The ATHE had a plenary this afternoon called "Elephants in the room: Manifestos on subjects we don't want to talk about." Six senior figures in the world of theater education talked about the need for ATHE's various subdivisions to talk to each other more, for college theater departments to train students for more than acting jobs they'll never get, to move beyond stereotypes in casting, for more work in African American theater history, etc. The most unsettling manifesto was a prediction that theater education as it now exists in American universities will not survive the transition to more cost-effective, STEM [science, technology, engineering + math]-focused, increasingly online education. It was interesting to realize that the problems we in the humanities face are that much more serious for theater programs which need smaller and longer classes, more space (for rehearsals as well as performances) and bigger budgets (for productions) than the rest of us.
But none of these manifestos were very controversial, and it wasn't until the discussion was opened up to the floor - most of the conference was there - that things got really interesting. Two areas struck me as particularly important, and it was exiting in each case to see at least a first step ATHE and its members might make towards addressing them. These areas relate to the non-performing liberal arts, too. Both involve more honesty about the state of a discipline - meaning not just what gets published and taught, but who's in it, what they are doing and in what settings they are doing it - and point towards ways in which a professional society might respond in a meaningful way.
The first issue first arose as the complaint that ATHE talks a lot about reaching out to disadvantaged communities, but does little of this. Community theater, service learning, etc. are not enough. But the beginning of a new perspective on it came from an impassioned plea by professor at a community college, who reminded us that 50% of American college students - including the vast majority of those from disadvantaged backgrounds - attend community colleges, and encounter theater there; and yet, faculty at community colleges get no respect from the profession - and were virtually unrepresented at this conference. What if ATHE reached out to community college faculty and students, and recognized them for their actual doing of what ATHE now mainly theorizes about?
The second issue involved another community of marginalized theater educators. It was raised first by someone who said he'd recently made the transition from "what I call fake-ulty to faculty" - from adjunct to tenure-track - and described two dysfunctional worlds, the first unsupported and exploited, the other "awash in a sea of administration." As you may know, tenure-track and even full-time positions in American universities are getting rarer every year,with more and more of instruction done by poorly-paid adjuncts paid course by course or semester by semester with no job security or benefits. Many of our graduate students will end up as adjuncts for at least a part of their professional careers. The opening to something new came from a young woman - an adjunct's - observation that ATHE is too expensive for adjuncts; graduate students pay a reduced registration fee, but when will ATHE realize that more and more of the field have completed graduate school but without finding well-paid full-time positions with a research/travel budget? Shouldn't there be a reduced fee for those stuck in adjunct "limbo," too?
Both suggestions - reaching out to community colleges and to adjuncts - are more realistic responses to the difficult world of contemporary academia than I've heard in a long while. It's probably too much to ask academics to put the culture of rank and status behind them - even the well-paid don't get paid that well, rank and status (and only among academics) is all they have. But an organization like ATHE could make significant changes in the culture of a profession by recognizing the obsolescence of the old "guild" model in which everyone who deserves a good job finds one (and those who end up adjuncting, etc., deserve to) in the present academic universe. Not every qualified graduate finds a good position, not by a long shot, and not every full-time professor is the sharper knife in the drawer; some of us were just in the right place at the right time. What if our professional societies, instead of reinforcing the caprice of chance, were ways of compensating for it? To a considerable extent they do this already, but community college and adjunct faculty need to be welcomed in. It's the least the rest of us could do, seeing as that they're doing so much of the heavy lifting of higher education ... and, on issues like making education available to more kinds of people, they're the front lines.
