."