450
PARTISAN REVIEW
football team or a faculty conductor "professionalizes" the Harvard
Chorus. It is, indeed, the very essence of an educational institution to have
trained professionals (in other words, faculty and others) function in a tuto–
rial and teaching relationship to unusually talented students.
There is a good argument to be made against overly-specialized arts
training on the undergraduate level in a liberal arts university. I sometimes
make it myself
if
such training is either excessive or superficial. It's a ques–
tion of degree. A theater-obsessed student is not going to be properly
educated if every university hour is dedicated to theatrical activities. On
the other hand, how effective can a course in acting be if it meets only
three hours a week? Professional acting training requires at least forty
weekly contact hours to be serious. True, a few hours properly used can
help correct bad habits. And that is also enough time to introduce the
aspiring theater student to the materials of the field, namely plays. Those
planning a theater career after graduation would certainly be better pre–
pared as professionals were they more familiar with theater history and
dramatic literature. I have often been struck by the ignorance of certain
professional actors, some of them in my own company, who when offered
the part, say, of Shylock or Iago, tell me they first have to read the play.
What were they reading as undergraduates?
So it is possible to argue against too much as well as too little profes–
sionalism on the undergraduate level. But what argument can explain the
absence at Harvard of graduate professional schools
in
the arts? Harvard
does have a Graduate School of Design. The title is misleading. The
Design School is essentially devoted to architecture and city planning.
Almost alone among America's leading educational institutions, Harvard
has no schools in the arts. The reason usually offered is that professional
schools are too "vocational." True enough. So are the Law School, the
Medical School, and the Business School. The real argument, I suspect, is
not over vocationalism so much as over the kind of vocationalism. Artists
are notoriously bad breadwinners, and arts schools are traditionally far
behind in their annual contributions to the Alumni Fund.
Harvard's attitude towards the practical arts has had a long history. In
the 1920s, George Pierce Baker gave his celebrated English 47 Workshop
Playwriting class at Harvard.
It
was an elective in the English department.
Although one faculty member compared it to a course in "butchering
meat," Baker's dramatic instruction was effective enough to attract the likes
of Eugene O'Neill, Philip Barry, and S. N. Behrman to Cambridge. But
when Baker requested a space in which to stage scenes from the plays of
his students, the administration balked. It was too vocational, too profes–
sional. A wealthy donor from the Harkness family thereupon offered
Harvard what was then the munificent sum of a million dollars to build a
