Planning for the Arts

The University would like to offer instruction in the creative arts, but not to the extent of providing training for professional actors, musicians, and painters. The flexible agency of independent study seems one of the best means of providing such education.

Last week the Committee on Educational Policy agreed that directing a play could sometimes fall within the independent study program. The course, as Daniel Seltzer describes it, would involve not giving credit for directing, but credit for program of reading and research connected with the play and supervised by a member of the Faculty. Such a study should be unexceptionable to the Faculty and should certainly be useful to one or two students annually permitted to engage in it.

But the CEP, and those worrying about Harvard's involvement in the arts, ought to realize that such studies are not a substitute for a carefully though-out program, of whatever scale, for artistic endeavor. Creative courses have been in an ambiguous position at Harvard since the dawn of the Visual Studies program in 1963. At present, no one is quite certain of their place; the adoption of Vis Stud, and of such courses as Hum 4 and Hum 105 has given a certain validity to the idea that Harvard has a program in the creative arts. But no one is planning it, no one is administering it, and no one has defined its purpose or its limts.

It is not enough to say that a number of such tentative gestures a Seltzer's independent studies will eventually add up to a valuable program. Such an education can never be, for years to come, more than a combination of the haphazard steps that created it. If Harvard is going to have a valuable program in the arts, whether one of negligible, modest, or gigantic size, some body of the Faculty, is going to have to start planning it.