Arts Should Be First

By John Rockwell

Harvard Overseers may be plenty right and plenty honorable, but we aren’t very powerful. Advice without much meaningful consent is our game. My counsel for incoming Overseers is to find something that you feel passionate about and then try to insinuate yourself into policy-making in that area, because one thing being an Overseer provides is access.

Larry Summers’ declared areas of emphasis  the sciences, undergraduate education, study abroad, laying out a master plan for Allston and asserting the power of the central administration—are all perfectly plausible. Every administration needs a focus, and this one has made its priorities clear.

Those priorities do not include the arts. Which does not mean a scorn for the arts or a cynical willingness to sell them short. But curiously, it seems to me, the very climate we’re in now  with a new or newish president, provost, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) dean, dean of Harvard College and head of the Office for the Arts; with the review of undergraduate education and with the ongoing effort to figure out what to do with Allston  makes this a pivotal time for Harvard arts advocacy.

At the outset of my service as an Overseer I was appointed to be the liaison with the Office for the Arts. What I have tried to do since, perhaps pushily, is expand that role into general arts advocacy. Of course there are and have been other Overseers similarly impassioned: I think of Dick Oldenburg, the former head or the Museum of Modern Art and of American Sotheby’s and last year’s president of the Overseers, who was no mean arts advocate himself, especially in the visual arts.

My own agenda is to talk a lot, to anyone who will listen. I thus thank The Crimson for inviting me to write this piece  and to get other people to talking about what the arts should and could mean at Harvard. Traditionally (and there is a sometimes crushing weight of tradition at this place), Harvard has been a liberal-arts college. The arts and athletics (and even the sciences, I’m told, 150 years ago) were avocational activities, not the proper vocation of a gentleman.

That legacy persists. Deep down, Harvard would rather study the arts than practice them, at least as part of the formal curriculum. Neil and Angelica Rudenstine loved the arts more than Larry does, I think it is fair to say. But they were largely content to foster undergraduate extracurricular activity. What I have been arguing for, at the moment of the undergraduate curricular review and the planning for Allston, is for administrators and faculty not to ratify the present but to re-imagine the future.

Right now, space in Cambridge for the arts (and for most everything else) is bitterly contested. When everything gets sorted out in Allston, maybe there will be room somewhere for a lavish dance center and expansive museums. But maybe there should or could be more theaters, more practice rooms, more art studios, more dance facilities, more film and video and electronic-music labs. Maybe even a School of the Arts, which Harvard has never had: all it would probably take would be a rich donor, unfortunately not me, who would be willing to give $200 million plus, making it clear that he or she would only provide that money for that purpose. In the shorter, more practical run, however, the issue is faculty review. All over Harvard, students and faculty have shown a yearning for the arts and for the granting and receiving of credit for arts practice. It happens in the music department, in Visual and Environmental Studies, in English. But it all seems sort of haphazard.

Larry has sometimes wondered, in his feistily Socratic way, whether the onslaught of extracurricular activity is distracting students from their true academic business. I have always stressed that my primary purpose is not to advocate a particular position. I just want the arts to be seriously reconsidered, and I think Larry, Steve Hyman, Bill Kirby and Dick Gross are likely to do just that.

It may be that the result of all this self-study will be to expand and coordinate curricular arts practice at Harvard: to give credit for dance, for instance, or expand credit for instrumental and vocal study and for participation in University musical ensembles, or to encourage students still further to write poetry and make films and do art; or to rationalize the relationship between the University and the American Repertory Theater and the museums in a way that makes them truly pedagogical without robbing them of their artistic integrity. To me, that would only be a ratification of already-evident interest on all sides.

But maybe there really is too much extracurricular activity, or maybe, as John Lithgow and others have sometimes feared, the wrong kind of curricular arts instruction, by tenured hacks, would dampen the extracurricular spirit that Arts First celebrates.

For me, the issue is less to push a position than to encourage others to come to a position: to add my own voice to a swelling chorus urging FAS and the administration and the OFA to work together to rationalize and foster the arts at Harvard in a way that makes academic sense, financial sense and creative sense. This may not constitute an exercise of awesome Overseer power on my part. But it has been a lot of fun, and maybe it will do some good.

John Rockwell ’62 was the editor of the New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section and is now their senior cultural correspondent. He is a member of the Board of Overseers and executive producer of Arts First.