Fine Arts May Revamp Curriculum

Responding to a perceived lack of midlevel offerings, the Fine Arts Department is considering revamping its undergraduate curriculum as early as 1986, professors said this week.

At a series of meetings this year--the second of which is scheduled for tomorrow the senior members of the department will try to hammer out a new set of course offerings, professors added.

The Fine Arts Department is--well, not antediluvian maybe paleolithic or traditional in not accepting certain forms of art," said new Department Chairman Neil Levine, who took office this fall.

The main things is to set up what we consider to be an ideal structure of teaching the history of art," Levine added.

The current structure, everyone appears to agree, is something less than ideal.

"There definitely are problems," said Oleg Grabar, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Arts, pointing in particular to "the insufficient number of intermediary courses between Fine Arts 13 ["Introduction to the History of Art"] and the advanced courses."

"There's not always a very wide choice of what you can take," said a senior concentrator in the department, who asked not to be identified "You sort of run out very quickly of courses to take," said another.

"There does tend to be a lack of clarity in the audiences of various courses that is, to whom the courses are directed," said Head Tutor Edward Goldberg.

The Fine Arts faculty, taxed by the demands of the Core Curriculum and thinned by a large number of leave takers, is already hard pressed to cover its current curriculum, professors said.

In addition, the department will soon lose several members to retirement.

But the staffing problems will have to wait, Levine said. "I'm an idealist I think you should start off by making an ideal structure, and then seeing whether we can do it," he said.

The main problem appears to be what to do with Fine Arts 13, the 200 plus student introductory survey class required of all concentrators.

"It's either exhausting or superficial," said Grabar of the course he is teaching this semester. The department should "either keep 13 and create a number of mid-level courses, or change 13 and create a number of introductory courses," he added.

Both plans would require concentrators to take a certain number of these classes--"beginners' courses [that] would not try to cover the waterfront," as Grabar termed them.

These classes would cover topics that Fine Arts 13 does not have time to go into, Levine said, ticking off primitive art, pre-Columbian art, and modern art forms such as photography and cinema.