By Odai Johnson  

“Hard times, hard times, come again no more” – Stephen Foster

It could be a story, I suppose, like those in journalism called ‘tragedy and triumph’, in that feel-good vein of reportage that sets up misfortune only to glance away to the ‘indomitable human spirit’. But it is the business (and to a degree, the pleasure) of scholarship to unsettle genres, to trouble such narratives, and above all, not to look away. That is closer to this story. Still, as the subject is bound up with our profession and its problematic future, one likes to evoke the hopefulness here, if it can be done with a level head and an open eye.

I: The storm

For most of us in higher education, the fiscal sea-scape of the recession is a bad hurricane season with rotten levees and neglected break-walls. We’ve run out the alphabet in naming the storms, and still they come. The woes are all too familiar, like many professions, but more familiar to those in social services. Shrinking budgets, lost lines, diminished resources, closed programs, vital services suspended, and the pressing, ever-present anxiety of survival. The list of lost or threatened programs is the legacy of the year that passed and the promise of the year to come. The Academic Landscape has become scarred by its own absences, collapsed curricula, consolidations of the hands-on arts into on-line non-arts, dean-down decisions, that re-map the field. All represent a sort of piecemeal foreclosure of the field.

In the new fiscal environment, the American University is rapidly becoming a smaller and more impoverished place, economically and experientially, a place where specialization, deep discipline, and the leisure for excellence are now the blank spaces on the wall where the stolen paintings once hung. We walk past them on our resigned slouch to the new mediocrity, to the new on-line future, the new over-sized and the under-staffed service elsewhere that is the new face of studia humanitas.

Like so many other institutions, when the first wave broke two years ago, the University of Washington

as a whole was reduced by 19% of its operating budget. Nearly one-fifth. Some of this was offset by

a sharp tuition increase, but departments across the board were still required to trim 8–10% of their

budget. In many cases it was trimmed for them. Staff hours were reduced, then cut; services and

personnel eliminated; subscriptions canceled; libraries closed; freezes, furloughs, teaching and research

assistants reduced.

Those faculty lines, representing the largest financial burden, that had become available (through

retirement or non-renewal) were not replaced, but absorbed into the gaping maw of deficit. Routine

re-appointments (like lecturers on annual, three or five year contracts) were no longer pro forma,

but fiercely defended and frequently lost. The inequities were rife. The cuts were opportunistic: what

became available was taken. The doctorate program at the University of Washington’s School of Drama

lost 40% of the program in one year. The Dean suggested the program close.

II: The resistance

There was the usual response: internal and external organizing across the field, a letter writing campaign

predicated on the assumption that the administration just wasn’t aware of our reputation, our standing.

Generous response from our peers accomplished little to argue exemption in a climate of triage. The

long-deferred results of the NRC (National Research Council) survey of doctoral programs finally arrived

in print, and though we were rated quite favorably, we were equally ineffective at marking anything of

a cursus of honors past. Internally, dorsal fins surfaced from the formally benign, blithely acknowledging

in lazy circles that one program’s loss would at least ensure the survival of the others.

Help, of course, never comes from elsewhere.

In the end, we sought out every faculty member who taught in some context of performance culture/

performance history from a wide menu of departments across campus and brought them together for

a meeting. Forty-four of us gathered and we laid out two distinct futures: shrinkage by discipline, cut by

cut, department by department, program by program, our own the first installment on a grim future,

broad and visible; or a new organization altogether, a new model that allowed us to come together to

share resources, to build a consortium of common interests to protect against our losses, and preserve

our field.

It was a hopeful, strained, idealistic, practical, cynical, anxious conversation that netted many responses.

Some departments, though we may share certain research interests in performance, were reluctant

to move outside of established disciplines; some representatives belonged to larger departments who

could frankly survive the loss of lines. Most however, (small graduate programs in the humanities)

recognized they were one retirement anyway from a threatened or lost program. We began to explore

ways we might share resources, curriculum, faculty, students to fill in the needs of others and preserve

us all.

The result was the creation of The Center for Performance Studies a consortium of graduate programs,

all teaching in some aspect of performance culture. In medieval terms, it would be a commons where

we would all graze our grad students. Collectively we might pool resources that individually we had lost.

There were precedents of course from other institutions to consider: Berkeley, Northwestern. But in the

end, each university has its own exigencies, and each model must in some way reflect the unique losses,

needs, and preservations of its own environment. Nothing of any scope is ever accomplished without

coffee, so we embarked on a series of coffee conversations with all and any interested faculty in other

departments to get a sense of where the threat was greatest, what the needs were, and how creating a

commons might serve.

III: Tools

We secured support from the graduate dean for the building of a Web site as a first point of presence.

It features a list of relevant graduate courses of each department, a list of faculty in the Center, links

and bios, as well as events, calls, conferences, teaching workshops, and guests. We used the course

catalogue to begin to re-shape traffic flow between departments that would allow students to migrate

more easily, moving seminars up or down an hour. We began to encourage more porous borders

between the disciplines, less insistence on ownership of the field.

If three faculty from three departments were all teaching the same period (Modernism, the Baroque),

we asked: to what extent could these approaches be shared, and how, without losing the disciplinarity

of the field, might they be combined? We looked at the things we had in common, what we already

shared. We found three member departments in the Center who all taught a research methodologies

class, and if these were combined into a single cross-discipline course, two faculty are freed up to teach

other classes. Two departments taught pedagogy. Could it be shared? We looked at what courses might

be combined to our advantage without becoming dilettantes or tourists out of field.

Seminars began to grow, to take on new shapes, opening themselves to the interests of others as well as

the in-house population. For example, in partnering with language-based programs like Classics, French

and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, we began to explore ways in which graduate courses might become

content-based, rather than language-based, that is, to become bi-lingual. Departments which no longer

had faculty enough to cover their own programs might avail themselves of shared seminars to preserve

their curricula. Most importantly, students from separate discipline might learn from each other.

We began to conceive of an additional product: Center Seminars.

Center Seminars are truly inter-disciplinary seminars based on a theme approached by three or four

faculty from different departments. The current (Spring) seminar is titled Rebuilding Culture, Reclaiming

Identity through Performance, and is taught by faculty from Drama, Dance, Ethnomusicology, and the

School of Social Work. Each faculty conducts a two and half week micro-seminar with a common text

around a common theme, approached from their own discipline. Other proposed seminars consider The

Colonial Moment – the point of contact from several disciplines.

To construct these seminars without creating an additional teaching burden on the faculty, we created

a system through which credit for teaching can be banked and carried from year to year. Credit banking

allowed faculty one/third of a course credit for teaching in the team-taught seminars, banking it and

withdrawing it later (after three seminars) as a full course release. It allowed a pool of faculty to draw

from, to engage under different themes in different years. Participation in three such seminars netted a

full course credit, redeemable at some future quarter of choice.

IV: Brown Bags, Workshops, and other Happy Hours

All the while, to introduce the broader graduate population to the work and opportunities of the Center

to other faculty, and to the graduate students of other departments, we began a series of Brown Bag

lunches in which we invited constituent faculty to share their research and research interests. This

brought new populations from other departments and introduced their work to our students. We began

to share speakers and guests, to seek out and sponsor speakers relevant to wider disciplines. When we

went out and began talking to graduate students across the campus, polling them about how such a

Center might help, some ideas were immediately applicable, others not so. We couldn’t replace lines,

but we could open up curriculum. We could make new curriculum.

One request surprised us: could we train teachers? Among the shortages, particularly acute in the

English department, was the training of teaching assistants. As faculty lines were lost and grad students

pressed into teaching more and more, resources to accommodate this shift did not increase. So we

considered what we might do and responded with a series of Performance as Pedagogy workshops.

Using performance techniques of presence, voice, movement, our performance faculty began to offer

Friday afternoon sessions, open to all graduate students, to help build authenticity in the classroom.

Directing faculty worked with TAs to think about their classes as scene partners. Vocal coaches helped

release voices. Movement work, Alexander techniques, even audition training, all served to build more

confident teachers. These workshops have become particularly important as more and more graduate

students are replacing faculty in the classroom, without the individual department support for teacher

training. We hope to develop these workshops into a full quarter course.

Eighteen months since its creation, the Center has become the poster child at the University of

Washington for inventive survival. And it is beginning to pay dividends. University grants have begun

to help support the venture, underwriting the efforts to create new curriculum, while the first outside

grants provide a platform for increasing visibility. The Simpson Center for the Humanities has graciously

sponsored a Center Seminar and with their aid, we are growing.

Where new hires are occurring in constituent departments, one component of the search is an eye

toward compatibility with the Center. The English hire, for example, will teach one seminar every other

year for the Center. Graduate programs, suspended with the loss of faculty, are beginning to re-tool to

include Center seminars to supply a component of their own missing curriculum. As more departments

realize how their losses might be augments by partnership, they begin to turn to the Center to fill in the

absences of their own departments.

In the end, such consortiums can never compensate for the loss of deep in-house specialization; but in

a world of loss, we look beyond our own into the possibilities of deeper, broader approach to training

that partners students with common research interests in performance culture from a host of disciplines

from whom we might learn.

Because in the end, we are a curious and consumptive field. We borrow freely from other disciplines

– anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology – but we do not always borrow the discipline of other

disciplines. Such broad based, inter-disciplinary components grounded in a core curriculum of our field –

theatre and performance history – can only produce a wider, deeper base upon which to construct solid

scholarship.

Such, at least, is our hopes. The project is new, it is fragile, and it carries its compromises with it. But

it is our best break-wall in this unending season of storms. It also gave us what no administration can,

agency over our own future. Change will happen to many universities in the months to come, troubles

will unfold like a long Dickensian serial, but agency is a choice. Proactive efforts to consolidate the best

of what we do might leave us richer, if smaller, but richer. And that will make all the difference. Best of

luck to everyone.

Odai Johnson directs the doctoral program at the University of Washington's School of Drama, as well as the Center for Performance Studies. He has published widely on pre-modern theatre and his current work is titled Ruins: Classical Theatre and the Archeology of Memory.