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PARTISAN REVIEW
for the past five years, although for two of those years the English
Department did co-sponsor Spike Lee to teach a course in screenwriting.
(When I asked why playwriting, with its obvious roots
in
English literature-–
Shakespeare most obviously-had been replaced by the myth and magic of
the movies in the English Department, I was told that Spike Lee would
attract a lot of new students to the department.)
Harvard now offers a concentration in Creative Writing and awards
Briggs-Copeland Lectureships to those who teach it. Slowly, glacially,
thanks to the openness of the last two administrations, arts education is
creeping into the Yard, past the cadres of Switzers manning the gates.
Nevertheless, those gates are still heavily guarded. It is true the university
can boast a Department of Music which offers a few courses in composi–
tion and orchestration. But undergraduate music majors do most of their
work in such theory and history classes as Eighteenth-Century
Performance Practice and Ethnomusicology. Largely thanks to a new direc–
tor, Ellen Phalan, Harvard now also provides an excellent curriculum in
drawing, painting, and photography at the Carpenter Center.
It
is admin–
istered not by a Department of
Art
but by a species called "Visual and
Environmental Studies." How do you paint landscapes or still lifes in a
department called "Visual and Environmental Studies"? It's as if such friv–
olities as studio practice had to be smuggled in as more purposeful subjects
such as exploring the optic nerve and preserving ecology.
There are, of course, a variety of other educational institutions in the
Cambridge/ Boston area, Boston University, Tufts, and Emerson College
for example, which offer professional arts training on the undergraduate
level, sometimes leading to a Bachelor of Fine Arts
(B.F.A.).
This degree
is rarely offered by the elite universities. At Yale and other such institu–
tions, undergraduates in the arts usually matriculate in special departments
or concentrations leading to a
B.A.
degree; but they must supplement
courses in their major with a variety of other disciplines, including the
sciences, social sciences, history, and literature, on the premise that anyone
planning a career in the arts would benefit from general knowledge
in
a
broad range of subjects. This premise is sensible enough, even, I would say,
inarguable, as long as students are allowed to study legitimate disciplines
(some of the arcane theories now in vogue pull them so far afield that they
can graduate from college virtually uneducated in their fields). At Harvard,
the options for someone interested
in
the arts are even narrower. Among
Harvard alumni have been a number of very talented artists in music and
theater-Yo Yo Ma, Stockard Channing, and John Lithgow, among others,
and, more recently, Matt Damon and Elizabeth Shue. But none of these
was ever given much chance to practice his or her profession during school
hours.
