Your Stand
Mary Schmidt Campbell
Dean’s Welcome
September 3, 2009
We are celebrating two anniversaries at the Tisch School of the Arts this year.
One is the 70th anniversary of NYU Film, now known as the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television.
The other is the 30th anniversary of the Interactive Telecommunications Program or, as everyone refers to it, ITP.
I mention these two anniversaries because there is something in the history of each of these programs that says a lot about who we are as a school and what we value.
Film production started out at NYU in 1939, at the school of education — long before there was a school of the arts and long before most people thought that film belonged in a research university. When a group of renegades at NYU did decide to start an art school in 1965, film production moved to the art school and quickly became the renowned NYU Film. In its early days at the school of the arts, however, the famous NYU Film was no more than a few rooms scattered throughout the east village, equipped with some ancient cameras — moviolas — with doorknobs to wind them up and projectors that routinely ate films. In spite of its deficiencies, NYU Film attracted wildly talented students.
By the time I arrived in 1991, I think that was the year that many of the freshmen were born, the school of the arts had already become the Tisch School of the Arts and NYU Film had amassed a long and growing list of distinguished alumni and legendary faculty.
But 1991, was also the year the internet came into wide public use, and a massive technological shift from analogue to digital technology was underway. As a result, we risked becoming obsolete. Change was imperative. Over the next decade, we overhauled the facilities, parts of the curriculum and in the process — thanks to the generosity of a brilliant inventor by name of Maurice Kanbar -- we became the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. Change didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve added graduate programs in Singapore, a dual degree in producing between grad film and NYU’s Stern School of Business and this year we have completely re-thought our production processes and procedures.
If you think there’s been a lot of change in film, consider ITP. For ITP the idea of change is core to its identity. And this from a department that has the distinction of being the only department at Tisch, still run by the person who founded it, the visionary, inimitable, Red Burns. Thirty years ago, she started ITP with the idea that the power of new technology resided not with the gadgets and machines; rather it resided with the powerful ideas of creative people. Red was convinced that if you bring people from vastly different backgrounds in architecture, poetry, engineering, music or medicine, and introduce those creative people to technology, give them the opportunity to play, connect with each other, make mistakes, step outside of their comfort zone, those creative people will push the technology in ways no one anticipated. Her department became a magnet for talent. This year they are hosting the artist, Laurie Anderson and the architect, Maya Lin as artists-in-residence. Every year the ITP faculty completely re-thinks the curriculum and re-configures their space. In the 30 years ITP has been in existence, the department has seeded silicon alley, incubated groundbreaking businesses, populated the leadership of every major technology company from Microsoft to Google and filled the leading galleries of the world with the art work of their talented alumni.
Congratulations ITP. Congratulations Film. Your histories are models of courage and resilience.
Truth is, courage and resilience are fundamental to every department at Tisch. Every department, every discipline in this school at some point in its history has had to have the courage to ask the difficult questions, and re-examine assumptions. Every department has had to ask what’s missing. What’s missing in our culture, what does not yet exist. Every department has had to have the resilience to re-shape and re-invent itself, to make space for what’s missing.
You could say that the history of our school has been about inventing what’s missing. What does not yet exist. Cinema Studies and Performance Studies, the first disciplines of their type at a research university, were invented here at Tisch. Cinema Studies then created the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Graduate Musical Theater Writing, as Sarah Schlesinger pointed out, was invented by some of America’s musical theater masters who felt that the musical theater idiom needed a source of renewal. Our undergraduate program, the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, broke new ground, when it opened its doors several years ago, as did the department of Art and Public Policy, when it launched its graduate program in Arts Politics. Our Photography department expanded the idea of itself and became Photography and Imaging just as our design department expanded from Design for stage to Design for stage and film. Over ten years ago, believing that study abroad was imperative for artists, intellectuals, and creative entrepreneurs, we launched advance studies in the arts in collaboration with leading cultural institutions in over 20 countries from all over the world. Our school took the lead in developing the university’s multi-school game center, which offers its first classes this year. Last year the department of Drama re-envisioned its music theater training by establishing a new primary studio: the New Studio on Broadway for Music Theater and Actor training. This school is like a dancer; we love the feeling of being in motion.
So welcome, you have come to a school that revels in the uncertainties of a changing world. You are now part of that continuous shaping and re-shaping.
At the same time, you have come to a school that has a set of values that are immutable. Our founding dean, Robert Corrigan, first articulated those values in 1965, at the time of the school’s birth. He called the school a daring adventure. He asserted that this school of the arts would not be content simply to accept the students who show up in the application pool, instead, the new school of the arts would search all over the world for the best students, make it possible for them to come to New York. The new school of the arts would have students in close collaboration with working professionals who are at the top of their game. He declared that at this school, learning would take place through collaboration, debate, experimentation. This would be a place for the mind as well as the heart, a place that incubated courageous artists and scholars devoted to excellence who would exit as leaders. He declared that as leaders, you, the artists and intellectuals, would be the lightning rods and change agents of our time. You came to a school that, from its beginning has been clear about what it stands for. To this day, those values haven’t changed. They are the same values we — the deans, the chairs your faculty and staff, stand for.
What will that mean for you? For one thing it may mean that you will be asked to go against the grain of what the culture at large is telling us is the accepted and acceptable way of dealing with the world. We live in a culture that champions individual accomplishment by any means necessary. Yet think of any film, play, musical theater production, television show, dance concert, ITP project or photography exhibition that you really love and I guarantee that even if it is a one person show, it was the result of an intensely collaborative effort. We will expect you to become expert at collaborations. We know that there are over 760 freshman; 200 transfers, and over 400 first year graduate students. You come from 49 states plus Puerto Rico and 44 countries. You bring with you the experiences of vastly different geographies, languages and histories. All of you in your glorious diversity bring your individual dreams and nightmares; your desires and distastes; your particular passions which are yours and yours alone. We ask you to bring all of that into the arena of your classroom, your crew, your ensemble, your creative team. There will be days when it feels crowded and messy. There will be clashes and disruptions. But we expect you to learn to open yourself up to see what someone else sees. We know that if you can silence the chatter in your head to hear what they hear, if you can inhabit their world, the way an actor inhabits a character, you will be well on the way to the empathy that is necessary for real collaboration, the kind of empathy that makes us deeply human.
We live in a culture that surrounds us with unthinking orthodoxy. Turn on American talk radio, or listen to the health care debates on television or read a blog or a newspaper. Positions harden quickly these days. The novelist Mark Slouka recently warned against the tyranny of orthodoxy. He writes: “Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.” You have come to a place that insists that you develop a habit of mind that probes, and investigates, that is excited by difference and comfortable with contradiction and ambiguity, that challenges and likes to be challenged and critiqued as a way of thinking more deeply, more complexly.
We live in a culture that loves success. Our culture loves to see a winner; loves to see someone come home with the gold medal, or hold up the prize. We’re guilty here at Tisch. You will hear us brag about awards. But, you will also hear us encouraging you to experiment, to try something unfamiliar, something you don’t know. If you try what you don’t know, you will make mistakes. You are all good students. You like to get the right answer. You probably don’t like to fail. If you are truly creative, you will fail. And you will need to remember the advice of theater artist, Berthol Brecht; “fail, fail again, fail better.” Do not be seduced by easy success; your failures can be your best teachers.
Fail, so that you can succeed. Our culture of sound bites and slogans desperately needs you to succeed. We need you to be the leaders we expect you to be. We need you to go against the grain, reframe the terms of the debate, invent a future that does not yet exist. We need your courage and resilience. So work hard, collaborate, play. You will get exhausted, exhilarated, frustrated, joyful. Be fearless and be kind. But by all means, make work that matters to you. You have come to a place that stands for something. What you stand for will be a choice that only you can make.
Now, as I end my remarks as I do every year with the words of the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston. The words come from her novel, Warrior Woman. Kingston writes of her mother who studied long and hard to become a physician in China. Her mother’s studies required her to be away from her family for a very long time. Kingston has this say about her mother’s journey:
She had gone away ordinary
And came back miraculous
Like the ancient magicians
Who came down from the mountain.
That is what I wish for you. Good luck.
