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INHERITING THE WIND: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE CURRENT CRISIS IN THEATRE HIGHER EDUCATION IN NEW YORK

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2011

Marvin Carlson
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Extract

It is no secret, unhappily, that the study of theatre in the colleges and universities of this country is a discipline under siege, but the severity of the problems received strong confirmation in New York State this fall when two of the most distinguished and long-established (over a century in both cases) programs in the country were, with little warning, faced with draconian cuts or outright extinction. The fact that one, the state University of Albany, was the flagship school of the public system, and the other, Cornell University, was one of the state's most distinguished private institutions, suggests the scope and impact of these actions. At Albany, four other programs are being terminated along with theatre—Classics, Russian, Spanish, and French—while at Cornell the extent of the severe cuts imposed on the theatre program—almost a quarter of the total budget of the department (which also shelters dance and film)—are being suffered by no other program in the university. The prominence of these two schools in a state that has long claimed a central position in American theatre makes them particularly significant symbolically of a discipline in crisis, and this has impelled me to engage in serious and sometimes painful reflections on that discipline, the basis of the present essay.

Type
What Are You Witnessing?
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , May 2011 , pp. 117 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2011

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References

Endnotes

1. “Disappearing Languages at Albany,” Inside Higher Ed, 4 October 2010; online at www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/04/albany (accessed 4 November 2010).

2. Feal, Rosemary G., “The World Beyond Reach,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 November 2010Google Scholar; online at http://chroniclecareers.com/article/The-World-Beyond-Reach-Why/125267/ (accessed 8 November 2010).

3. Roach, Joseph, “Reconstructing Theatre/History,” Theatre Topics 9.1 (1999), 3–10, at 7–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Two very useful surveys of this movement have recently appeared: Practice-as-Research: In Performance and Screen, ed. Allegue, Ludivine et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2009)Google Scholar, and Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research, ed. Riley, Shannon Rose and Hunter, Lynette (New York: Palgrave, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.