Why do undergrad programs focus on design?
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JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
Oh boy do I have opinions on this topic
But what I don't have at the moment is a lot of time (embarking on a new book project, updated my website, etc etc). So I will point to several articles and blog posts. The first one is now 21 years old and still (mostly relevant):https://www.controlgeek.net/blog/2002/9/1/rethinking-entertainment-technology-education.html
I followed that up in 2019:
https://www.controlgeek.net/blog/2019/9/4/articles-from-my-sabbatical-published
And of course I believe the root of it is:
https://www.controlgeek.net/blog/20...inded-live-entertainment-students?rq=snobbery
And while I'm early retiring because there's a lot of other things I want to do while I'm still able, I was also completely burned out because my school has been devastated by endless austerity. It's a real tragedy:
https://www.controlgeek.net/blog/2022/10/21/crumbling-cuny
Our department, which I believe has the right focus for the future (I just sent one of our recent grads over to the Met Opera to do my old job there), is really collateral damage here, but it's tragic nonetheless.
(Note I just did a huge website update and there's a few broken links around that I haven't found yet).
Thanks @derekleffew for tagging me! Somehow my email notifications fell off...
John
Ahh yes, it’s been a little bit since we covered this topic. It’s good to hit it again and again here, because it might help some young people make good decisions.
I spent about eleven years doing technical direction and lighting and sound design and production for theatre and dance at a smallish, well-regarded private liberal arts college. That kind of place is maybe the last place an aspiring technician should look, but over that time I did build up a fair amount (for our program size) of curriculum and resources for student technicians. Some key points I know from that work:
First of all, I don’t work there anymore because I got a 40% raise to switch to a public performing arts magnet high school, which illuminates several of the points that follow…
Academia (or at least the 4-year university/lib arts college flavor) doesn’t believe in enshrining the work of technicians in all the prestige of the ivory tower hocus pocus. The institution doesn’t recognize trades work as scholarship. Indeed any handcraft or other “body-driven process” (yeah I got their lingo down) had better be utterly lacking in utility in order to be considered for inclusion, lest the institution’s “higher learning” branding and standard of excellence (competitive advantage in a doomed market) be degraded. It’s pretty okay to hire a staff level technician to “support” arts faculty, but tenure track positions are rare, and the staff positions will get cut/not renewed first. Tenure tracks go mostly to the performance and design sides, along with all the supportive resources the institution has to distribute to its tenure track faculty.
Tenure tracks for technicians are also rare because that same “standard of excellence” requires applicants have terminal degrees. It’s hard to find applicants for a tenure track on the tech side because so many otherwise qualified people have not collected all the degrees.
Plus there’s this: a lot of (LORT style) designers need to teach in order to support themselves, and a lot of them enjoy the teaching too. On the other hand, a lot of technicians make good livings without teaching in an academic environment. They may also enjoy teaching, but not necessarily in an academic environment.
Faculties have near complete autonomy over their content, and rightly tend to teach what they know. Folks in power (design and performance faculty, and admins who believe academic art can’t stray into trades territory) advocate for and shuttle resources towards their areas of expertise. This is especially challenging in recent years’ budget/enrollment crises, during which the reactionary austerity response has been to cloister in comfort zones rather than truly adjust to student interests and industry needs (not true in all content areas, but true in theatre I think, because that industry doesn’t pay the college back like some do). In fact, even when adjustments are made, they may remain mired in the same old biases, as happened at my former institution. They recently added some programs deemed up-and-coming. One was an interdisciplinary design major, which would pull from existing resources in a handful of departments to… I don’t know… teach students to innovate… something or other… They asked me to serve on the committee to design that program and I declined, because it was about squeezing more out of existing resources; adding the people, space and equipment to provide a critical mass of practical opportunities and outcomes from design thinking was off the table. The synergy of academic snobbery and austerity is really powerful.
So for any young whippersnappers reading, the “prestige” of college education is about 98% horse dung. That doesn’t mean college is 98% likely to be a waste, but it takes a lot of self-awareness, self-advocacy, and independent hard work, along with accurate information from mentors in your decision making process, for you to wind up in a program that really benefits you (and maybe that program should be something ancillary to production work, like business or engineering, rather than production work itself). I’ve spent a lot of time undoing the results of recruitment efforts that aren’t honest about the program a student is being steered into. It has been pretty awkward at times, standing in front of a few dozen prospective students on a visiting day with the Dept. of Theatre and Dance, and contradicting what a colleague in acting just said about “state of the art facilities” and “hands-on opportunities” in tech which weren’t really there. The sales pitches to prospective students are pretty over the top nonsense sometimes, so those students need to be able to sniff some of that out (need mentors who can help with that) and to observe as much as possible during visits, and talk to current students and alums to be sure what’s real.
The program I left has graduated quite a few working techs in recent years considering its small size, and what they all have in common is strong self-direction and personal advocacy skills. No big surprise those are ingredients for success (in anything) but it’s especially important when so many colleges lack the resources to provide that critical mass of experiences which builds true proficiency rather than “I took these survey classes”. Yes, I went to great lengths to build well-resourced formal, structural, curricular opportunities in tech, and that worked pretty well all things considered. But it’s always necessary to learn in a professional environment. Those of us who have already made our careers all know this, right? We all know most college departments can’t (and their admins won’t) provide the density of practice opportunities and breadth of exposure to professional techs that a busy road house will, right? And most won’t have all the gear you want to learn either, because that’s not a budget priority in higher ed, because, whelp, how many of us (or our companies) have donated at all to our alma maters, let alone enough to have a scholarship or room or whole building named after us? So we can sort of set this one aside; of course you learned and honed more technical skill at your road house gigs than in your classrooms. That has always been and always will be how this works. Learning doesn’t start and stop at the campus boundary. The problem to me isn’t so much that this is how it is; the problem is that colleges aren’t honest about it when convincing people to give them big stacks of money.
Now, there’s still the issue that some well-endowed institutions (not many remain in this position) could actually create brand new programs with no attachment to these old “Drama Department” mindsets that prioritize design and performance. That’d be cool. But would it really take off? How many programs graduating how many technicians can the industry absorb into high paying careers? And what of the cost to students? My alma mater’s comprehensive fee is now upwards of 75k annually, about 60% more than when I attended. Can we say even a fraction of that cost is worthwhile to get an education that might be attainable through on-the-job professional development instead? Why should workers assume the costs so that employers don’t have to? What does “elevating” this training into the purview of higher ed do to people who don’t have access to higher ed? A college education’s social and economic requirements exclude a lot of people. I’m looking around at my high schoolers today, bussing in from the poorest and brownest communities across the state to get a free start in an industry with major diversity problems. These kids don’t often make it into a pipeline controlled by higher ed, and those barriers aren’t going away without a much bigger fight than we’re talking about here.
I spent about eleven years doing technical direction and lighting and sound design and production for theatre and dance at a smallish, well-regarded private liberal arts college. That kind of place is maybe the last place an aspiring technician should look, but over that time I did build up a fair amount (for our program size) of curriculum and resources for student technicians. Some key points I know from that work:
First of all, I don’t work there anymore because I got a 40% raise to switch to a public performing arts magnet high school, which illuminates several of the points that follow…
Academia (or at least the 4-year university/lib arts college flavor) doesn’t believe in enshrining the work of technicians in all the prestige of the ivory tower hocus pocus. The institution doesn’t recognize trades work as scholarship. Indeed any handcraft or other “body-driven process” (yeah I got their lingo down) had better be utterly lacking in utility in order to be considered for inclusion, lest the institution’s “higher learning” branding and standard of excellence (competitive advantage in a doomed market) be degraded. It’s pretty okay to hire a staff level technician to “support” arts faculty, but tenure track positions are rare, and the staff positions will get cut/not renewed first. Tenure tracks go mostly to the performance and design sides, along with all the supportive resources the institution has to distribute to its tenure track faculty.
Tenure tracks for technicians are also rare because that same “standard of excellence” requires applicants have terminal degrees. It’s hard to find applicants for a tenure track on the tech side because so many otherwise qualified people have not collected all the degrees.
Plus there’s this: a lot of (LORT style) designers need to teach in order to support themselves, and a lot of them enjoy the teaching too. On the other hand, a lot of technicians make good livings without teaching in an academic environment. They may also enjoy teaching, but not necessarily in an academic environment.
Faculties have near complete autonomy over their content, and rightly tend to teach what they know. Folks in power (design and performance faculty, and admins who believe academic art can’t stray into trades territory) advocate for and shuttle resources towards their areas of expertise. This is especially challenging in recent years’ budget/enrollment crises, during which the reactionary austerity response has been to cloister in comfort zones rather than truly adjust to student interests and industry needs (not true in all content areas, but true in theatre I think, because that industry doesn’t pay the college back like some do). In fact, even when adjustments are made, they may remain mired in the same old biases, as happened at my former institution. They recently added some programs deemed up-and-coming. One was an interdisciplinary design major, which would pull from existing resources in a handful of departments to… I don’t know… teach students to innovate… something or other… They asked me to serve on the committee to design that program and I declined, because it was about squeezing more out of existing resources; adding the people, space and equipment to provide a critical mass of practical opportunities and outcomes from design thinking was off the table. The synergy of academic snobbery and austerity is really powerful.
So for any young whippersnappers reading, the “prestige” of college education is about 98% horse dung. That doesn’t mean college is 98% likely to be a waste, but it takes a lot of self-awareness, self-advocacy, and independent hard work, along with accurate information from mentors in your decision making process, for you to wind up in a program that really benefits you (and maybe that program should be something ancillary to production work, like business or engineering, rather than production work itself). I’ve spent a lot of time undoing the results of recruitment efforts that aren’t honest about the program a student is being steered into. It has been pretty awkward at times, standing in front of a few dozen prospective students on a visiting day with the Dept. of Theatre and Dance, and contradicting what a colleague in acting just said about “state of the art facilities” and “hands-on opportunities” in tech which weren’t really there. The sales pitches to prospective students are pretty over the top nonsense sometimes, so those students need to be able to sniff some of that out (need mentors who can help with that) and to observe as much as possible during visits, and talk to current students and alums to be sure what’s real.
The program I left has graduated quite a few working techs in recent years considering its small size, and what they all have in common is strong self-direction and personal advocacy skills. No big surprise those are ingredients for success (in anything) but it’s especially important when so many colleges lack the resources to provide that critical mass of experiences which builds true proficiency rather than “I took these survey classes”. Yes, I went to great lengths to build well-resourced formal, structural, curricular opportunities in tech, and that worked pretty well all things considered. But it’s always necessary to learn in a professional environment. Those of us who have already made our careers all know this, right? We all know most college departments can’t (and their admins won’t) provide the density of practice opportunities and breadth of exposure to professional techs that a busy road house will, right? And most won’t have all the gear you want to learn either, because that’s not a budget priority in higher ed, because, whelp, how many of us (or our companies) have donated at all to our alma maters, let alone enough to have a scholarship or room or whole building named after us? So we can sort of set this one aside; of course you learned and honed more technical skill at your road house gigs than in your classrooms. That has always been and always will be how this works. Learning doesn’t start and stop at the campus boundary. The problem to me isn’t so much that this is how it is; the problem is that colleges aren’t honest about it when convincing people to give them big stacks of money.
Now, there’s still the issue that some well-endowed institutions (not many remain in this position) could actually create brand new programs with no attachment to these old “Drama Department” mindsets that prioritize design and performance. That’d be cool. But would it really take off? How many programs graduating how many technicians can the industry absorb into high paying careers? And what of the cost to students? My alma mater’s comprehensive fee is now upwards of 75k annually, about 60% more than when I attended. Can we say even a fraction of that cost is worthwhile to get an education that might be attainable through on-the-job professional development instead? Why should workers assume the costs so that employers don’t have to? What does “elevating” this training into the purview of higher ed do to people who don’t have access to higher ed? A college education’s social and economic requirements exclude a lot of people. I’m looking around at my high schoolers today, bussing in from the poorest and brownest communities across the state to get a free start in an industry with major diversity problems. These kids don’t often make it into a pipeline controlled by higher ed, and those barriers aren’t going away without a much bigger fight than we’re talking about here.
Boy, Johns comment about austerity touched a nerve. The City University of NY, partly funded by the state of NY was just hammered with budget cuts for a decade under the leadership of Governor Andrew Cuomo. It was absolutely tragic what he did and I would not vote him as town dogcatcher. The pandemic did see a lot of added funding, likely used by the assorted colleges for other than pandemic related issues. Enrollmenent took a huge nose dive and has not recovered. The current governor announced increases to the SUNY and CUNY budgets a week ago, but is not increasing to replace the lost pandemic monies. Thus the BC president announces a 5% funding cutback, a hiring freeze and I suspect a lot of the adjunct money used to pay students to be crew is going bye bye. What a way to run a railroad.
Time to change gears. We all have opinions about how we were educated academically vocationally, and hands-on-edly at various institutions. The same could be said for engineers and technicians in traditional trades. How do we take our opinions and design how we would teach a course? What do we want the semester syllabus to be? Let's take that back to the powers-that-be or even better, for those of us that have Masters (not me in a production sense, but in an engeering world) become the powers-that-be and start teaching the next generation the relevant concepts.
Thoughts on how you would design a BFA/MFA (or realistically is it a BSc & MSc in Technology considering what we do?) and what would your course syllabus be? Therein lies the value of this community.
Thoughts on how you would design a BFA/MFA (or realistically is it a BSc & MSc in Technology considering what we do?) and what would your course syllabus be? Therein lies the value of this community.
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JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
I addressed curriculum in the two articles I posted above. At CityTech we are pretty much doing what I think the industry needs, and have a number of successful alumni to prove the approach:
https://entertainmenttechnology.org/
We were hurt primarily from a lack of funding, which is across the university and getting even worse, which burned me out and why I took the opportunity to early retire. With any luck they will replace me and someone less burned out can carry on.
John
More question was a bit more philosophical. I'm 12 years from early retire. Tic-toc, tic-toc. How fast goes the clock?
EDIT. Dang fat fingers, it's 12 not 2, oh how I wish it was 2.
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Crisp image
Well-Known Member
A quick Question. In the USA what age is considered early retirement? Here in Australia we can access our super at 60 and depending on what year you were born go on a pension if not self funded. For me it is 67. But for now because I don't work full time I consider myself semi retired at 54.
Its somewhat dependent on whether a person is counting on the Federal Social Security benefit to kick in. You can start withdrawing at age 62, but there a penalty to withdrawing at that age. If you wait until you are 67 you get substantially more, if you can wait till 70 you max out your benefit, but raises the question of 70 is now wondering if you'll have much time to use it. Thus 67 might be the sweet spot. Then its whatever private/work related pension you have been able to squirrel away and there's no norm for that. Those of us who where fortunate to have some form of government career will do best, as those pensions were typically very generous in terms of how much money was contributed and how much they pay out, at what was a usual lack of actual competing pay scale vs. the private sector. Or whatever money you can stash into pensions as a private employee. Unlike many countries, there is no otherwise federal pension (other than SS) and no defined age for retirement, thus we look with amusement at France where the citizens are having fits over the the government wanting to raise the retirement age to 64 from the current 62. If only........
Pensions and personal retirement funds you can start as early as 59 1/2. Social Security is well explained by @SteveB . I've gotten lucky with some investments. Its not high living, but it is paid for.
JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
As others have noted it all depends on what the individual has saved. I've been putting up to 20% of my salary away for a long time, and don't have kids so I can go early and just live off of savings and investments. I won't likely tap into Social Security for another 8-10 years (the longer you wait the higher the payout).
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Tier 4 Steve? That goverment production job really pays off quick when you start looking at retirement.
I don't actually know whatever Tier I was in. It was specific to CUNY and a TIAA-CRAF pension, not Civil Service. (CUNY Professors union). And yes, it paid off long term, but I was very close to going IATSE on a national tour, so might have potentially been making twice as much in salary. Over 40 years, that's a lot of money. No regrets though, just glad I am able to retire and have a decent pension.
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Crisp image
Well-Known Member
Most likely I will not ever tap into government aged pension because I have so much Superannuation. They call it self funded retirement.
Thanks all for answering my question. I try to understand things from other countries so I can make a comparrison to here and it all make sense.
My intuition is pushing for more comprehensive paid internship as part of the program. The actual curriculum portions are well laid out by @JohnHuntington. If we don't address some industry insertion, we won't get the influx of experience the faculty and students need to stay relevant.
Unfortunately, it isn't just the university system that has a bias towards design. In my former job, I had the opportunity to mentor a lot of students, including international students. I had two international students who asked me to write letters of recommendation for them to continue their learning in the US after they graduated (beyond the one year work study allowed). The first student was in design and she was granted an extension (and has excelled). The other student wanted to become an awesome technician. She was denied. I was fortunate enough to still be able to help her by getting her some contacts in her home country. Her denial for an extension was not approved because she wasn't learning design, even though the skills as a technician would have benefitted her and her country had she been allowed to stay.
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