Art for Gen Ed's Sake

The Faculty's skepticism towards teaching any course with more than just words has slackend a bit. And the change has happily come under the auspices of the new General Education program. Daniel Seltzer, associate professor of English, has gained approval from the Committee on General Education for his new course, Hum 105--"The Literature and Practice of Drama."

Seltzer now needs only the approval of the Committee on Educational Policy--expected later this Spring--for the course to become an official offering. Course work in Hum 105 will involve not only the usual lectures and discussion, but also the production of one of the plays studied. For the first time credit will be given for work on the Loeb Mainstage.

Hum 4, the lower-level course offered this year by Seltzer and Loeb director Robert Chapman, had much the same goals as the new course, but was stymied by its large enrollment. Hum 105 will have a strictly limited enrollment preventing it from deteriorating into just one more, "we must try to imagine how this appeared on stage lecture-only course."

Having people actually do things, rather than just read about them, has been anathema around here for quite awhile. The usual argument against 'practical' courses asserts that Harvard is a liberal arts College and that therefore mere 'technical training' would sidetrack students from their main educational concerns, sullying the snowy white linen of pure scholarship.

Even if courses like Hum 105 or the Visual Studies courses offered at the Carpenter Center were only technical training, in the narrowest sense, this argument would have at best shaky validity. The process is as important as the plan in any of the arts, even if the concern is only with analysis. A practical knowledge of metre and rhyme is essential to adept poetic analysis, as is knowledge of brushstrokes to the criticism of painting or a knowledge of staging to dramatic criticism.

More important, courses can certainly be designed which eliminate the danger of parochialism by putting the technical aspects of art in their larger context. Hum 105, as a Gen Ed course if it fulfills its promise, would seem to be the archetype of this new genre. The Committee on General Education has both the flexibility and the philosophical rationale to take such courses--those featuring academic and practical analysis--under its newly strengthened wing. The "new breed" of Gen Ed courses should highlight a few more confrontations with real, live art.

Such courses should, of course, not drain activity away from the current extra-curricular efforts. In the particular case of Hum 105, faculty direction should not push student directors off-stage. Faculty members should only direct one play each term on the Loeb Mainstage, whether or not that play is part of a course. The bulk of directorial work should be carried, as it now is, by students.

Approval of Hum 105, the Visual Studies program, and the English Department's writing courses are all symptoms of a rather beneficial disease the Faculty is succumbing to--creeping tolerance. Academic appreciation for the procedures as well as the products of art will continue as long as the Faculty realizes that while mechanics occasionally drip grease on the liberal arts limousine, they also make it go.