It’s prospie time on campus, which means scores of bored high schoolers and their terrified parents are making the rounds on tours. A highlight of each tour is the new Fouts Center for Visual Arts: its shininess alone is surely a draw even for the most artistically inept student.
Unfortunately, many Whitties have found themselves unfairly deprived of the right to use this $14.2 million space which we all pay for with our tuition. The powers that be have decided that only students enrolled in art classes should be allowed to use the building.
First-year Adam Michel discovered first-hand that the Fouts Center is an exclusive facility, fit for only a select group of students.
“I began with a friendly e-mail to ceramics professor (and art department chair) Charles Timm-Ballard explaining my extensive experience with clay and asking if I could use the studio in an independent capacity,” Michel said. “He responded, telling me, ‘If you want to do work on your own you can do it off campus, and if you want to do Art you can take my class.'”
I could write a whole column about that capital “A”: but I’ll pass for now. Suffice it to say that the Illuminati have decreed that we peons are unfit to use the facilities, or even distinguish Art from mere craft.
Thank goodness we have distribution requirements, or some of us would graduate never knowing how to completely offend a student with a one-sentence e-mail. Please don’t let me anywhere near this building, or I may drown in the molasses-thick pretension.
Professor Timm-Ballard declined to comment for this column, but Provost Lori Bettison-Varga tried to explain the policy of exclusion.
“[The Fouts Center] is not an open use facility,” she said. “Many of the materials and equipment used in the Art Department are hazardous if misused. Students in art courses are taught the proper use of equipment, proper use of supplies and proper disposal of hazardous materials.”
While the potential for equipment misuse exists, this is no reason to deny experienced, competent artists like Michel. Further, what is preventing the art staff from providing, for a fee, a short tutorial on proper equipment use? This could be a money-maker for the art department.
As first-year Laura Euller put it, “The new building is so beautiful and well-equipped that it seems silly not to put it to as much use as possible.”
As it stands, this treatment of students is not only silly, but wrongheaded and unfair. Locking art and theatre majors out of the library would make just as much sense. Or what if the Writing Center were only open to students in English classes, and the pool closed to all except Varsity swimmers? The music department permits non-students to use expensive pianos in the music building; how is this any different from art supplies?
As a liberal arts school, Whitman usually does a good job of encouraging and facilitating diverse learning opportunities for its students. However, it has completely failed here.
“Is it too much to ask for the art department to foster art without academic purpose?” asked Michel.
Artists and non-artists in the student body are united in their disdain for this ill-considered, condescending policy.
If no reconciliation is to come with the Administration, perhaps Whitman will build a new $15 million building where the less talented and dedicated among us may scratch out stick figures and clumsily prod balls of clay.