[Alumni-chat] Recent Visit to YS

[dude (dudevoyeur at gmail.com)]

Bob:

I, for one, grow tired of hearing how you were "dragged into the President's office" or how you were so sick you hobbled across campus to accept the job.  Are you not a creature of free will?  You're a big boy now Bob and are responsible for your personal decisions.  Are you unable to make decisions for yourself that affect your own future or are you so altruistic that you think only of others?  

Also, I'm sick of hearing how underpaid you were....not because I think the faculty is not underpaid, but because you seem to be the only one who keeps bringing it up.  I think the faculty salaries are a crime and a sin and I don't know why the faculty stayed on for lo, so many years.  I thank them for their dedication, scholarship and humility.  It is each individual faculty member's choice whether or not to accept the sorry pay.  If they do, I thank them for their dedication and if they don't, I can't blame them for wanting to make a living.

I know you were away from campus for 7 years.  You did return and accept positions and make decisions.  That is your responsibility.  Nobody forced you.  Martyrdom sounds romantic but in my view, it's just plain silly.

In my opinion, it sounds to me that you believe you were pressured into leadership roles but bear no responsibility for any of your actions during your leadership years or that your actions (together with Guskin) "fixed" the college and then these other dopes went and broke it again.  That's only my opinion, Bob, but others share it, too.

I'm sorry you're so underpaid.  By the way, are you still underpaid?

Deb


>Andy,
>
>I can't tell you that your experience is incorrect or that your perceptions of, or feelings about, the shift of film from the art department to the umbrella of communications are unwarranted, but I will tell you that your facts are incorrect.
>
>I left Antioch at the end of 1981, soured by the declining state of affairs, unable to pay my bills and take care of my kids on a tenured associate professor's salary (at that time $11k), bitter about how I had been treated, and determined to turn my back and close the door for good.  At the time I believe Ted Lyman was teaching both film and photo, and if I'm not mistaken, he left a year later.   My contact with the College was non existent until the fall of 1987 when I was persuaded to come to campus to do some workshops.  Guskin was raising money, fixing infrastructure and hiring a cadre of young faculty members, and older colleagues told me that they felt as though the College was moving once again.  I was favorably impressed, and the next year applied for a communications position that was advertised.  I was hired, took a 50% pay cut, and returned to the mother ship.
>
>What I learned in that process was that during the Presidency of Bill Birenbaum -- sometime after I had left the College -- the Board implemented a "new curriculum", combining various disciplines and programs into "Institutes" to reflect the liberal arts education of the future.  At that time, Birenbaum had decided that everything with a lens belonged together; it was his initiative to create an Institute of Communications and Media Arts, combining film, video, photography, radio and journalism.  As Karen Shirley told me the story when I returned to teach at the College in the fall of 1988, workers had come when the Art building was empty to literally tear the film equipment out of the walls and transport it (in a heap) to the newly created ICMA (in the basement of McGregor).   Karen was still angry enough about this pillaging that she told me that, while she was there, there would never again be a collaborative programmatic relationship between Art and Communication.  The
>"Communications Department" never "took over" the film department.  At the time I was hired to chair the program, the College also hired the late Jonathan Mednick to teach film; the two of us were supposed bring order to the remnants of Birenbaum's Institute of Communication and Media Arts. Both of us found it deplorable that film and photo were no longer part of the Art program, and our students have attempted to bring about a bridging of Art, film and photo several times during the last two decades   -- unsuccessfully.
>
>I don't recall that I ever sent you a written appeal for your animation stand.  I vaguely recall you contacting us about the possibility of donating the stand, but I honestly can't remember what happened to that possibility.  And finally, I hope it doesn't escape notice that when I was dragged into the President's office I recruited Chris Hill from Hall Walls and the Media Studies group at SUNY Buffalo to take my place in Communication/Media Studies.   Not coincidentally, Chris is clearly someone who appreciates "odd little films" and videos and was a colleague of Tony Conrad and the late Paul Sharits in Buffalo.
>
>I have no problem with you holding animus for me.  I'd just like it to be for something I actually did or had some responsibility for.
>
>Bob
>
>
>>So, perhaps this brief synopsis might help explain my chagrin when I discovered that the film department had been taken over by the Communications Department. It was no longer part of the Art Department at all, and the film professor, as best I could understand, had no background with film as an art form, at least in the sense of using it for one's own personal vision and/or as a tool for learning to see. Now I know that is a slippery comment to make, at least in the sense of an "art is in the eye of the beholder". But either you believe politics and didacticism kills art or you don't. I do. And you either care about that, or you dont. I do.
>>
>>I decided not to donate the animation stand. I remember receiving nicely written appeals for me to change my mind, first by Bob, followed by Al Guskin himself. I refused and refused again.
>>
>>Now before you think that I've held this as an animus against Bob, I'll have to say in all honesty you're wrong, although I do hold him responsible for the move, which was ferociously fought against by the Art Department at the time. But it did, in one feel swoop dramatically change my feelings about the College. I understood even at the time I was attending Antioch that there were, as it were, barbarians at the gate of the Film Department. Either you loved what was going on there at the time, or you found it terribly irrelevant. I loved it. I thrived on it. It saved my ass, if not my mind. Antioch was nationally known at the time as having an incredibly unique thing going on at the third floor of the Art Building. Every single film artist that you can name from the 70's came to Antioch or had their films shown there.
>>
>>Even after both Paul and Tony left, the torch was carried on for awhile by Janis Crystal Lipzin. I'm not sure when it all really ended as I lost touch in the 80's. I'm sure this is where Bob will point out how wrong I am or how out of touch I am. But I'm not wrong about my experience, and I'm not wrong in knowing that the education I had, watching "odd little films", even those that Tony pickled, was not a waste of time or money. It was a long hard look at reality, in the broadest possible sense, through the medium of film. And I pity those budding filmmakers at Antioch over the years since that haven't had as luxurious an opportunity. (And remember, it wasn't that luxurious!)
>>
>>But to see it not just end, but be killed off was what saddened me. No one can tell me that it was just "the times" because I know too well how other small Colleges have kept film programs going, under the auspices of the Art Department, without much problem. Evergreen is just one example. It's not even to say "documentary film" bad, "art film" good. (Or Bob bad, Paul/Tony good.) It is to say, there was  a tug of war of resources, and Art lost yet again.