Don Jones on thu 22 oct 98
Teachers who are as
>incompetent as you describe are out there, but they are in the EXTREME
>minority. You do a great disservice by bashing higher education in such a
>broadly generalized and profoundly inaccurate manner.
>
>If any of you out there are considering undergraduate or graduate school,
>please feel free to email me on or off the list, and I will do my best to
>give you candid and realistic assessments of what higher education can and
>cannot do for you. For most of us, undergraduate and graduate school change
>our lives for the better in ways which would be all but impossible
>otherwise. As you can probably tell, I had a really wonderful graduate
>school experience. I know that not everyone is so lucky, but even if one is
>faced with flawed faculty or a shoddy facility, graduate school need NEVER
>be a wast of time. When that does occur, it is usually the fault of the
>individual student.
>- Vince
>
Vince,
I have to take issue with you here. It seems you are being as general in
your criticism as Donn was. There are are alot of complaints out there
over a good many years as to the condition of fine art instruction at the
college level. It has to come from somewhere. If it were an extreme
minority as you stated, there wouldn't be this low level anger I sense from
alot of graduates and faculty as to how the system works.
My feeling is that there is something wrong. Be it lack of accountability,
lack of responsibility, out of touch instruction, or simply a feeling that
the instructor would much rather be working on his/her own projects than
bother with students. Then there is all the administration madness and
little feifdoms that grow in this environment. It can be more than
frustrating for a student and teacher alike.
Your last statement in particular is quite wrong and shows your lack of
experience with these kind of bad situations. Graduate school can be an
incredible waste of time with bad guidance and a distracted faculty. I am
sincerely happy that you had a good undergrad and graduate experience.
Others are not so lucky and they are not as rare as you think.
I'm going to put forth another theory here that you all can take issue with
or not. I think that the problems with ceramics department instruction and
fine art instruction come from insecurities and defensive issues arising
from the perceived division between art and craft. The universities and
colleges are responsible for creating this division by putting the ceramics
departments under the administration of the fine arts department. Ceramics
instructors are therefore constantly having to prove their programs,
products, and students are at a fine arts level rather than a craft level
which is percieved to be below that of fine art. This may be all at a
subconscious level but I think it exists. That is why there is all this
argument over art vs craft. The word craft should be out of the
discussion and the categories should be deleted. The art department should
be divided according to other criteria such as visual arts, performing arts
etc. Over here is clay, over there is fiber, here is dance etc.
I think that egos are very fragile at the college level since there is no
clearcut bottom line to prove how well you do at your job. Most of the
exhibits that appear on resumes are in-house shows at various other college
galleries. Evaluations by colleagues boil down to alot of politics.
Student evaluations are thrown out the window. One could hope that a good
student goes on to fincancial success or fame and glory of some kind. But
really, everyone hopes for fame and financial rewards such as those of
Bennet Bean getting 30,000 for a piece. The irony is that if a student is
interested in money questions, he/she is often put off by the statement
that university art departments are not for fincancial pursuits. "We are
above all that" It is convenient that faculty have this nice salery and
quite a lot of time to pursue lofty artistic goals while secretly hoping to
get a real high price for a piece.
In conclusion, I think that art instruction at the college level is torn by
a lot of irreconcilable forces pulling in opposite directions on both
students and faculty. I hope that everyone can come together for a
solution and see that we are all in the same game.
Don Jones
claysky@highfiber.com
:-) implied in all messages and replies
http://highfiber.com/~claysky
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