The State of Video at Harvard

Jane Q. Student wanted to make a documentary video tape on street musicians for academic credit last semester. She had to do this under special supervision, because there were no courses in video. She went to the Visual and Environmental Studies Department and was told she couldn't use its equipment. She went to Harvard Video Services and was told she had to pay hundreds of dollars for their equipment. She eventually found her way to a cable TV station in Somerville, signed up to use public access equipment on a weekly basis, and was able to produce her show.

In the process she ran into a lot of people concerned about video. Some were interested in artistic experimentation, some just wanted to communicate information in their field of interest, some were interested in programming and audiences, but they were all wondering the same thing she was: Why is it so hard to work with video at Harvard?

In an era when we are constantly assaulted by our own electronic technology, an era when satellites and television are as common as shoes and socks, an era that media critic Marshall McLuhan has aptly summed up as "the electronic age," you would expect to find some established means of learning about electronic technology in your college. After all, didn't McLuhan say, "We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation."

The electronic media are subtly and constantly altering our perceptual senses. But where does the student go to find out about them? Since television and video are visual media, the first place an intelligent undergraduate at Harvard would look would be the Visual and Environmental Studies Department. But, alas, the department has had a policy of "no video production" since 1974.

Robert Gardner, senior lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies, who recommended the "no video" policy to the Faculty says, "In a better of possible worlds we would have video production. It is an important medium of expression and it's terribly important in a place like this in visual studies to undertake some work because video is an important medium in the country and in civilization. To leave out video and TV is quite artificial but it is required because of the practical exigencies of financing."

Between 1968 and 1975, students could take classes in video at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The VES department spent tens of thousands of dollars on video equipment, acquiring four porta-paks (portable camera and recording decks for location shooting), monitors, and simple editing equipment. The film wing of the department was divided into three sections--16 mm film, photography and video.

VES 40 then included a section on video and spanned all the media. VES 147, taught by Robert Saudek, former television producer of Omnibus; a weekly television documentary series, and Eric Martin, his teaching assistant, was a seminar on TV that offered both practical and theoretical video experience.

Those were the days when the VES department was young (it started in 1968) and when Dean Rosovsky allowed it more money each year in order to get on its feet. Now that the yearly departmental budget is not rising fast enough to cover even inflation, the video scene has changed considerably.

By 1975 the only remnant of a video class at Harvard was Soc Sci 168 "Mass Telecommunications," taught by Saudek. The porta-paks and video equipment were in disrepair and Robert Kuglers's position as video supervisor was eliminated, leaving him to concentrate his efforts on 16 mm film.

The little video equipment at Carpenter Center that is still serviceable is now used once or twice a year as a research aid for 16 mm production. But there are now no classes in video offered, and students are not allowed to use the department's equipment for tutorials or independent study.

Studio Professor Midge Mackenzie feels the limited video resources at Carpenter Center are being used intelligently. The problem, she says, is that electronic technology requires too much special attention: special engineers and special maintenance techniques make costs prohibitive. Studio professor Alfred Guzzetti says he regrets not having access to more video equipment for VES 158r, "Sound and Image," a course he is teaching this semester on film and electronic music. He feels it is a good teaching tool because it can be used immediately and is erasable. Both Guzzetti and Gardner recognize a student demand for and interest in video, but don't want to hold out false carrots to students by offering a video program which is not adequately funded. "We ought to do it well if we're going to do it," says Gardner

So the student stumbles on, looking for some outlet for his or her interest in video. In and around the Harvard community there are other resources available besides Carpenter Center, but these are limited, too.

The best one can hope to do is to get involved with HUTV, Harvard's closed-circuit cable television. The cable is the ward of the telecommunications branch of the Harvard Office of Information Technology (OIT). Right now two student shows are being broadcast live over the cable weekly. One program, Noon Hits, which got rolling last fall, is a pot pourri of news, entertainment and university issues. It is broadcast on Thursdays from OIT's Video Production Center in the depths of the Kresge building on the Medical School campus.

Marley R. Klaus '79, a biology major who has been instrumental initiating Noon Hits and is the assistant producer of the program, says it is a good opportunity for students interested in video because it's new, and therefore anybody's ideas are welcomed. Any undergraduate may work on Noon Hits.

The other student program is "Home-Cookin," a country music show broadcast on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Stewart Shofner '79 initiated it this month.

Students can get independent study credit for working on these programs, and the programs can be seen by other students in the Greenhouse Cafeteria, Science Center lobby, and Holyoke Center. Undergraduate producers can work free of charge since OIT funds it. But there are still kinks in this video opportunity. It is just beginning and therefore somewhat unstructured, it does not count for credit toward any particular major, and plans for placing monitors in the Houses have not yet been realized.

Other video opportunities are even more limited. If you can find an amenable professor at M I T you may cross-register there for a course in video. You can compete for one of the limited number of unpaid TV internships at one of the stations in Boston and petition for independent study credit for it. If you live in Somerville, you can take workshops at Warner Cable TV and use its battered public access equipment.

If you have some money to spend, you can rent equipment from numerous places. The School of Education occasionally rents equipment to the tune of $48 per day for a black-and-white porta-pak and monitor, and from $24 to $34 an hour for a studio set-up. However, the School of Education offers non-credit video courses to its students only--no cross-registration is allowed. You can rent equipment from OIT's studios, the Video Service Center at Cruft Laboratory and the Video Production Center at Kresge at even higher rates. You can also rent from various companies in the Boston area.

If your interest is in seeing works of contemporary video artists, you can keep your eye open for the annual Video Show, a series sponsored by the Massachusetts College of Art in cooperation with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard. The series is running right now and will continue through April 26, featuring such artists as John Godfrey, Jennifer Morris and Jerd Stern. The show will screen video tapes by anyone who brings them in that night. You can also keep your eye open for video showings at Center Screen, a public, non-profit film screening organization.

If you're really industrious, you might even breathe some life into the Harvard Video Club. Although the university established a charter for this club, it has never been active.

The biggest limiting factor in the video opportunities at Harvard is probably the fact that information about the opportunities that are available is limited. No one hands the incoming freshman a booklet on video at registration day, as happens with so many other opportunities. Bob DesMaisons, manager of the Video Service Center, says, "It's a chicken and egg problem." You can't make the opportunities broadly available until you have generated interest in them, and you can't generate interest in the activities until you have them and can tell people about them.

But if the situation at Harvard seems grim, it's no more grim than at many other colleges in Boston. Other schools are coping with the dilemma posed by high student interest and lack of funding in various ways.

At Tufts, students have organized a cable TV station, TUTV, which is supported by a $10,000 yearly grant from the student senate. The station is completely extra-curricular. Students train other students to use the equipment, which consists merely of one 3/4" color porta-pak (the size refers to the tape visual quality), two color cameras in the studio, and a special effects generator. About 40 and a special effects generator. About 40 students participate in the station, which puts out six hours of programming a week.

The University of Massachusetts Harbor Campus offers no credit courses in video this semester, although video production is usually taught in Theater Arts class. When such courses are given, the class gets its equipment from the UMass Media Center, which has been operating extensive video facilities since January 1974. Right now the Center offers 25 free video workshops each semester.

The Center is expanding its services by offering credit courses in Introductory Video and Media Production for Public Service during a summer institute. Past attempts to provide classes at the Media Center have failed owing to the need to concentrate funds on supporting the editing facility there. The Center's funding comes from the Commonwealth in the form of initial educational funding and a trust fund. This means that only non-profit organizations can use the center's facilities, and a student must be part of such a group to use them. In addition, Videcom, a UMass student video group independent of the Media Center is funded by the university and has its own equipment.

Boston University offers various courses in video, from video sociology to TV production to video anthropology. Any student who wants to do a video project and has a professor's approval can use free of charge, the equipment and studios of the Central Video Services, which include no fewer than 150 porta-paks. Director of Video Instruction at B.U., Peter Burrel, says the B.U. video program is oriented toward a meeting of the minds between the "artists and the plumbers" of the video world and further directed toward encouraging students to use their video skills in community service. The program is supported mainly by "hard" money--funding from the university--and only partially by "soft," or grant, money.

The place where video seems to be getting the most respect and where a stimulating environment for video work seems to be taking hold most strongly is at M I T, which has five major centers of video activity: the film section of the humanities department, the political sciences department, the Center for Advanced Video, the libraries, and the Center for Advanced Engineering Studies (CAES). CAES has taken the lead in encouraging M I T video: it's two-inch broadcast equipment, used for the continuing education of engineers, attracted two major video grants. Following the grants, a good deal of student interest developed, and CAES developed procedures for students and faculty to submit video project proposals for approval and funding.

Now CAES has two-inch, 3/4 inch, and half-inch production equipment, studio, and cable systems available free to M I T individual producers, student production groups (such as Basement Video, and the Video Club), students in classes, and cross-registrants from other schools. A group of student producers broadcasts seven hours of cable programming a day, consisting of student and faculty projects, as well as lectures and programs picked up from other cable stations such as Harvard and Tufts. M I T theses can now be done in video, and three have thus far been completed.

Niti Salloway, manager of the M I T cable system, says one problem with video there is that the only way for it to continue is for the Institute to endorse it. The video community at M I T exists now solely because of about a half million dollars in grants. But those grants run out in December, and if the video program at M I T is to survive, Salloway says, the Institute will have to support it just as it does the libraries and art galleries.

M I T, though advanced in offering video opportunities, illustrates what Guzzetti hopes to avoid in developing video at Harvard. "Grant money is not the answer. It just causes problems," he says. Soft money, he adds, "puts us in the position of losing things," because it permits a program to be built up only to be dropped if the grant money runs out.

The only thing standing in the way of further development of video at Harvard is, of course, money. Gardner says he sees no new economic dawn on the horizon. Guzzetti says his only hope is that the economy will change and Harvard will come up with more money for video. Gardner estimates $50,000 per year of University money would cover the costs of offering a more extensive video program. One possibility would be to follow the example of many European colleges and hook up with a TV station for expanded opportunities. Another possibility would be to apply for a grant in the hopes that the programs it funds would convince the University to begin permanent funding.

Meanwhile, Jane Q. Student will just have to ferret out her own channels of video expression.