From the Source; The Urban University and the Performing Arts

And at the outset I'd like to say that it seems fitting that we return to Boston as an organization. I recall in February of 1974 that this organization had its founding in this city. As a matter of fact it was on this campus and perhaps even in the same room although I don't remember that very clearly at that time we were called the Committee of urban public universities and some time later we changed that kept the same acronym but changed it to the committee of urban program universities recognising that it was not only state supported institutions that had an urban commitment but many private institutions as witnessed by the fact that some of our own very active participants in this organisation are private institutions so it's a pleasure to return to Boston

and to the UMass campus. It's my pleasure this morning to introduce those who are going to participate early in this program. And one of those is Dr. Obi Hardison for a presentation on urban universities and the performing arts. It is almost impossible for me to give all of the credentials that Dr. Hardison brings to this presentation except to say that he is a 5 beta kappa. He is currently a professor at Georgetown University. He has his own consulting firm in Washington and I just learned happily that one of his graduate students is a professor at my institution and happens to be the next door neighbor of my older son and that old

cliche that it's a small world indeed holds true. Dr. Curtis and I think if I were to try to recap all of your accomplishments that I would be doing you a disservice because I could not do so adequately and if I may simply say that we're pleased to have you and look forward to your presentation. Dr. HARTOGS. I appreciate that introduction for its specificity and its brevity. Thank you very much. I want to thank Jim Harrison especially for the invitation to be here. It's a pleasure to talk to you and to talk about a subject that interests me greatly. Before I get to that subject I'll say that the one item that Walter didn't mention in the introduction and I want to call your attention is that I

am the chairman of the board of the National Humanities Alliance which is the only organization in Washington D.C. that specifically concerned about the fortunes of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And last Wednesday we had what we considered and our 57 constituent organizations considered to be a great victory. I sat in the Senate hearing room where confirmation hearings were being carried forward for the nominee for chairman of the national down for the humanity of Mr. Edward Curran. Normally those procedures take a quarter of an hour and they have one senator breath who propping his eyelids open with toothpicks and a couple of other senators will sand type questions for the candidate answer at the leisure. But for this these

hearings we had senators waker Grassley Hatch Kennedy tell Simon Carey Frahm in Massachusetts it was a tremendous turnout. And those hearings lasted four and one half hours and they were devastating. And we think that we may have turned back that nomination. We're still counting noses but if so this will be a. I think a great victory for the Humanities in the academic world and for a change in the humanities will have made themselves felt in Washington D.C.. Usually they're notable in Washington for their utter invisibility. And I have said time and time again in hearings where appropriations for the endowment when I I would be one person the Bill Tanner from the Newberry Library in

Chicago would be another person and maybe somebody like Willard where it would be the very purpose of everything the rest of the room would be utterly vacant while on the other hand since we're talking about the Performing Arts Today I will note that when the arts and downwards have their hearings usually the rooms are crowded and you have a Charlton Heston a mofo sings an aria and the newspaper and the television are present and so on. But this time it's different. I have maintained from the very beginning that the humanities have a much larger and broader and deeper constituency across this country than the arts. And that for every dollar that goes into the arts $50 goes into the humanities but those dollars tend to be invisible because they go to the humanities via your universities and they go into departments and so on whereas when they go into the arts they go in let's say to a theater it's an independent entity that has to make its joyful noise to the Lord every night in order to survive. So but if we can

organize a constituency as I think we're about to do and if we can make ourselves felt in Washington and I think every one of your faculty members who is in the humanities will be the beneficiary in the long run. And we started to do it. I think we may have turned aside a hack. And an incompetent. And if that is the case maybe next time around they will bother to consult the humanities community before they decide on their appointee the appointee as you know it so the current to point to is a little bit as though they have taken somebody who was a locomotive engineer and appointed him to the ER and nominated him to head the National Science Foundation. It's just ridiculous and it's an insult to humanness that that person should have been appointed. Which is not to say he's probably not a nice fellow and perfectly good in his particular area. The other topical item I encounter when I when I come

here to talk about the arts is a big picture of Tom Wolfe in the Boston Globe today. And I understand you had a tour yesterday and saw some of the architectural glories of Boston and got a lot of information about the Wii. Read gentrification of the city or the revitalization of the city a little bit above to remind us of the fact that we are educators and we're supposed to be critical. I will quote Tom Wolfe here on the subject of what's happening in the arts today. Quote this is a period of lust of greed of great hawg wattle. But what do we see in our art. Do we express the spirit of our age. No I don't. I think it's probably a little bit of truth in that I think this is that we've been through a very mean spirited period of American

history. Maybe we got a little more of it to to experience but maybe eventually the Spirit will change. Now I prepare the next for the day. So here it is. But this is a relatively small informal group. And so with your indulgence when I'm going to do is to pick out a few of the topics and talk about them informally and try to be a little bit provocative. And then at the end of that open the floor for discussion because you people have a lot of information and experience which needs to be brought to a subject that looks like motherhood. I mean who can and who can oppose the universities and the performing arts. But on the other hand it's got a lot of complicated

aspects to it. But let me begin by by saying that I've known about it. I started my academic career at what I would call bucolic universities to contrast them to urban universities. I got my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and I wouldn't call Madison an urban environment even though it's the seat of the state government. Certainly it is in Chicago. And then I spent most of my teaching career at another bucolic university kind of a classically bucolic you know areas of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill intentionally selected by the founding fathers of North Carolina in some argument about whether it's the first or the second state university in the United States but one of the earliest intentionally located as

far from any of the big urban sections of the state as possible. Partly I suppose because of the tradition the medieval tradition of the university as opposed to be a sanctuary walled off from the rest of the world and partly because even at the end of the 18th century there was this sense that students tend to be content theorists and universities tend to be centers of troublesome free thought and radicalism and if you keep them as far away as possible a scene out of your hair. But I begin to get a sense of urban universities. When I was appointed in 1968 to the Board of Trustees of the University of Detroit or as we called it in North Carolina Detroit. And that is a Jesuit university. When I came on board it was working up to its first Centennial a great university in the center

of the archetype whole urban environment of the United States Detroit the great center of American economic muscle. At least that's what it was supposed to be in those days but the year I joined that board of trustees the roof had fallen on him. It was the year after the assassination of Martin Luther King the riots in Detroit had been especially violent and they had been especially environment in violent running in the neighborhood immediately surrounding the University of Detroit. The university had gone to bid one night thinking of itself as a center of service to its

community. And one of the special cultural jewels of its urban environment and it had awakened the next morning literally surrounded by fire and surrounded by a hostile alien a mob prone to violence including violence against the student body. Indifferent or utterly puzzled by what the university was all about. And we all know why that happened. The university tried like so many universities thought of its mission as educational. It had thought of its clientele primarily as a white middle class children heavily Catholic but from

all denominations actually and it had oriented its programs in that direction. But gradually over the years the neighborhoods around of the university had changed. The term frequently used with it is urban blight but that suggests a kind of a psychological orientation all by itself it's not urban blight is just the fact that the nature of the group surrounding the university changed they become poorer. They become much more black than they had been before and the university inheriting a tradition which goes back to the same traditions that created places like Chapel Hill. I had not considered where it was geographically. It hadn't tried to build bridges to that community or if it

had the bridges had not been affected. And you know it we on the board of trustees the discussions frequently touch the problems but nobody really did anything about them I think there was a feeling maybe you couldn't do anything about them. And so as I say they woke up one morning and the roof fell in. One byproduct of that was a symbol was a structure that became a kind of a symbol of what had happened leaving the university was forced to put a high wire fence all around the campus separating it from the urban environment. That didn't make it any more popular in the neighborhood but it was forced to do that because the parents of the kids go to the schools and what are you doing to protect our children there have been some cases of rape and other violence on the campus and so they

did that and they manned the gates with the security guards. And you had to kind of get looked over way you went in and out of the campus. It was a tragic kind of a symbol. Nobody liked it. But but that's that was seen to be the secret of survival. Now during my 10 years on the board of trustees the university troika the university went through one of a series of agonies after the other. I can't speak highly enough for the administration and the faculty who were forced to make a constant series of readjustments who had to contend in addition to the changing curriculum and the huge currents of shifts in the student enrollment patterns and in the way the nature of the student body.

And along with that declines in enrollment which meant constant layoffs and all the agonies of wrestling with budgets that wouldn't balance complicated then in the 70s by the energy crisis and the decline of the Detroit automobile manufacturing centers that had been great sources of financial support for the university. In spite of all of that the faculty and the administration hung in where the universe had a or retrenched as the saying goes. And it's a successful and viable and vital institution today. But the parrot him and I'm trying to suggest is that. There weren't enough bridges between the university and the community and I don't know whether

the people including the Board of Trustees including myself who were involved with the university back in the late 60s and early 70s whether they had a sufficient understanding of the situation even to suggest the steps necessary for Politico with it I don't know whether the faculty would have gone along if the suggestions had been made because we were thinking in terms of one world and all of a sudden another world was there all around us. But the University of Detroit did relate to its community directly over and above the educational services that it provided in them. A few ways one way of course was that it had professional schools that provided community services and I think the

pair of him for that. It is a dental school. It had the only dental school in the south of Michigan and they ran a dental clinic and this dental clinic provided services for the low income segment of the community. The services were not disinterested because this was a good way to give the students clinical experience under supervision. But they were enormously appreciated and a great many people got dental services through that unit clinic that would not have had any dental services otherwise. So that was a bridge with the community. This is WM BFM Boston. You are listening to from the source. Tonights present generation is the urban universities and the performing arts because this is a tape presentation. Please hold your telephone calls. And now back to Obie Hardison.

The law school did a have similar bridges because they provided legal services for low income individuals who desperately needed the services and particularly to them in those turbulent times. There are very frequent legal problems. Then a second area which touches on your experiences yesterday was a city planning. The university had a fledgling School of Architecture and city planning into the direction of a very inspired gentleman named Bruno Leon. And this school worked with city authorities and individuals in the immediate neighborhood of the school to sort of reveal what could be done to stabilize the neighborhood and to make it less tense and a more agreeable place for everybody in the neighborhood of two to live.

And I want to come back to that in a moment. The third area in which the university built bridges to the community is sort of in the performing arts area. And I'm going to be a little unorthodox here to include one and tell you about in a performing art but I'm very serious. The university Detroit had a superb basketball team that regularly made it a national ratings and it was a basketball team that was thoroughly mixed racial bias I whenever it was on television that basketball team became an advertisement for the fact that the University of Detroit was an equal opportunity educational institution. And you know usually think of basketball as a performing art. And you usually think of sports as a totally separate from the performing arts. But if you if if you think of Performing Arts in terms of

building bridges to the community surely a high profile team athletic team is a way to build bridges to every Sigmond of a community as long as that team is successful. If it becomes unsuccessful or disastrous then it can be a way of exacerbating tensions in the community but the basketball team was a great and see even after her comments to the university trait I confess that when I was a trustee being academically inclined and so I didn't fully realize that and I looked on sports as a sort of a secondary activity of the university. And I think my attitude if I were in that same situation again today would be somewhat different.

Now if you go to the university trait today at least the last time I was there you'll still see that wire fence but it's more of a relic then a reality it's sort of a it's less like architectural so something then that of the the the architectural preservationist might want to keep because it's a it's a it's a memory of a time which happily if it hasn't passed completely seems to have largely passed and the sense of tension and hostility has declined. Part of that is a growing up of everybody. Part of it however represents another facet of the ever changing urban community. And it brings me back to the School of Architecture School of Architecture and city planning did work with the community around the university to stabilize and improve the neighborhood and they were

pretty successful and pretty soon faculty members began to buy houses in that a neighborhood partly because it was convenient and partly because of the depressed values of the houses matched the depressed pocketbooks of the faculty members. But as it happened. Some of the houses began to be restored right a little restoration movement. And as a few houses began to be re stored at me values continued to be excellent terms of value for dollar. More people moved back in and lo and behold you have the process which we all know as gentrification. I think today if you go into that neighborhood you see a reasonably flourishing middle class neighborhood of much more racially mixed than it had been previously but relatively flourishing and there they

were on clay is a very elegant houses in the area one own by the Fisher family huge Neo two door kind of a structure. And these houses some of these houses have been restored Of course they're no longer owned by their original owners but some of them have been restored so that their touches even of architectural elegance in that community. And since the last time I was back to Detroit was about three years ago things that made gone a lot further. Bye bye now. I don't know what how I feel about gentrification if I were a university administrator seeing the neighborhood around my university and proven land values go up and increasing safety and the increasing friendliness for the university. You know sprouting little stores selling boat in fancy little French nouveau cuisine restaurants and so on I suppose I might be

feel rather positive about it. But on the other hand I would feel the same way I felt when I lived on Capitol Hill and saw that happening in Washington on Capitol Hill I would feel that maybe the university and the community is losing something in the process that. These highly renovated gentrified sections of the city that are occupied primarily by middle class people are kind of urban ghettos of them of their own and they're different from our concept of the city as a place which you know welcomes people of all backgrounds and all incomes and which draws a great deal of its strength and fascination from its diversity and diversity which extends into the neighborhoods as well as the diversity that you can see if you see the whole city and think of all the components that make it.

Well that's my background with the urban universities. I'm now teaching at an urban university and I'm fascinated with the experiences that I've had and because of this very kind invitation I've thought a little bit about urban universities and the performing arts particularly in Washington but elsewhere in situations I know about and also in relationship to efforts that I made when I was chairman director of the Folger Library in Washington to develop strong performing arts programs there. I think I'd have to offer is my the conclusions of my observations furnished that the business of a university whether it's an urban university or a bucolic university or any other kind of university the first primary benefit is education. Second that the university is always going to be a little

bit different from the surrounding community even if as in the case of George Washington University and watching you drive through and there are places where you don't know whether you're in the city or in the university because the university has moved into row houses it's going to be different because it's business primary fundamental business is education and that's it's a great service to the community and education requires some kind of withdrawal from regular activities. If only the setting aside of a few hours a day on the part of a student who's got a full time job to go to class. And do the assignments from say every urban university I know about has very flexible programs and Saturday classes and night classes and you don't have to get regular degree. You can register as a nontraditional student for specific courses and they're also offering courses for a nontraditional students that many of them didn't

offer many a few years ago because because they didn't seem to be as it were a standard to study academic courses. But beyond that let me take three examples of universities and their relation to performing arts let me start with Georgetown within a very well. Georgetown is located as the name suggests in the midst of Georgetown in Washington D.C. which is one of the wealthiest enclaves I suppose on the eastern seaboard. Georgetown has a performing arts for its students but not no not really high profile performing arts programs for the community and it doesn't make much of an effort to publicize the performing arts programs which it has for students in at the community and draw the medium. Why should it.

The last thing in the world he would say about the residents of Georgetown are that they are culturally be private. They all have boxes at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They're all pestered up to their eyeballs by the performing arts organizations in Washington like the Folger Library and Arena Stage for contributions and going to endless benefits and all of the rest of it. And I think if you as a town launched a high profile performing arts program it would be a real loser. It have nothing to do and because all performing arts programs are gambles. That's one thing you have to realize about the performing arts. There are always a gamble and they're always in a state of crisis. It wouldn't have anything to gain it had everything to lose. What is George 10 do in place of that. It is deeply concerned about his community and I would say its

its image throughout Washington in every segment of the community is incredibly strong. Well at but upper end of the scale at the upper end of the scale they have a continual series of seminars and symposia very high level for various special groups in Washington. The Law School for all of a billion lawyers and watches sometimes I feel there are five lawyers in Washington for every other human being in the population. They have continual symposia and lectures series for people interested in international relations and diplomacy. Because they have a fine School of Foreign Service they have similar symposia for people in the medical community and those symposia interestingly enough extend beyond things

like the latest developments in hematology to medical ethics because Georgetown is the site of the Kennedy Center for Bioethics and they have some of the finest people in the country in that very important field. Now with the other the populist end of the scale God has smiled upon Timothy Healy. God gave Timothy he leave John Thompson and the whole AI basketball team which is not just nationally rated but it is so good that occasionally it beats the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the A C tournaments and of course that's been an enormous positive influence on a university's relationship to its community. We're back to sports as a performing arts but there surely they are the archetype all instances of the influence of sports in community

relations. Now let me turn from Georgetown to Catholic University. Catholic University does not have John Thompson Its never had so far as I know a really significant sports program. It's always been that prided itself on being a graduate school primarily and it developed because of the need to provide graduate programs for people who were in the clergy and give orders that was traditionally centered around those activities though it has changed significantly. Now as an accident of history Georgetown University Catholic University rather I had a very good theatre program presided over by a man named Gilbert Hartke. And in the 1940s that theater program became a nationally recognized. And since the 1040s graduates from that program have become national

stars in the Broadway theater and in cinema. Well naturally having this accident of history happened cancelling university has a strong suit from which to play and consequently they emphasize their theatre offerings. Now they don't pretend to offer professional theatre they don't pretend to compete with Arena Stage or the Kennedy Center but they do advertise regularly in the paper and because of the great mansion of the stature of their theater program they regularly get fine audiences and sometimes they will bring in international figures to work with that program. About four years ago they brought in Peter Brook for example and everybody in Washington had to go down to what I am glad to say is now called the Gilbert Hartke theater at Catholic University to see what Peter Breggin was up to. I don't think they they put a lot of money

into that program. If you measure money by the cost of professional theater. But it's very successful. It's very good in terms of community relations. And of course it's closely integrated with the academic programs because this is a theater a school first and last and it's to educate people about four professional activities in the theater. Now for my third example which is of the opposite extreme I have to turn away from Washington D.C. to Herbert Lehman College in the Bronx. Herbert Lehman College found itself 10 years ago in a situation a little bit like that of the University of Detroit in the 60s though not as critical there hadn't been any riots so far as I know but the city the area around Herbert Lehman had changed. It had become a much less affluent and much more multi-racial and multi-cultural and Herbert Lehman

if you ever visited the campus is kind of like a gigantic Roman arena surrounded by all these apartment buildings and high rise buildings and super highways and this many other thing leading off into the Bronx. And you look at it physically and it and you can see it's physically to be physical characteristic campus symbolize a certain difference between the campus and the surrounding world. I know that people Herbert Lehman were concerned about that because I know Leonard leaf the president and I know several other people in the administration and several years ago a loner an excellent con man that he is persuaded a City University of New York system of they should create a very large Performing Arts Center on the campus of Herbert Lehman which they did. And I know that they had to immediate objectives for that

Performing Arts Center. One of course was to provide high quality Performing Arts for their students and faculty but particularly for their students on the theory that getting their students interested in culture in the form of theater and music and so on was an important educational function. But that Performing Arts Center is far larger than it would need be if it was only for the students. The other is that they wanted to bring the community into the campus. They wanted to create a sense in the community that this campus was part of the community and contributing vitally to the community even as it drew energy and talent from the community. Now I have no idea about the financial situation of the Performing Arts Center I know they have booked in some fine attractions I know they have had great successes in terms of. Attracting audiences on the basis of my own experience with the performing

arts I deduce without any evidence that they must also have had horrible crises and table pounding sessions and bleeding on the carpet sessions and all of the other things that seem to be inevitably associated with anything involving the performing arts. But I know nothing about that. I merely say that it's that it happens at any university that he lacks to go the route of Herbert Lehman and to create a large scale performing arts program for the purpose of improving community relations has to accept the fact that pounding on the table and blood on the carpet and. Treasure is threatening to resign and trustees saying these crazy bohemian artist there is waste squandering all our money and they don't care about finances and they don't have a businesslike view of things and so on.

All of which is perfectly true. But that goes with performing arts and nobody should institute a performing arts program in the illusion that this performing arts program is going to be different. It is simply the nature of the beast that performing arts programs are like that. This is wu Amby Af-Am Boston. You are listening to from the source. Tonights present Haitian is the urban universities and the performing arts. Because this is a tape present Haitian please hold your telephone calls. And now back to Obie hardass. Well now I'm going to draw some conclusions and open the floor for discussion. Conclusion one which I hope I have illustrated from my examples is that the decision about what to do in the performing arts is related to the specific concerns and sighting and situation of the university involved.

When university like Georgetown may elect to have a low profile program another like urban layman like to have a high public profile program. But you can't have any hard and fast rules. Second if you decide to go in that erection of a high profile program you need an adequate facility like that Herbert Lehman performing arts center and that means a fully professional in size in acoustics in seating capacity in parking tremendously important for any urban university in sound of the lighting equipment and in support staff. By that I mean particularly in the advertising department and in the box office because if you have a poor box office day if you're dead in the water. Second you need professional management. You need somebody who knows the performing arts and who doesn't threaten to commit suicide the first time a crisis comes down the pike.

Third you need to add adequate capitalization. You can't do it on the cheap and by adequate capitalisation I mean you have to face up to the fact that you're probably going to lose money. The question is how much and sometimes you're going to lose a lot of money and sometimes you're going to make money. So you have to be prepared to have situations where things look really bleak because you drop a bundle on this particular show or feature. Those are some of the requirements and balancing them. I think there are three benefits that can be derived benefit one is that a university benefit the students and the community are educated culturally and that's very close to the center of the heart of what I suppose we're all doing in the university world. Second a community and university benefit in the sense that bridges of understanding are creative and these

bridges are good at all times but they're awfully good to have planted those inevitable crises occur in the relationships between the university and the community if you've established those bridges beforehand and they are solid. You can cross them finally and not to be scorned. The community contacts that are made by performance in general and by the special activities that are appurtenances to performance by which I mean for example dinner parties with the star fancy a black tie opening night reception. They fund raising and benefit Committee as they get established and so on. These introduce you to people who will support your program through donations.

But more important they introduce you to people who are not well not only give the smaller donations and become involved through their interest in the performing arts but if they are there when the inevitable happens and the chairman of a board striking his fist on the table and says Gentlemen and ladies it is now time to begin a $100000000 in down to the campaign. You cannot know too many of those people. You know a lot of them through the regular activities of the university. But the performing arts will introduce you to more of them and they will be very helpful. Well those are my observations on this I've dated my talk. And I now will be very happy to open the floor for discussion. Thank you very much. I am. Sure it is.

I'm going to ask that we hold questions on till after Mike Alexander offas given his presentation then we can address questions to both of the presenters. And since the chair is being arbitrary in that respect I'm not going to even ask you to agree to that. And now my faculty would say well we knew it all along. I do wanted to introduce Mike Alexander up an introduction which may not be at all necessary but I learned some things about him last night and since he was a dinner partner he is president as you know of Columbia College in Chicago. I did not realize until our conversation last night that he's been with Columbia College almost four decades now and has been president of that institution since 1961. For that alone he should have several stars in his crown as

in addition to his white hair. He is. Involved in many organizations having to do with the college and also in Illinois. But what interested me greatly is the fact that and in fact I did not know is that Columbia College is the largest independent college in Illinois. That did surprise me frankly and I had not really thought about the private school size in Illinois until that figure was given me. That in itself says that that college and Mike have a very important role to play not only in Chicago but in Illinois. Mike I will forgo other accolades to be cast in your

direction and give you the chance to make your presentation to us. Will you join me in welcoming my colleagues. Thank you. My father warned me against the Russian ballet and mayonnaise and people who invite you to speak at 9 o'clock in the morning which means you airs under which circumstance it's fortunate that Dr Hardison is the mornings principal speaker. I had understood my task was to introduce a panel discussion which is a reasonable invitation you get your name in the programme and you don't have to do anything. But I'm informed now that the panel members have been swept away

presumably on Gloria's wins and appropriate I suppose of this New England setting and as in the old What's My Line show I await now the appearance of the mystery panelists. Our subject is the arts and the urban university. Ordinarily discussions about the arts have a large occupation with matters of definition for our purposes today. We will assume some common understandings and confine ourselves to the arts as academic disciplines in the shape of these in urban university settings. Perhaps we will be successful too in avoiding controversy about fine and popular arts though admittedly such contentions have currency in many campuses. Some

institutions compete commuter and residential alike are for a comprehensive variety of arts subjects and majors. Others may have more restricted interests usually in music theatre and fine arts. Obviously the prominent presence in the humanities and social sciences and aesthetic societal and economic implications in a wide range of other studies. We are mainly concerned here however not with the texture of the arts but with the character of education for arts occupations and with their performance within and within an urban university setting and in relation to the University City community. Typically university practice in the arts is shaped to a residential largely non urban model as similarly higher education generally follows such a story forms. Thus conventionally the arts disciplines are taught as major fields of study. In general

consider consistency with ordinary curricular requirements. Parent Thetic only an estimate which recognizes ancient tensions between conservatory training and the arts in collegiate curricular prizes and where performance an exhibit of student and faculty work is meant principly is the cultural dimension of university life and student experience. A frequent corollary of this is that universities serve as performing and exhibit centers for their towns and communities. And in recent years many universities sponsor professional theatre and musical seasons and other mainly popular entertainment events. I offer this brief review of the odds and university setting as a background to what I think is our association central interest in the arts namely a critical need to develop a distinctive view of the IDEs in terms of the mission and environment of the urban university. This is not to say

that the practice of the arts by urban universities should discard the traditional tenets of the arts education or the a valuable effect of these in the collegiate experience but instead that while test good qualities are preserved the special character of the urban university and its community O can give a different caste starts practice. In fact while not a universal pattern a number of urban universities have developed very enlightened and distinctive Urban Arts programs. I hope today that some of you will describe your institution's projects. I submit that in the conduct of their arts programs urban universities have unique opportunities not only to better serve their been mission but as well to genuinely improve the character of their education and its disciplines and the contributions of the arts to university life. What is necessary is a much heightened recognition of these opportunities

and a corresponding commitment to their implementation a process which should carefully and gauge the participation of the faculty and staff. Of many many departments and university officials and not be restricted Dart's Department singularly. Moreover if such wide participation is enlisted. These explorations can provide productive occasion for influential members of the university to consider broadly the special distinctions and implementations of the institution's urban service. A Paramount identity of the IEDs is their public character. Though individually performed most expect indeed depend upon audience and Arg making in response to its infinite variations is a universal human possession. Thus the arts activities of an urban university particularly when they occur in great variety can enjoy a large community audience and participation

and correspondingly can become an important mutuality between the city and the institution in an active programme of university sponsored community arts activities and services. The university's public regard is clearly much improved. This is important implications for student recruitment fundraising and the climate of community support for university interests. Moreover such arts activities give very valuable experience and opportunity to students and faculty. Professional life to their talents and unique vitality in the classroom as Similarly the pool of professionals uniquely available in the city is a rich resource a part time and special faculty. As a verification of this view of the arts is an important and successful way of implementing a university's urban mission. I offer a brief case study of my own institution.

I think our experience is at the opposite end of the scale from the University of Detroit as I think in a general sort of way. Doctor I'm sorry Dr. artisan and I have widely differing views on the role and presence and conduct of arts programs particularly performing arts within a an urban university setting. While we are an independent graduate an undergraduate liberal arts institution we have a principal event that the in arts and media subjects an emphasis stress particularly in the last 10 to 15 years. In that time Colombia has grown from less than a thousand students to today more than 5000 with a full time equivalent of forty four hundred and unusual full time for a fourth proportion for a big city commuter institution. Ten years ago virtually no parents

and the fewest people will influence college enrollment or give financial support. Ever heard of Columbia. But great numbers of young people and every city community knew about Columbia and that it was a good place to go to college and the source of this was and is now a deliberate and imaginative community service program particularly emphasizing the args we perform theatre and music in the communities mostly in ad hoc settings. We conducted a wide variety of special projects ranging from ethnic arts to an Appalachian cultural center in one way or another. We were a participant and often leaders in the greatest number of city arts and cultural activities and in community schools and parks. We gave meeting places to countless community groups with our interests and we had prominence in all arts issues before the legislature local and

state. In short we worked every street in the yards enjoyed glad to publish Sydney and very quickly won an important measure of the city's attention and respect. A reputation which attached to the college is holding the whole enterprise. All of this I hope will encourage you to your question and discussion and in the interest of time V8 agree to eliminate a great deal of other remarks I wanted to make but I think there are some distinct differences as I suggested between my own view of the arts in an urban setting and the previous speaker. The building of expensive theaters the conduct of wholly professional theater undertakings. The building of great galleries. The whole effort to bring the

community into the college seems to me to be vastly less important than bringing the college to the community something we've done with remarkable success. I think there has been no diminution of quality. Our students have had a unique kind of experience. The streets have literally been a constructive part of the whole arts undertaking. But in a very practical sense account for the quick and I think fairly said remarkable progress of the institution and most certainly it's a role that as I mentioned earlier there was a time in the early 70s when not a parent in the city of Chicago and heavens knows none of the city's fathers ever heard of Columbia. But there were there were literally hundreds of thousands of young people who knew about the college through what it what it did in the arts performance within the city.

I close with an example of this. Out of our ad hoc to Sylhet he's in music and theater. We bought a very old building I think for about $30000 to remodel the remodel the most minimally and called it the free theater. It was on the city's north side or mid north side in a mixed Hispanic black and Appalachian community performed all sorts of theatre things musicals did rock operas did Shakespeare did it all to just an endless variety of Performing Arts. And we played in a I think in 1972 to something in excess of one hundred twenty five thousand young people. And again it was

this sort of thing that accounted for the remarkable growth of the institution. The students had confidence in us. We were consistent with their aspirations. Many instances we anticipated it and the arts for us served as an organizing tool and whatever prominence the institution has in the city I think stems from this peculiar. And vital kind of arts activity which we engage them will give that good for provokes discussion. Good for that. We will. You have been listening to it from the source. Tonights present tension has been the urban universities and the performing arts by Obi Hardison. Stay tuned next for black expressions.