Opinion | Guest Column
Putting the Arts Cuts in Perspective
February 8, 2010 - 1:55am-
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Because The Cornell Daily Sun is an influential news source on campus and beyond, I was troubled to see several factual errors in last week’s reporting on the Theatre, Film and Dance budget reduction. Those errors, as well as conjecture in the two articles, seem to have informed much of the reasoning in last Thursday’s editorial on Reimagining Cornell. I feel compelled to write about Cornell’s critical challenge to honor excellence and breadth in our offerings, but within the financial constraints recently imposed on universities across the country. It is essential to start by clarifying the request to Theatre, Film and Dance.
The college has asked the department to imagine new ways to be successful while reducing their budget by $1-2 million (to be achieved over two years). My goal is for a robust, sustainable Theatre, Film and Dance Department to emerge from this process. The Sun inaccurately reported that the department’s budget cut is one-third of the Arts and Sciences cut. The department reduction, spread over two years, should be compared to the college reductions being made over several years. Last year’s Arts and Sciences cut alone was $9 million, and we expect significant cuts in the future. Last Thursday’s editorial paints our request as a drastic measure, when in fact, we have given the department a broad range and an extraordinary amount of time to realize the savings.
The experts are the department members who practice, research and teach theatre, dance and film, so we will rely on them to devise proposals that will retain the department’s vigor and creativity, and accomplish its most important goals. Our only requirements are to meet the needs of at least the current number of undergraduates and to preserve the resources devoted to professorial faculty. We have laid out the challenge, as we have with everybody else, to imagine themselves excelling while having reduced resources.
I realize this op-ed would be much more satisfying if it provided details, but that is not possible until Theatre, Film and Dance proposes models for their future. Once we hear the results, we certainly will have opportunities for public discussion of their ideas.
Theatre, Film and Dance and our other arts programs are highly valued components of the liberal arts education particular to Cornell. They enrich the community and, most importantly, they touch the lives of thousands of undergraduates. But please remember, the university is in the process of implementing a 10 percent correction in its annual operating budget over the next several years. In that context, the Arts and Sciences deans decided to invest strategically across our departments because we will emerge stronger than we would if we uniformly reduced everything we do. The college must remain competitive. Most important is our core mission of teaching and research, and it is critical to both parts of our mission that we maintain the quality and number of our professorial faculty. A strong faculty is essential to providing our undergraduates with an exceptional education. Consequently, the college decided early in the fall to commit funds for hiring new professors, despite great uncertainty about next year's budget. We approved only one quarter as many hires as usual, but the majority of those are in the arts and humanities.
For the college to be excellent while using fewer resources, we must become more sharply focused in what we do, and that includes Theatre, Film and Dance. It also is true for the rest of Cornell. Perhaps some programs will be combined, some will be reconfigured, and no doubt our unusually broad range of offerings will be reduced to some degree (but also made stronger, as it is refined). The process will have many dimensions — sometimes initially painful, when we must do less than before; at other times creative and invigorating, when we discover exciting ways to teach, collaborate or do research. By acting strategically, we will be in a position to grow to our best advantage when our finances start to improve.
The Sun plays a role in Reimagining Cornell, too, as it reports on this complex endeavor and provides a forum for opinions that inform our thinking. I am encouraged by the passionate interest in the university’s future that I see so often in the articles and essays printed here.
G. Peter Lepage is the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at gpl3@cornell.edu. Guest Room appears periodically this semester.
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Way to say nothing new
He forgot to mention that the proposed cuts for THIS year are only $6 million...hence... the TFD Department gets 1/3 of the cuts. Even $1 million out of a total of say $18 million is completely disproportionate and unfair when we have 37 departments in Arts and Sciences, none of which represent Cornell or give back to the Ithaca community the way the Schwartz does.
These cuts ARE drastic considering the operating budget is only about $4.4 million and $500,000 was already cut this year. The TFD Dept. seems to be bearing a brunt of the financial burden for the entire College.
The argument the Dean makes about preserving tenured professorial positions sounds good on paper, but it just goes to show how MUCH the Dean has not been listening to us. We do not have many tenured professors; our faculty is largely made up of designers and technicians and performing artists who have distinguished themselves in their fields. Their expertise is of a different kind. Students benefit from receiving hands-on training in every aspect of theatre, film and dance. With only tenured professors, the Department will be forced to transition from educating students in all areas of theatre/film and production to just teaching them about theory and history. Such training will be pretty useless to any student who wants to pursue a career in theatre, film or dance.
I'd also like to know how the Dept. is supposed to bring the Dean our plan of action when he REFUSES to respond to letters, e-mails, and calls and REFUSES to meet with the students who are working on proposing "models for our future". Please stop lying to us; we've been trying for a week to engage in discussion with you and all you do is ignore us and cancel appointments with us.
Playing Dumb
Dear Dean LePage - Thank you for your column. It is very nice that you want to clarify your position...unfortunately the numbers you are presenting are not new to us. They are the same, and our opinion has to remain the same. Right now, I understand that you would like us to calm down because we don't know for sure what will happen in the next few years. Unfortunately for you, anyone who is able to do basic math can figure out that when we are forced to cut anywhere from 50-80% of our non-professorial budget, tons of essential people WILL lose their jobs.
Dozens of classes are on the line...nearly the entire dance department could be lost. They have only one professor - the rest are lecturers who have taught here for many years. Our staff and students are running scared for good reason. Many staff are handing in their resumes to other places. They want to get out of this sinking ship. The best staff will leave first. Students want to leave the school, they know that even under the best circumstances, we could not create a stronger, better department after these kinds of cuts.
It is appalling that you continue to pretend that it will be our fault, our failure if we cannot continue to attract students under this budget. A "sharp focus" in theatre means something different from "sharp focus" in other departments. Most other departments need only professors and space to operate. We are interdisciplinary. We are acting and directing, building and designing and sewing and thousands of tactile ways for people to come together to make one thing.
The student body is still reeling from your gross misunderstanding of what it takes to do college-level theatre. This will not change until you retract this ultimatum and really come to the table to talk.
ANSWER ME THIS... I must
ANSWER ME THIS...
I must confess, as a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, I am disappointed that my Dean is unwilling engage in an “open discussion” (as he had promised) of an issue critical to my continued education here. I also find the lack of “transparency” (also promised) in this process frustrating and disheartening. Despite immediate and continuous attempts on the part of the students associated with the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance to contact Dean Lepage via phone, e-mail, letter, and appointment, so that we could engage in a discussion of our future, our Dean has been unwilling to meet us according to his own terms. Not only have our missives been ignored, but appointments already scheduled were canceled out of hand once it was discovered they were concerning the issue of budget cuts. And now we find that, showing a lack of respect for the students of this school, and a lack of professionalism, Dean Lepage confines himself to contradiction and condescension in this public forum, the Daily Sun. Fine. If this is where he wishes our “discussion” to take place, so be it. In that case, however, I have a few questions I would like addressed:
Dean Lepage, you made it clear that we were spreading “factual errors” when we said the Department of TFD would be shouldering a preposterous one-third of the overall cuts for the College. Please then, tell us, how much exactly does need to be cut from the College of Arts and Sciences by the end of this semester? Next year? Two years hence?
Secondly, when you say, “we have given the department a broad range and an extraordinary amount of time to realize the savings,” what exactly do you mean? I am afraid I don’t understand. We are being required to cut up to half of our annual budget, and with all professorial positions being preserved, this means virtually eradicating the entire production side of the Department, leaving us with no practical application of our theory. No matter how much expertise or creativity we bring to bear on this issue, with no resources (your euphemistic “reduced resources”) there is nothing we can do, and there will be little left of the department we love.
Lastly, you point out that “Most important is our core mission of teaching and research, and it is critical to both parts of our mission that we maintain the quality and number of our professorial faculty.” What you fail to understand or care about, it seems, is that some fields require instruction of a non-professorial nature in cooperation with professorial teaching in order to be effective. The fields of theatre, film, and dance are certainly three such. “A strong faculty is essential,” you say. I agree. I would go further, and say unequivocally that a strong faculty includes all those essential for providing my peers and myself with an exceptional education. This means my stage managers, my sound designers and propsmasters, my lighting designers, my costume designers, and my senior lecturers. How am I to learn acting without the opportunity to act? How am I to learn my craft without mentors to teach me? Please tell me that at least, Dean Lepage.
68 TF&D Courses Could Be Eliminated
After a cursory review of the Courses of Study, a cut of $2 million could eliminate up to 27 theatre courses, 36 dance courses, and 5 film courses, all of which are taught by non-professorial faculty and staff. This is not an exaggeration. It is fact. http://www.cornell.edu/academics/courses.cfm
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