Visual and Performing Arts College
Approved
By Carrie Secondo Provost Peter Stearns supports the college's
creation for three reasons. "It clarifies the relationship between the
academic and performing units, it also brings music together with the other
arts, and it acknowledges the rapid enrollment growth in the arts," he
says. Enrollment in the arts programs (i.e., academic
programs within Art and Visual Technologies, Dance, Theater, and Music)
increased by more than 70 per-cent from 1996 to 1999 to a total of 665
students, according to the proposal. The CVPA will house the departments of Dance,
Theater, Music, and Art and Visual Technologies, which includes InterArts
(Interdisciplinary Studies in the Arts), as well as the Center for the Arts,
the Theater of the First Amendment, the Internet Multimedia Center and
Multimedia Performance Studio, the Gallery Program, and other academic and
performing units to be developed. Last summer, former IOA director Betsy Brininger
left the university. "If the need for new leadership hadn't come up,
the decision [to create CVPA] probably would have been extended into the
fall," says Stearns. Stearns says he will "use this [CVPA]
proposal as the basis for the search for new leadership." After the provost
hires a dean for the college, that person will then hire chairs for each
department. Based on the late Music chair Joseph Shirk's
"A Vision for the Arts: George Mason University Arts Restructuring
Proposal," the latest proposal describes how the new college will
focus its faculty, facilities, and budgets on seven interlocking
goals:
The Board of Visitors, at its
September meeting, approved a proposal to create a College of Visual and
Performing Arts (CVPA). The
CVPA will unite the arts disciplines into a single, academically rigorous unit
and merge the Institute of the Arts (IOA), the Center for the Arts, and the
Music Department, which is currently housed under the College of Arts and
Sciences.