I want to organize these brief remarks by way of three points: the first two are interconnected, and the third might be articulated as a question. And please bear in mind that these originate in my perspective as an administrator for most of the past fifteen years, having served over five years as a department chair and, at present, seven and a half years as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University.The first point concerns a trend I have seen gathering force over the past decade or so of restructuring departments and schools, and these typically manifest themselves as mergers, consolidations, and the closing of departments. At Indiana, three new schools have been founded in the past decade: the schools of Global and International Studies, the Media School, and the School of Art, Architecture + Design. The birth of the Media School was particularly difficult, as an independent School of Journalism was closed, an action that did not endear the university to many alumni and supporters, and two very successful departments no longer existed in the autonomous way they had previously enjoyed. Many faculty, most of them younger, embraced the change, but many—most of them older and established—did not. Some faculty were not encouraged to pursue positions in the new School, leaving it up to administrators like me to broker arrangements across campus with other academic units. The reasons for such restructuring are numerous, but suffice it to say that, in the long run, one hopes that the costs of administering a single School as opposed to three units will decrease, the pressures of border crossing for students will be reduced, and innovation can flourish. Cost reduction, however, in my experience is not likely to be achieved in the short term—just the opposite much of the time.The study of drama, my second point, has been affected by this trend of consolidation; the theater department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for example, recently divided in such a way that publishing drama scholars went in one or several directions, artists and practitioners went in another. But the decline of drama study in theater departments is actually alarmingly widespread, and here I have no desire to disparage the academic work of MFA-holding professors of directing or design. But it is startling, I think, to see both the lack of drama courses in English and language departments, on the one hand, and the declining number of drama theorists and historians in Theater and Performance Studies departments on the other. The website for the theater department at my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, for example, includes the biographies of thirty-three faculty, less than a half-dozen of whom are publishing scholars of drama and theater history. At Indiana, which a generation ago boasted one of the most distinguished faculties of drama and theater history in the country, a faculty of twenty-five in Theater, Drama, and Contemporary Dance includes only three Ph.D.– holders, one of whom was a visitor until this past year. In fact, the graduate populations of Ph.D. programs in drama and theater are in such significant decline at some institutions that many surely will not survive. Another way of saying this is that unlike the consolidations I spoke of a moment ago, a strategy of centralizing cognate disciplines, drama study has moved—often perilously so—in an opposite, decentralized direction on many campuses (which is one reason why so many visitors and adjuncts work in arts departments of all varieties). The very first bullet point trumpeting the attractions of the Illinois Ph.D. program in Theater Studies make this pattern obvious: Doctoral students will realize “opportunities to work with theater faculty affiliates across the campus.”These two points lead inexorably to this question: “Where will drama be taught on the twenty-first-century college and university campus?” The answer might be “Everywhere—or nowhere.” Teachers and scholars of drama need performance, but can it really be the case that serious directors, actors, or designers do not need drama? Of course they do. The Illinois website declares, “We Make Theater Makers.” And, as the associate dean for the School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana the past two years, I can echo this sentiment. We embrace makers of all kinds: from those who work in costume shops to those who require increasingly sophisticated fabrication technologies. But where will the serious study of drama be—where will it exist—in this new culture of making?
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Feb 24, 2020
Syamsul Bahri + 1
Open Access
