Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These deficiencies in Harvard's attitude toward arts curriculum and faculty are only one part of a larger indictment that the performing arts at Harvard are bad. Questions of good and bad are ugly and difficult in almost any context, but the personal nature of art makes such questions even messier. Yet it would not be breaking any code of objectivity to write that the arts at Harvard were bad; President Bok admitted as much when he authorized a committee on the arts six years ago to suggest improvements for Harvard's arts programs...
Today, "bad arts" cannot be so easily determined as a missed cue or a wrong note. Finding the role of performing in art education and finding qualified teachers are problems of assessment that send University administrators scurrying to far easier tasks like budget-balancing and tuition-raising. It is one thing to decide that learning from performers is a valuable experience for students. It is quite another to decide which performers are valuable enough to 'society" to merit a tenured teaching post at Harvard...
Traditionally, Harvard has never felt the need for performing professors, so assessing them was not a problem. In recent years, however, student pressure and a greater national enthusiasm for the performing arts has softened that stance. Still, President Bok firmly asserts that Harvard will not be transformed into a school that trains professional artists; and he is right to do so. Transforming Harvard into a conservatory or a professional arts school would swing the emphasis on performing art too far in the opposite direction, away from Harvard's commitment to a complete liberal arts education...
PERFORMING ART is an itellectual reprive from intellectualizing. It is necessary as such. Yet the great performer needs the stimulation of intellectualizing as well, and some of Harvard's best artists--musicians, actors, painters, film-makers--will explain that this is why they attend Harvard instead of an arts school. None of them, however, enjoy the relegation of the performing arts to an aside in the drama of the liberal arts education...
Actors have always been forced to learn and ply their art extracurricularly. They are much like college athletes, some say, and deserve no better and no worse. Surely the actor is more a part of the Western intellectual tradition that Harvard embraces than is the athlete. The future of Harvard drama is moot for several years, however, until the curtain rises on Robert Brustein's innovations. Despite the tempest over the undergraduate's loss of control of the Loeb Theater caused by the Brustein appointment, no one denies that there is much ado about the possibility of good, innovative theater...