Vis Stud Chairman Sees Gains Despite Shake-Up and Criticism

One year after a personnel shake-up in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Robert G. Gardner, chairman of the department, said yesterday he feels, his department is "coming along."

The seven-year-old department is the only one at Harvard that grants degrees solely for work in the creative arts, and Gardner said he expects Vis Stud to "stand on an equal footing with other departments before long."

Dean Rosovsky has authorized three tenured positions in the department, which now has no permanent faculty, and three other members of the Vis Stud faculty will be promoted to the position of "senior lecturer." Gardner says the hirings will give the department "a sort of cadre" of instructors that it has long needed.

Shake-Up

One the other hand, he said that last year's shake-up--in which the department fired three popular instructors and declined to promote two others--was a reassuring sign that Vis Stud will have a "normal turnover in its junior faculty."

Members of other Harvard departments have criticized Vis Stud for ignoring traditional academic standards. In particular, some faculty members charge that grading in Vis Stud is lax, and that the department's instructors lack proper academic credentials.

Gardner said that grading is "probably" lax in studio courses because "there is little objective means for measurement of somebody's ability."

One Faculty member, who asked not to be identified, said last week that low grading standard's in Vis Stud are "understandable."

"It's hard to put a grade on somebody's finger-painting or feces-smearing," he said.

Gardner also says that traditional academic credentials are irrelevant to the creative arts, and that their application "would deny Picasso a professorship--it would keep Faulkner out of the English Department."

The most likely candidates for the new tenured positions are all "working artists" Gardner said.