Dennis Hollingsworth

Dang. (the USC Symposium)

Alas, the Future of Art School may not be in my future! I might not be able to make it to the Symposium tomorrow, or at best I can try to get in sometime midway.

I was able to get a copy of the Primer, available here.

One last note: I have heard tell that at least for two art schools in Southern California, there is a problem with old guard tenured faculty who tend to rest on their laurels and take a permanent vacation from the streetfighting arena (I was going to write "marketplace") of their professions/disciplines. Slackers by another name, these professors represent a retrograde tendency in the academy, a kind of intellectual/professional/creative torpor that acts as a drag to progress within the university.

(Caveat: I tend to wince at the formulation of this thought. I don't mean to portray legacy faculty in such a negative light... surely many such faculty are carrying much water for their departments, surely many are isolated in their respective tunnel of interests, surely the human tendency to form rivalries and instinct to compete can make such distinctions a handy weapon to unfairly gain advantage. But given this caveat, all schools suffer from such topor. The question here is whether it is at such a level that harms the educational mission.)

In one school, most of these slacker faculty are monolithic in terms of cultural diversity, their interest in expanding the multicultural dialog nil. As a result, the students hunger for diversity of various kinds -especially cultural- and thus agitate fruitlessly petitioning for radical exemplars in the public sphere to contribute to the intellectual life in their schools. This situation becomes more strange in that contemporary culture has overtaken university culture in the progess of the that particular (multicultural) debate, leaving the university mired in a public argument that is 20 years or so old. The trouble is that the students are only dimly aware -if at all- that their apparent sophistication (purchased at so dear a price) is shop worn upon reciept.

In another school, slacker faculty have retired their professional practice on the sly. No longer having to struggle for success within their work, they go through the motions within the institution. As the saying goes: "Good enough for government work", the temptation to punch the clock has evicerated the intellectual ideals that the sanctuary within academia was meant to inspire. As a result, students model themselves on degraded standards of excellence, oblivious to the sharpness of the cultural streetfight that is out in the world. Young faculty when confronted with the problem of intellectual (a.k.a. theory) torpor, respond by insisting on more intellectuality (theory) for the students. In an era where theory itself needs its own comeuppance so that it too can evolve, the strategy of increasing the volume of theorization seems to me that it would only compound the problem with another orthodoxy. What is desireable is to acquaint students with the heterodoxy of the dialog in the street. But until the slacker faculty get a life within their profession, this source of the problem will continue to be an drag on any ambition for acculturating students to the "cutting edge" however it is defined.

It's worth asking at this point: is the university the proper place for the "cutting edge"? Perhaps that is what the street is for? And the university is best reserved for something else? I ask because I really don't know. I start thinking of institutions like the military, who have the pressing need to adapt to a changing world... and they too have similar problems with creeping bureaucratization which is overcome only with extreme effort.

As I like to say: Bureaucracy is the natural enemy of art.

The sobering thought is that reform within the institutions of higher learning will be extremely difficult, if it is possible at all. The problem of slacker faculty can be joined by bloated budgets/tuitions, the lack of financial transparency/accountability, and a growing irrelevance in a time where technological change can spawn and exhaust several careers within a person's lifetime. Our universities need their own reformation but the problem is that since they were designed to provide a refuge from the markeplace, academia lacks the systems for self correction (creative destruction). And thus the problem compounds.

What we need is to radically imagine a university 2.0... but how to start?