ADMINISTERING THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE
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tension, at least in my own field, to what the movie critic David Denby has
identified as "theaterophobia," and what the late Jonas Barish in his book
of the same name called The
Anti-Theatrical Prejudice.
Barish traced this
affiiction back to Plato. But he found its defining event in the closing of the
English theaters during the Puritan interregnum. Harvard, like the state of
Massachusetts, was founded by those very same Puritans, fleeing England
after the restoration of Charles II. That fact accounts for a lot of the bad
blood that still exists there between those who .practice and those who the–
orize, except in music, which the Puritans and Harvard consider sacred.
Perhaps the best theatrical representation of this conflict is in Moliere's
Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme,
where the eponymous hero, the social-climber
Monsieur Jordain, is taught the theoretical rudiments of the arts-how to
dance, sing, fence, philosophize, and write love letters-by a group of spe–
cialists
in
each field. He discovers that he can perform each skill much
better than the experts, simply by doing it.Jourdain not only learns that he
has been speaking prose all his life; he also proves that he can write prose
with more directness and simplicity than the most learned pedagogue.
Moliere, like his twentieth-century cousin, Eugene Ionesco, had an artist's
suspicion of the over-intellectualized beliefs of his age.
It is amazing to me that humanists stand in such an ambiguous rela–
tionship to artists, considering that it is the work of poets, novelists, and
dramatists that constitutes the grist of their endeavors. Obviously, there
would be no analysis or criticism-no deconstruction, semiotics, or gen–
der theory-without the existence of artworks to spin theories about.
To me, the greatest obligation of education
in
relation to the arts-and
I'm speaking now of education from the secondary school level through
the college years-is to create some appreciation for and understanding of
the arts rather than competition with them. Whitman believed that great
artists required great audiences. The education system has signally failed to
create the great audiences that might understand, support, and maintain
great works of art in this country.
The failure is on every level. Whereas arts education used to be a sta–
ple of the grammar school education, funding for such arts programs in the
schools is now very erratic. For who is the first to get fired when money
is short, but the music teacher? The only way to stimulate appreciation for
quality is through arts education in the schools, an area that has been
unconscionably neglected, though some of Walter Annenberg's recent
grants have been helpful. Effective projects like the Teachers and Writers
Collaborative of New York City, in which poor kids are introduced to
language and poetry by practicing poets, are very rare, and they're private–
ly subsidized. No wonder the infrequent visit of a dance company on a
grant leaves children baffled and sullen when the system employs so few
