The new art season is not quite upon us, but the new academic season is. I was incommunicado yesterday while making my way through the flooded Mohawk Valley (and avoiding my usual route through the Susquehanna Valley, where roads were washed out) to get to my alma mater, Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. I’ll be seeing some of the starchitects’ additions to the campus, while my husband (whom I met in college), is busily planning his next class reunion.
I’ll have more to say after I return home, assuming I can navigate through the still flood-ravaged region.
For now, I leave you with the Art History Newsletter‘s latest rankings of the top 50 art history doctoral programs. Here are the Top Five:
1) University of California-Berkeley
2) University of Chicago
3) Columbia University
4) Yale University
5) Princeton University
I won’t even tell you where Cornell is!
Meanwhile, seventh-ranked Harvard University came in for a drubbing in its own alumni magazine, in essays by two of its alumni who deplored the university’s relative inattention to the creative arts.
As one of a small group of alumni (including Bill Gates) who were asked for their visions of the university 25 years from now, composer/conductor John Adams wrote:
I…imagine a Harvard that treats the arts with the same sense of
importance that it accords its schools of law, medicine, science, and
business.
For too long Harvard has viewed the arts as an ancillary activity, as extracurricular, something its students do on the side.
Similarly, Mia Riverton, an actor, writer, producer, and musician, wrote:
It is widely acknowledged within the alumni community that students seeking to realize their arts-related ambitions receive less attention and fewer resources than those in more traditional areas such as law, medicine, or—my personal bête noire–investment banking.