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Economie Challenges for the Fourth Generation University Theatre Kent Neely College and university educators are keenly aware of the current economic pressures which are causing tremendous shifts and changes in the manner in which they work. University theatre scholars and practitioners in particular experience an exacerbation of the problem. The current economic crisis affects university theatres especially hard, largely in part from a history of serving two constituencies, higher education and the professional theatre. Those two institutions grew rapidly over the last 30 years by relying upon deficit budgeting and an imbalanced exchange between services and population . As a result of this conflict, the university theatre can no longer sustain the quantitative productivity which characterized it in the past. For the purposes of this article, university theatres are defined as academic and practical programs of theatre study found in colleges and universities . The phrase "economic challenges" refers not to sales, earnings nor the means to those ends, but to the conditions that surround, and to the influences exerted upon, an enterprise by coincidence or design. Further, it presumes that these conditions and influences affect the existence of that enterprise through the supply and acquisition of human, financial and material resources and the use of those resources in the creation of a service: education. University theatre, now in its fourth generation, has developed within four distinct periods that parallel major changes in the United States economy, public policy and higher education.1 The first generation occurred near the turn of the century when George Pierce Baker began playwriting and study classes at Radcliffe in 1904, at Harvard in 1906 and finally at Yale in 1925. Baker's efforts were the first to indicate that the study and practice of theatre was a legitimate academic pursuit. The second generation began shortly thereafter and continued through the Second World War as colleges and universities "bootlegged" theatre courses 57 58 Kent Neely into curricula. Public speaking courses were thinly veiled efforts to teach acting; playwriting began to be taught in "workshops" and classes at places like the Carnegie Institute, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Iowa. The third generation, after World War II and through the 1960s, was the boom time for higher education. The G.I. Bill enabled veterans to reenter acadame. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 funneled vast amounts of money into colleges and universities. The growth was unprecedented in the nation's history.2 The fourth generation began in the early 1970s when college and university funding and student populations changed dramatically. It has been further affected by the erosion of academic resources since 1980. For the past three years it has been hit hard by a major economic recession that Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman said is unlike any the country has previously experienced.3 Friedman noted that "because we have underinvested and overborrowed to such a great extent for the last dozen years, we have seriously impaired our country's long range growth prospects" (Meyers and Alters 16A). Friedman's observations apply to the fourth generation of university theatres and to professional theatres since the prior three decades are characterized by an overextension of education's and theatre's economic tools. Neither grew as a result of an equitable provision and exchange service based upon continuous market need or demand. Both have relied upon deficit budgeting while defining operations by growth objectives; a strategy which grew opportunistically and concurrently in both the university theatre and the professional theatre. An initial rupture occurred for both institutions in the early 1960s as more and more colleges and universities embraced art training as part of their missions. Consider a position speech delivered by W. MacNeil Lowry in 1961 to a conference of graduate deans. Lowry, then director of the Ford Foundation's Program of Humanities and the Arts, was a principal leader in the funding of non-profit arts organizations. He noted a dilemma in the shift of arts training programs into higher education and away from private institutes. The shift concerned him because it was inconsistent with the traditional college and university role as a place for the liberal education of the...

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