The Rise of the Arts on the American Campus

Abstract

THE RISE OF THE ARTS ON THE AMERICAN CAMPUS by Jack Morrison. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973, xx + 221 pp., $8.95. In 1971 Dr. Jack Morrison, formerly dean of fine arts at Ohio University and presently associate director of the Arts in Education program, The JDR 3rd Fund, presented an illuminating report at the annual meeting of the International Council of Fine Arts Deans, in which he analyzed statistical material supplied by the administrative officers of 56 of the 91 members of the Council. This indicated enormous variations among fine arts programs in institutions of higher education, but seemed to confirm many people's feeling that there has indeed been a significant increase in the demand for training at the university level in all of the major fields in the arts, and that, on the whole, universities and colleges have attempted to meet this need. Dr. Morrison has now completed a much more detailed study of a much smaller group of institutions, and the report he has now issued through the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education is full of important information which needs careful consideration. He selected seventeen institutions of the most widely varying types, from such giants as Pennsylvania State University and New York University to small colleges like Antioch and Bennington. There was an equally wide geographic spread, from Harvard to Pasadena, from Dartmouth to Jackson State. It is meaningless to compute averages from the utterly variable figures which emerge from such a statistical study, but a wealth of specific information is here spread before us. A questionnaire gathered information about seven areas: architecture, dance, film, music, theatre, writing, and the visual arts. It records the dates when these programs appeared in their respective institutions and gives us the number of majors, class enrollments, and degrees granted for the five-year period 1966-71. It records the amount of space which has been allocated to these fields, the capital investment in buildings for the fine arts, total budget figures, and the number of faculty members. An ingenious series of questions attempts to determine the support or resistance to the arts on campus, relationships with the central administration and boards of control, and with the local community. I think it was a mistake not to include also the total enrollment of each school, as it is important to know the proportion of students in the arts in relationship with the entire institutional dimensions.