Stinky, Cramped Dorms Made Me The Arts Administrator I Am Today

The dean of arts and sciences of the university and I were talking briefly about strategies to attract more students to performances.

One of the hypothesis that occurred to us was that the student housing situation might make it too easy for students to avoid becoming involved with any sort of campus activity. Not only that, it didn’t provide the opportunities of cross pollination of ideas that once existed.

I know, it sounds a little strange to say that the problem in K-12 schools is not enough arts classes, but the problem with colleges is the dorms.

When I was in college, there was one or two pay phones on the dorm floor for three wings of guys and everyone used the same showers. You got to know about 40-50 guys between knocking on their doors to tell them someone was calling or when you bugged them to hurry up in the shower.

Or you know, when someone pulls the fire alarm and you are all standing outside grousing at 2 am during the winter.

Our rooms were small 20×20 cells with bunk beds, two desks, two wardrobes and two sets of drawers. There was a lot of incentive to get out and do stuff elsewhere. I got a call to help hang lights and didn’t see the inside of that dorm room much over the next few months. (Which was not necessarily a good thing for all my classes.)

There was always someone blasting some music. Disgusted with my lack of classic rock knowledge, my first room mate would quiz me on whatever was on the radio or in the cassette deck.

I had about 10 different room mates between undergraduate and graduate school and I credit all of them for expanding my musical taste since each one’s varied.

Now students live in more comfortable apartments, with cable, internet and their own phones. There is less incentive to go out and do something.

If you are living with 4-6 other people as I did my senior year, that can be okay because there is still good opportunity for bonding. Except that since everyone has their own headphones, they can listen to whatever they want without bothering—or indirectly influencing anyone else.

While you may chalk up my sentimental recollections of mildewy dorm rooms as something from the past that can’t be returned to again, recall that Steve Jobs famously tried to recreate just this situation at Pixar by putting all the bathrooms and mailroom in a central hub so that people had to see and interact with each other.

In that same article where I talk about Jobs’ efforts at Pixar, I cite some studies from Richard Florida that look at cities across the country where creatives are segregated from the rest of the population and other places where things were more homogenous.

Thinking about how people isolate themselves from each other, I wonder if there is any discernible benefit to living in a homogenous community over a segregated one. If you live in close proximity to creative geniuses but never have any interaction with them, you might as well be living 10 miles away for all the benefits you accrue.

The one good thing about artists is that they tend to misbehave. They paint their mailboxes strangely and put sculptures in their yard. They practice on instruments and sometimes don’t use mutes or plug in earphones. They sing in stairwells and pace back and forth muttering lines to themselves.

People may dismiss them as weird, but they are hard to miss.

The problem is that everyone else tends to stay in their cocoons. People aren’t exposed to as many unknown influences and they may not have their own characteristic tastes confirmed or challenged unless they are confident enough to share it on social media.

I am not as concerned about people orienting to the same crappy music as everyone else so as not to stand out as I am about the missed opportunity to validate personal taste and every person’s basic ability to create and participate in the arts

I am not sure how to change the dynamics for housing to encourage people to interact more with each other and whatever is intruding on the environment.

One solution that does occur to me is to actively encourage students in Fine Arts classes, especially non-majors, to share pictures, videos and audio files of whatever personal projects they are working on with each other. Things that are totally outside the scope of the assigned class projects.

Students may be reluctant to share something that is deeply personal to them or only half way done. Maybe they don’t ever share with each other, but just the act of frequently implying that they have the ability to create something worthwhile may have a cumulative positive effect.

Some arts classes require mandatory attendance at some sort of arts event. My thought is that without the influence of peers visibly exhibiting an affinity for different artistic forms, that experience occurs in a much larger vacuum than when I was a student. There is a chance that what students are learning becomes solely associated as something old people over 30 value.

I am not necessarily suggesting to get rid of that requirement so much as to place a much greater emphasis on the validity of an individual’s ability to create.

[N.B. For some reason this thought disappeared from my mind when it came time to write it- Part of my thoughts about having people bring in examples of their personal work was the opportunity to use it as the basis of in class work.

A student brings in gorgeous pictures of the Grand Canyon, the writing class uses it as the basis of an assignment. Someone writes a story, it is used as the basis of a dance piece.

Again, just that sense of reinforcing the sense everyone has artistic ability and providing a little cross pollination of ideas at the peer level.]