Critical Correspondence

University Project: Susan Van Pelt Petry, Chair of the Ohio State University Dance Department

in conversation with Maura Donohue

Interview: 04.06.09

Maura Donahue: I was able to speak with Bebe Miller about her experiences working at OSU. I’m wondering if you could talk about the development of your program.

Susan Van Pelt Petry: It is interesting, when I read the Garber article that you sent I thought, “Gosh, we’re in relatively advanced shape in some of these issues.” In this institution, we’ve had the luxury that the leadership before me has positioned dance as not just window dressing for the past 30 years. Our faculty is made up of artists, who get tenure and recognition of creativity as rigorous work and as central to new knowledge investigation. There certainly has been a historical shift in these older departments. Previously, the faculty was expected to teach a lot! It was a teaching department. That was the primary way information was disseminated and that’s what faculty were expected to do. The shift from a heavy teaching load has been changing over the past 10-15 years, accelerating recently with this notion of research. We currently are defining research—creativity, epistemological methodologies, scholarship… Faculty are asked to do it more and are rewarded for it. So, the school wants not only effect teaching, but also active research and creativity. The teaching loads are less than they were 20 years ago. We have a new faculty member starting in the fall and she’ll have a $7500 research support grant and a course release each year. We get these vital, engaged, young faculty, who are really making their mark. We’d initiated this course load with our previous two new hires and then the university has made it a policy. It was our choice and now its policy. That’s nice to see. The other thing that I think is indicative of changing kinds of support is I am much more willing to let faculty leave for a week here or there to work on a project, it strikes the right balance. They are still delivering the right courses and the faculty member can thrive and do a special gig. It is a matter of communicating to the students why this is valuable and not doing it too much. It is hard, because if somebody is gone it’s the other faculty who bear the burden when advising loads end up on their shoulders.

Maura: Do you see how this changes the experience for your students?

Susan: We are preparing people to be artists. Very few are trying to get teaching jobs. Our MFAs had a course that used to be called Dance in Academe. It covered applying for a job, interviews, curriculum development, and service. Now we call it Professional Development seminar. We still talk about the academic issues but we include grant-writing, touring, non-profit sector, market sector, and nuts and bolts conversations. It broadened because the graduate students were not all looking for positions in academia. My position is that whether in academia or not, you should be aware of its challenges and protocols, and if you are working in other sectors you should know how to cross over, link, collaborate and connect. We’re training our students for crossover careers. I think our biggest impediment is curriculum. I think the paradigm shift—because of the pedagogy we’ve all inherited—is a lengthy process. We have to secure approval a year before. It’s a slow moving system that doesn’t respond the way an artist can respond to changing inputs. It’s pretty inflexible—curriculum can and does change, but it is slow in a state institution like ours. We want to think of a modular curriculum that can respond to an on-project basis versus a curriculum basis. But, the graduate students are seeing a lot of different ways of working and putting a career together. There is a really entrepreneurial spirit. Many more want to do their own installation work instead of sharing a concert That is more demanding on our staff, which ends up making us put up limitations which we didn’t want to do.

Maura: How else would you like to see artists and academia pairing?

Susan: All the chairs over the years have, when budgets allowed, brought in artists to develop new work. There’s always been that thread coming through. We still bring people in for two weeks, who then will come for a month next year, and then for a whole year. We try to do that as much as budgets, schedules and curriculums will allow. But, there’s an interesting inevitable split in our language—one is a working artist as opposed to what exactly? During our recent search, our posted job description was written in a very different way from most others and we got a lot of mid-career applicants because of that—“practicing professionals”. So many of them carry concerns about giving up stuff though. Yes, you do spend more time on committees, teaching and advising, but things should be talked about—maybe working a year on and year off or taking eight years to get to tenure so that you have time to make work. It’s not impossible for artists to think creatively about what an academic appointment could look like and for administrators to see how far we can bend.