ADMINISTERING THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE
449
Although it is now possible to major in some academic version of
music and visual arts at Harvard, the university still does not offer a major
in theater. There have been some rumbles lately about creating a theater
concentration.
It
may very well run into faculty opposition and possibly
into student opposition as well. At Harvard, where the cult of the amateur
is virtually enshrined, the word "professionalism" and the verb "profes–
sionalize" are more often used as epithets than honorifics. [ have heard
faculty members talk in hushed tones about a student production of
Shakespeare or Sophocles in one of the resident houses as
if
it were far
superior to anything produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company or the
Greek National Theatre. On the model of such English universities as
Cambridge and Oxford, Harvard prefers its scholars to be gentlemen and
gentlewomen, and its arts to be recreational. The actual practice of music,
dance, and painting-aside from a scattering of studio courses-is largely
left to clubs, orchestras, and choruses.
For decades, undergraduate interest in theater had been accommodat–
ed by a self-generating extracurricular association known as the HDC, later
the HRDC, or Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club, along with a host of other
student producing organizations, such as the Gilbert and Sullivan Society,
Black CAST, independent productions at the Agassiz Theater under the
supervision of Radcliffe's Office of the Arts, and Harvard's resident hous–
es. When the financier John Loeb contributed money to Harvard to build
a new performance space, it was dedicated largely to undergraduate theater
activity, even though the main auditorium turned out to be too vast to
accommodate the relatively untrained skills of undergraduates. As a result,
a typical HRDC production plays to about 75 people in a hall seating 556.
How then does one explain the anomaly of the American Repertory
Theater at Harvard? The bringing of this professional theater to the univer–
sity and my appointment as director of the Loeb Drama Center were
accomplished partly to help improve the quality of HRDC shows on the
main stage, whether through practical courses in the craft of acting and
directing or through professional guidance of HRDC productions. But there
has always been a structural fault in the position of the director of the Loeb,
namely that the title has no real meaning. From the first, we were working
with an undergraduate club that wanted to retain its traditional indepen–
dence and autonomy, and that sometimes regarded the presence of the ART
company as that of usurpers. The HRDC is one of the very few extracur–
ricular organizations that has no professional or faculty supervision.
It
is said
that undergraduates fear the "professionalization" of undergraduate drama.
But improving the quality of production on the main stage through ART
supervision or anybody else's supervision is no more to "professionalize"
this extracurricular activity than a coach "professionalizes" the Harvard
