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.

I am anything but an objective observer of course, though by the same token I think I may claim to be an informed one. I taught for twenty years at Cornell and still maintain close ties to that institution. My older son is a graduate of Albany (my younger of Cornell). One of my first Ph.D. students was for many years chair at Albany, and another of my students is currently on the faculty there. Clearly then, in addition to my general concern about my profession I share a personal sense of pain at the difficulties these two schools, both of which have contributed so importantly to that profession, are now undergoing. This in turn has led me to ponder how we have come to this unhappy situation and what its implications might be as we try to find a way to move forward as a profession.

Like unhappy families, every unhappy theatre program is unhappy in its own way; and yet, at least from my personal perspective, there seem to be many significant parallels between the trajectories of the Cornell and the Albany programs, parallels that I know can be extended to many other programs with which I am acquainted across the country. The current threatened state of theatre at these two schools has developed from a variety of sources, some external, but also some clearly internal. Among the external problems one must begin, I think, with the troubled position theatre holds in the American culture and consciousness. Doubtless our old enemy, the antitheatrical prejudice, is at work here, but more generally there is the long-standing problem that in American culture theatre has rarely been considered a “serious” art, as music or painting are. It is for most people a “show,” an “entertainment.” Compare this attitude with that generally found in Europe, which certainly has a long history of antitheatrical prejudice as well, but nevertheless generally considers theatre as a significant contributor to cultural discourse, an attitude rarely encountered in this country even among “serious” theatregoers (whose idea of “serious” theatre is in general reverential Masterpiece Theatre–style revivals of Chekhov and Shakespeare). Thus the American universities and colleges are only reflecting the values of their surrounding culture when, in lockstep fashion, they hold the sciences in higher esteem than the arts and humanities, the humanities in higher esteem than the arts, and within the arts, music, art and architecture in higher esteem than theatre. Evidence of this can be found wherever one looks. It is not at all surprising, for example, that theatre as a discipline was finally recognized only in the most recent NRC reports, when music and art have long been included. And nothing could indicate the position of theatre within the American academic imagination more clearly than the way the Albany cuts are currently being reported in major professional sources. There was an open letter circulated 13 October on the H-France email list containing a lengthy summary of the actions leading up to the announcement of cuts as well as a good deal of information on the services rendered to the university by the threatened programs. In this extensive letter theatre is mentioned only twice (both times in passing). One might of course argue that since this letter is drawn up by and for teachers of French, a focus on the disappearance of that and other language instruction is quite understandable, but presumably more objective sources are no different. The report on the Albany action in the 4 November 2010 issue of Inside Higher Education bore the revealing headline “Disappearing Languages at Albany.” The first paragraph, in its entirety, ran:

In the more than a thousand words of the article, theatre is never again mentioned. The commentary on the crisis by Rosemary G. Feal, the Executive Director of the Modern Language Association in The Chronicle of Higher Education (7 November 2010) is no better. It begins:

The “along with” says it all. Theatre is not mentioned again in this eight-hundred- plus-word article. With such a hierarchy firmly in place in the culture in general and in higher education in particular, theatre is the obvious place to look if you are cutting from the bottom up.

There is no doubt in my mind that this cultural bias has contributed to the current crisis, but I must add to it an even more uncomfortable corollary. No small part of the current difficulties in educational theatre, I believe, can be traced back not to the philistinism or misplaced priorities of university or college administrators, but all too often well-meaning but ultimately unfortunate decisions made by members of the theatre profession itself. To explain this I must offer a overview of the academic theatre profession over the past half-century. Admittedly it is subject to my personal biases, but I make bold to assume that in its general contours it will strike familiar chords with many of my readers. When I entered the profession in the 1950s, the general model of theatre in higher education, then most notably advocated by the large Midwestern universities and influenced on the one hand by German Theaterwissenschaft and on the other by the pedagogical theories of John Dewey, sought to produce theatre scholar-practitioners, equally at home in the archives or onstage, and equally adept at writing a scholarly article or directing or designing a production. How successful or how desirable that model was need not involve us here, but it was widely accepted as the goal of theatre education, and certainly of my theatre education. My first job was as a theatre designer, and for many years, like most of my colleagues, I divided my professional time fairly evenly among teaching, research, and directing.

During the 1960s and 1970s this model began to be challenged both by those oriented toward academic research and those oriented toward production. The argument on each side was essentially the same: both theatre research and theatre production should become more professional, more specialized, more “serious.” Theatre historians, it was argued, would be taken more “seriously” by “real historians” if they devoted themselves to research and did not spend they energy “putting on plays.” Similarly university theatre productions would be taken more “seriously” by the “real theatre” if their artists, like “real artists,” were not burdened by research obligations. Behind this latter assumption lies of course another problem within American culture: the widespread corrupt neo-Romantic assumption (and alas not only in theatre) that all art must come directly from the heart and from inspiration and that thinking or dealing in any way discursively about your art corrupts it. Although the older model of theatre training balancing academic research and practice did not disappear, it became more and more attenuated. This process was reinforced by a number of major developments in the 1970s and 1980s. Two of these, closely interrelated, were of particular importance in altering both the orientation and the image of American theatre programs. One was the “professionalization” of university theatre training, most obviously seen in the burgeoning of M.F.A. programs across the country. The other was the construction, on campuses from coast to coast, of multimillion-dollar theatres, often far more lavishly equipped than the nation's major professional houses. As the century passed, the problems created by these developments became increasingly clear. A flood of new M.F.A. programs not only meant that professional theatre training, especially training of actors, became more erratic and unreliable than before, but it also pushed into an already oversaturated market hundreds of young people with little or no chance of ever making a living in the profession for which they had been presumably trained. The majority of colleges and universities that subscribed to the theatre M.F.A. boom have since given up that project, but the “professionalism” boom had major repercussions on the discipline, which are still being felt.

An M.F.A. program can be closed down with relative ease. Cornell, like many other universities, closed down its program in the 1990s, even though it had produced a larger number of established actors than many such programs. Monumental theatre buildings are another matter. Albany's theatre was an early entry to what Harold Clurman called the “edifice complex” sweepstakes that swept American universities in the late twentieth century, being constructed as part of a new campus project in the 1960s. Cornell's theatre, designed by the noted British architect James Stirling, was one of the last, opening only in 1989. Just how to utilize and maintain these impressive structures has been and remains a challenge everywhere. The response at Cornell was to convert the M.F.A. program into a quasi-professional producing organization, hiring part-time professional actors to take leading roles, and to reorient the theatre to become less a traditional university theatre and something more like a regional not-for-profit. Whatever one may think of the value or achievability of such a vision, it clearly moved the program even further away from the basic, traditional teaching mission of the university.

Equally important, it continued the tendency, already well established by the development of M.F.A. programs, to drive a wedge more deeply between the “academic” and “producing” wings of the program, a division that not infrequently, at these schools and elsewhere, led to misunderstandings and, all too frequently, outright antagonism between faculty and staff members who found themselves trapped in opposing camps. Tensions were unquestionably fed both by tangible and intangible elements. On the tangible side, maintaining a full production program in a large building is a vastly more expensive proposition than maintaining a traditional program of academic research, and so the rapid expansion of M.F.A. training and/or attempts to establish some form of regional professional theatre on campus tended to direct a large share of a theatre programs' resources and attention toward production. Intangibly, the hiring of faculty and staff to run these new production-oriented programs often meant that faculties were joined by individuals without traditional academic backgrounds who brought into theatre programs the anti-intellectual bias found in so much of American culture, even in the creative arts. All of these elements contributed to an atmosphere in the theatre programs at both Cornell and Albany in the late twentieth century that if not actually poisonous, was certainly unhealthy, especially for what might be called the “academic” side of the discipline. “Academic” faculty members felt marginalized, and nontenured ones (almost none of whom survived those years at those schools) felt threatened.

A decade ago Joe Roach clearly saw the handwriting on the wall and in an incisive article in Theatre Topics analyzed the results of the theatre-building boom of the late 1960s on university campuses. His entire article is worth quoting in the current context, but I will restrict myself to one central section:

These observations, deeply troubling ten years ago, can today be seen as a prescient, if largely unheeded warning to the profession. Roach's analysis offers a disturbingly close fit to recent history of theatre not only at Cornell and Albany but in dozens of other theatre programs nationwide. Unhappily Cornell and Albany are far from unique, just as the current fallout at these institutions is far from unique. Theatre programs riven by internal feuds, spending a great deal of money on nonacademic activities and with small and rather dispirited academic staffs make very tempting targets for administrators looking for likely places to cut. A by no means insignificant side effect of the focus on production and relative neglect of academics, not developed by Roach, was also the steady shrinking of cross-departmental relationships. Neither the Cornell nor the Albany theatre program was ever very large, especially on the graduate level; but when these programs were most active and influential academically, both had strong ties across disciplines, especially with colleagues in the languages and literatures. As both programs turned toward a production emphasis, they also turned inward, toward the admittedly demanding concerns of running a would-be professional theatre, and most of these interdisciplinary relationships dried up. This also meant, of course, that neither program had many devoted friends in other disciplines when major cuts began to be discussed.

In flush times universities can afford to support fairly peripheral activities; but when cutbacks are necessary then small programs, weak programs, internally divided programs, and programs that are not clearly contributing to the central research and teaching mission of the university are the first to go. When both Cornell and Albany decided to move their focus toward production they exposed themselves to the danger that, in times of retrenchment, their activities would be seen as an expendable luxury, and those times have unhappily now arrived. It may seem ironic that this blow comes when Cornell, after many years of an unstable, revolving-door academic program, has in recent years made a number of strong hirings and established at long last an important presence in that area, but irony is perhaps the wrong reaction. It may well be that had this correction not taken place the Cornell theatre program might be facing the Albany fate of total extinction, instead of extreme cuts, which in fact have been largely restricted to cutting back the production area. It is surely significant that the Cornell administration, while not specifying exactly where the cuts must take place, made it clear that they must preserve the academic faculty, thus virtually ensuring that the largely nonacademic production program would bear the brunt of the reduction. Some remnant of theatre at Albany may also be saved, as the program itself disappears, in English or other departments.

Obviously in the light of these serious losses one must ask where we go from here as a discipline. In this age of increasing specialization, a return to the mid-twentieth-century model of the universal theatre person, equally skilled in production and research, does not seem feasible. Even worse however is the later model of the divided and all too often antagonistic department that, as Roach and others pointed out long ago, unquestionably contributed significantly to the current vulnerability of theatre programs in American universities. I still retain enough of my 1950s training to feel that pure theatre and performance research, uninformed by practice, is not desirable, but a way must be found to enforce that connection in a positive way while also recognizing that, as long as theatre is going to seek a position of significance and respect within the American university, it must be keenly aware of what the university itself desires, in terms of teaching, reputation, research, and yes, commercial viability. Perhaps something akin to the model of cooperation attempted in Minneapolis (between the University of Minnesota and the then recently opened Guthrie Theater) and a few other places in the 1960s, soon overtaken by the expansion of universities into professional production, might be revisited. The problem today is that few major regional theatres still share the general humanistic and cultural goals of the liberal arts in the university, but are devoted instead to reproducing the most successful and conventional New York attractions of the past season or two. Still, attempting to develop such cooperation might also encourage some regional theatres to undertake a somewhat more adventurous repertoire. Another possibility might be the development of an American version of the performance as research model now booming in England and elsewhere but so far having gained little traction in this country.Footnote ⁴ Before jumping on that bandwagon, however, we should carefully consider how such an approach could be made compatible with the American educational system. A new version of the previous generation's wrong turn into production work that again weakens the tenuous position of theatre within American universities is above all to be avoided.

It is critical that whatever their future course, American university theatre programs must no longer allow themselves to be drawn into the ongoing antagonism between those who study the theatre and those who create it, an antagonism that is so widespread and so debilitating within the general American culture. It was a very easy trap to fall into when American professional theatre moved into the university, as program after program across the country discovered. The result, in far too many American colleges and universities, has been to weaken and divide what was already a vulnerable discipline within this social and academic culture, exposing it to the sorts of devastating attack that we have recently witnessed in these two major New York institutions.