Posted on 05/25/2018 11:30:29 PM PDT by llevrok
The Evergreen State College is known for a liberal-arts environment that encourages free artistic expression. However, this spring Evergreen will cut heavily into the budget for staff and facilities that nurture theatrical expression. This year, the last seven shows at TESC will be especially fraught but meaningful, as they mark a climax before severe budget cuts and staff reductions go into effect.
The Experimental Theater (COM 124, a 200-seat, black-box venue) and its costume and scene shops will close at the end of the spring 2018 semester. On Friday, May 18, faculty and staff members were informed that three of four staff positions and 20 student-staff positions are to be eliminated. There will also be cuts to the academic budget office, library staff and media-services office.
Theater arts at TESC have educated and entertained thousands of students and community members over the decades and have been a greenhouse for theater to grow across the South Sound and the world. Alumni of the program have gone on to theatrical success. Mark Alford graduated in 2011, has since co-founded two improv companies and appeared on nearly every stage in the South Sound. After renowned choreographer and actress Amy Shephard’s 2009 graduation, she completed theater graduate school in England. Matt Lawrence, a 1992 graduate, went from a role as technical-theater director at TESC to lighting design at Abu Dhabi entertainment complexes for global entertainment agency ThinkWell.
Lawrence describes the decision to close the theater as “mind-numbingly short-sighted” and “diametrically opposed to the point of a liberal arts institution. Performing-arts curriculum without actual public performance is like swimming school without water.”
“We have 5.9 million (dollars) in cuts to make,” explains Zach Powers, communications manager for the college, “and the reduction to our Communication Building and some of our arts programs that work in that building make up 250 thousand of that.” In a year of “waning enrollment,” Powers emphasizes the need to prioritize funding for lower-cost programs that most directly affect students’ academic paths. “There (are) no curricular offerings being cancelled as a result of these closures. … We’re trying to minimize the effects on students all over campus. … It’s not as though (the arts) are being singled out.”
“As the school was working on their fiscal challenges and drop in enrollment,” recalls Jerry Berebitsky, the facility’s current technical director, “they said, ‘Stuff will happen. People will lose jobs.’ We knew the arts are not often respected in the budget-cutting realm, and it’s something that’s easy to cut early.” The faculty will be reduced to “about as minimal as you can get,” Berebitsky says: “one full-time dance faculty, one full-time theater faculty and (supplemental) weekend and evening faculty.” Berebitsky himself will lose his job. The recital hall will remain open, but scheduling space for student-run arts organizations to perform will be increasingly difficult.
“I find it very disappointing,” says Shephard, “but I’m not surprised. … The benefits of theater and performance for individuals and groups are boundless, but … the benefits aren’t easily measured and recorded, so those departments that rely primarily on qualitative data are the first to get cut.”
Asked to characterize this loss to students and the community, Berebitsky recalls a Russian-history student who was cast in ‘Three Sisters’ this spring. “He was deeply moved by what this experience brought to him,” says Berebitsky. “He thought he would carry this with him the rest of his life. I was really moved by his comments. He was choking up as he reflected on it. That’s what I think the power of Evergreen offers.”
Hahahahahahahah...that is just an AWSOME spell correction fail!
The part “watching lefties stroke their goatees and say ”Yeesss...yeeesss...I get it!”’ was correct, but I have no idea what the “Woke thee” thing is...I think I probably meant to say “I can just see watching lefties stroke their goatees...”
Spell correct can be funny and unfortunate depending on the circumstances...at work, I usually end my emails with “Regards,” and every once and a while, it spell corrects it to “Retards,”!!!!!!
One of these days I am not going to catch it, and a firestorm will be ignited!
Where I got that goatee imagery...
A few years back, one Saturday night a conservative friend and I went to Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA, a city right up there with Berkeley, Ithaca, and Madison with regards to its leftism.
They had a place outside an Au Bon Pain (coffee shop) that was frequented by chess players, and that night, there was a “Poetry Slam” going on, so we stopped and watched for a few minutes.
There was a girl, dressed all in black, faintly resembling Ally Sheedy in the movie “The Breakfast Club” reciting a “poem”:
(Spoken in beatnik tones) “...and then he grabbed me and threw me down. And he F***** me. And then again. And...”
We looked at each other with this shared expression of “Can you believe these effing lunatics?” and then, looking at the people sitting next to us watching intently, a guy, stroking his chin and listening as if it were the most profound thing he had ever heard.
That is a great, great, story...it describes in real-life detail what goes on with many of these people, living in an insulated artist/academic bubble, and they do it long enough that they begin to believe it is the real world.
These art majors, they go to school, often paid for by someone else or with exorbitant student loans. Then, they may go for their masters (again, often paid for by someone else, parents or loans) and THEN, if they have a modicum of talent and/or know the right person, they may get into some program or artist in residence thing and extend it a little longer.
But, as your story shows, at some point, the “gravy train” comes to an end, and they are forced to leave the insulated bubble and enter the real world (much as a teenager leaving home) encountering things like how and when to buy toilet paper, etc.
It comes as a shock to some people, having to actually go out and sell their skills to either a company or individual customers, and get sporadic payments of money for services rendered.
Part of me wants to feel pity and put a hand on the shoulder, and part of me wants to laugh and boot them in the butt, and the part that wants to laugh and boot them in the butt won fairly easily in the case you described.
I think working for yourself, running your own business, is damned hard, and is hard work. I am not cut out for it, but if I had to do it, I would buckle down and do it.
What I find surprising is that so many people go into college for the arts without seeming to even give that a second thought, and then, like the woman in your story are devastated when the piper comes due.
Maybe that is why many (though by no means, all) artists are left of center...they can’t think ahead and plan.
Hehehe...”Twit” account!
Uh, no, that isn't what Evergreen is known for. And no one who doesn't recognize what it is known for will have a clue about its current budget travails. Evergreen is known for hatred, intolerance, and racism - it is, in fact, rather notorious for it. The current occupants of that playpen don't see it that way, but then they aren't the ones paying the bills.
Professor Weinstein and his wife were not simply yelled at, they had their lives threatened for the offense of being white and insisting on going to work on a day when student activists had declared the campus off limits to white people. Little squads of self-appointed enforcers were carrying ball bats around on that campus, so the threat was real.
What should have happened is that the budget for a public institution which allows that sort of abuse should be zeroed out until it shows repentance and reform, the guilty actors expelled and if faculty, fired. Tenure doesn't cover felony. What actually did happen was that Weinstein and his wife were paid off and they decided to move out lest the people threatening their lives follow through on that threat, because nothing whatever was done to them.
The author pines for lost artistic freedom, but in fact both artistic and academic freedom are long gone at Evergreen, and what is left is a hostile, toxic wasteland of political correctness which should be and is withering on the vine. The only people mourning for that are the abusers.
it boggles my mind that the school's president is still there.
He was a major cause of the situation getting so out of control. Then, last summer, he declares he has PTSD due to the trauma of the strike(s).
Now, with declining enrollment, even though 95% of all applicants are accepted, he's still on the job??
Good point, they still consider themselves ‘elite’ and have not learned humility from their experience.
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