a holiday is a great day to catch up on articles... Below is an excerpt from “A Vision for the Arts at Harvard.” It was published in December of 2008 and is a frank assessment of the school’s support (or lack of support) for the arts. It says “Our peers at Columbia, Princeton and Stanford all outpace us in their graduate and undergraduate degree offerings in arts practice…” They forgot to mention GMU!
The 3 recommendations of the report – for Harvard to create: a graduate degree program in a range of art practices, an enhanced place for the arts in the undergraduate curriculum, and new, innovative art spaces - are already happening at Mason. Check out Amazing Space for more info on the School of Dance’s construction project.
“Harvard values leadership and originality of mind. It has created a curriculum to foster these qualities, in the hope that its students, in their different pursuits, may change the world for the better and make things new. But by sidelining arts-practice, this university has largely left out of its curriculum the most direct training in imagining the new and in exercising the practical cunning required to bring the new into being. Since the end of the Middle Ages – long before originality became the hallmark of great art – people recognized that, in crafting paintings, writing poems, and composing music, they, uniquely among all creatures, introduce into the world something new. This capacity was what gave art its special promise: hand in hand with science, it could – on occasion – change the world.”
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