“Teaching a mindset”: Art History, Art Education, Creative Writing, and Liberal Studies

Roman Kavanagh

Opinions Editor

More than ever, we need to be supporting the arts. In light of the recent Productivity and Efficiency report that detailed the suspension of 20 majors, many have noticed that the majority of majors being cut have come from the humanities. What’s more, these cuts are coming just as RIC is introducing its new A.I. majors, leaving many speculating the insidious correlation between the two. In this article I want to highlight the value of the arts as well as their vitality in the modern age. I interviewed Dr. Natalie Seaman, Chair of the Department of Art, Dr. Rebecca Shipe, Art Education Program Coordinator, and Dr. Brandon Hawk, Director of Liberal Studies and Director of Graduate Programs in English: all professors from departments and programs affected by the P&E cuts. 

This article is one in a series in which I interviewed RIC professors from departments and programs that have been affected by the P&E cuts. At this time, President Jack Warner has failed to respond to my requests for an interview.

“We serve really passionate students,” said Dr. Natalie Seaman, Chair of the Department of Art. “There’s not hordes of them, but one of the things about art history is it's really something that people go into and it hits them like a ton of bricks. Like: ‘where has this been all my life?’ And it’s love. That was what happened to me, it was what happened to many other people who are art historians now.” 

Image by Sam Gervais

The art and art education majors provide pathways of enrichment to students that are indispensable in the course of their lives. “Art history is a field of study that has been associated in sort of the public imagination with kind of dippy rich people,” said Dr. Seaman. But it shouldn’t be. Art should be for everyone. “The fact that we can offer it at RIC to striving people of any color and background…we are making this subject accessible to everyone.” 

The issue of equity is a key part in talking about the humanities. Many people write off the humanities as a luxury. The reality is that this kind of thinking only serves to perpetuate systemic inequality. By cutting these programs from our list of majors, the administration at RIC is essentially doing the same thing. “It’s just taking away opportunities from people who don't have financial privilege,” said Dr. Shipe, Art Education Program Coordinator. 

“We at Rhode Island College, our art education program, is the only public institution in Rhode Island that certifies our teachers.” That means that if you can’t afford to attend a private institution or travel out of state “and you want to become a certified art teacher in the state of Rhode Island, RIC is the only option that you have.” In the criteria defined in the P&E report, the programs they sought to review were ones that are “duplicated in other institutions.” As you can see, and as defined by Dr. Shipe, “Art Education is definitely not duplicated.”

Another misunderstood and minimized program is the Liberal Studies major. Dr. Brandon Hawk, Director of Liberal Studies, outlined the program, which is actually incredibly well structured. “The program is pretty much independently put together,” he said. “I work with students to create a plan of study, but we don’t offer any core classes in liberal studies. Our students take classes all in other departments. So we don’t have classes to run, it costs the college very little to run. The only thing it costs is the amount of money needed to pay faculty to teach the independent studies and what they pay me to direct it.” At the end of the program, there is a capstone thesis, in which students bring together what they’ve learned in all of their courses.

Dr. Hawk gave an example of a student who benefited from the program’s flexibility. “We had a student who was really interested in cosmetology and the history of beauty standards and the philosophy of aesthetics and beauty. They pulled together a certification in cosmetology with courses in history and philosophy, thinking about the history and the construction of beauty and the beauty industry.” Students like this who wish to pursue a degree with multiple intersecting, interdisciplinary aspects thrive in Liberal Studies. 

As Director of the Graduate Programs in English, Dr. Hawk reflected on the value of RIC’s creative writing concentration on a broader scale. “We are the only public institution in Rhode Island that offers a master’s with a concentration in creative writing,” Dr. Hawk said. “Regionally we’re one of the only schools that offers a master’s with a concentration in creative writing. Some of the biggest competitors that we have are places like Emerson, which is a private school, and students really don’t feel like they can afford or want to travel that far. A couple of other public institutions in Massachusetts have programs in writing but not necessarily focused in creative writing.”

All four of the programs overviewed provide a unique service to the residents of Rhode Island and the students here at RIC. Cutting these programs will have severe consequences. Dr. Seaman outlined a similar example to ours to give perspective. “You’ve probably seen the statistic that’s been presented by others that when West Virginia University dropped a number of programs, their enrollment and number of applications dropped.” This is the fate that awaits RIC by gutting our creative majors. “It demonstrates a kind of vividness,” said Dr. Seaman, “a kind of life on campus, to have a wide range of different things available. To sort of arbitrarily decide that even though these programs cost nothing, or very little, to get rid of them just in the name of this sort of ‘streamlining’ is simply to ask a whole bunch of interesting people to pull up stakes and leave.”

The P&E report has failed overwhelmingly to accurately represent the needs of Rhode Island College. Dr. Hawk outlined this in reference to the creative writing concentration. “One of the biggest reasons why faculty are upset by the report that was written by President Warner and Provost Fleming is that it has quite a few inaccuracies and misrepresentations of what the individual department or program reports said.” The P&E report based the suspension of enrollment on a policy from the Office of Postsecondary Education, the OPC. Said policy outlines that any undergraduate program that doesn’t graduate 11 students a year over three years needs to be reviewed, and that any graduate program that doesn’t graduate six students in the same timeframe should be reviewed. 

Yet, the way in which these numbers were reported were skewed. “The way that the English MA was counted for graduations was counting creative writing separately from literature, even though they are not separate programs…all of the curricular components overlap.” 

“In our report and in subsequent meetings since the official report came out, we’ve pointed out that if we continue to allow students to take creative writing courses and we continue to allow students to write theses…it will continue to cost the college the same exact amount of money that it does now.” Yet, the Provost refuses to answer the faculty on why or what, then, the outcome is of this change. “As far as we can tell the only thing that will change is that we won’t be able to advertise creative writing as a concentration, which could drop our enrollments further because students come here specifically because they want creative writing on their diploma.”

The perspectives of Dr. Seaman, Dr. Shipe, and Dr. Hawk told a very important story about the arts. Though we are written off by many as a luxury or impractical, the reality is, degrees in the liberal arts build foundations for incredibly skilled people and workers. As Dr. Seaman said, “We are not teaching specific skills that then get applied into a specific field. We are teaching a mindset, we are teaching broader skills, and those can go anywhere. And if you learn how to learn, you can learn how to do anything. And that is really what college is about.”