Tension for performance practice within academia

[innopac]

Here is a thread from Ballet Talk for Dancers with a link to the article below which highlights some of the tensions in universities today for performance based areas of studies.

This is especially pertinent now when universities are ranked by indicators biased towards research and papers. How do you deal with art teachers who do not have higher degrees teaching art at a tertiary institution. How do you assess a music or dance teacher's "output" for the year if they don't write papers?

And then there is also the cost of education to the university. Perhaps this is more crucial with music than with dance but I was once told that it costs 15 times more to give an education to a musician than a scientist at a university because of the amount of one on one teaching required for music students.

“There is a real tension between dance — at even a department like mine, which is very well established — and an academic context,” said Lynn Garafola, a dance scholar who is a professor in Barnard College’s dance department. “Most of the people teaching technique classes have been longtime professionals. They’ve never been to a liberal arts college. There really is a deep anti-intellectualism, but in some ways it’s almost a naïve anti-intellectualism. It’s just not a part of their world.” From

Mind and Body at Yale

by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, September 23, 2007