Discourse and Disjuncture between the Arts and Higher Education ed. by Jessica Hoffmann Davis (review)

Jessica Hoffmann Davis is revered in arts education circles for the development of the Harvard Arts in Education (AIE) program and the subsequent research that led to her seminal work, Why Our Schools Need the Arts (2008). Now, ten years after leaving Harvard, Hoffmann Davis tackles the complex relationship between university arts programs and the academic institutions that house those programs. She contends that despite the current commensurate goals of the arts, other liberal arts, and the sciences, “the arts are separated out from [the] core-curricular discourse” of the larger academic community (15). For Hoffmann Davis, the arts have been historically, and are still, at the margins of campus conversation. She asserts that because arts programs are not respected in the same ways as their curricular counterparts, these programs are in danger. Arts faculty may face serious resource, course-load, and tenure challenges. Arts students cannot “major honorably in the arts” (7).

This information is not new to arts administrators and faculty. Most of us have lived what she describes here. Appropriately, she places blame for the tensions that grow out of this academic sidelining on the sometimes-archaic university system, but also on the faculty engaging with administrators and other stakeholders in out-of-date ways. The onus, then, is on both the arts faculty whose persistent performance of scarcity frightens administrators, and the administrators who Hoffmann Davis positions as unable to see the real-world benefits of the soft skills that arts programs cultivate in their students.

She proposes that to counter these challenges, arts faculty might plan and implement new discursive alternatives that bridge the existing disjuncture. Leaning heavily on Nancy Cantor’s work at Rutgers University, Newark, she first suggests that faculty might reframe the university discourse by further exploring meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration between arts and non-arts subjects. Then she proposes embedding the arts within other disciplines. Finally, she invites artists and arts educators to consider service to the broader university community as a diplomatic entrée into the public sphere.

To some readers these ideas might seem dated, and to a certain extent the introduction does seem to lack cognizance of academic models in which arts-based thinking is a central university concern or where the arts and sciences are deemed effective collaborators. For example, the Stanford School has been creating interdisciplinary innovation experiences grounded in design principles since 2004, and the National Academies Press published a major report of ongoing research, The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree (2018), that highlights the imminent need for a university education that combines the arts and sciences.

However, the remainder of the book is highly engaging. It is made up of cases studies that introduce practical ways that arts faculty have dealt with the difficulties of disjuncture. The studies also present strategies for effecting change through various attempts to create positive discourse. Chapters are divided into three sections: the first confronts the challenges faced by arts programs in higher education settings; the second presents several variations of arts courses that are taught in the academy; and the third section describes the progression of a university arts curriculum over time.

“Part I: Challenges” includes four chapters that focus on the challenges that disjuncture of the arts from the academy poses for students, faculty, and administrators alike. For example, Tiffanie Ting’s chapter, “Negotiating a Path to the Arts at Harvard: Student Stories of Academic Decision Making,” features the stories of sophomores at the elite school. From her position as a graduate student and resident tutor at the school, Ting explores the ways that students are both constrained and enabled to select an arts concentration at Harvard. Through interviews and observations, she learns that their decisions are heavily influenced by the dominant cultural narratives produced within the school’s structures and are then reproduced by its student population...