Can art be taught? How a dismissal at Harvard threw an entire field into question.(Department of Visual and Environmental Studies chair Ellen Phelan)

In a time when art can be anything at all, how do you teach it? That nagging question causes endless problems at the colleges and universities where most art teaching goes on these days, and it was at the heart of the recent unpleasantness at Harvard that led to the resignation of Ellen Phelan. Phelan, a New York artist, had been hired in 1995 to build up Harvard's studio-arts program, and by most accounts she had been successful. An engaging, unshy fifty-eight-year-old with boundless energy and considerable wit, she had picked up what was by general agreement a moribund program and turned it into something never before seen at Harvard: a full-fledged undergraduate curriculum in the practice of the visual arts, a program that was attracting students and exciting interest at other universities around the country. Phelan's Harvard career came to a sudden end a year ago, however, during a meeting in the office of Jeremy Knowles, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

She had wanted the meeting to find out whether the Dean was going to approve two new faculty appointments that she and her colleagues in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (V.E.S.) had requested. Phelan quite often got what she wanted from University Hall, but this time she got something different.

"Jeremy said that the entire administrative staff of our department was ready to quit en masse over what they described as an abusive and obscene working environment," Phelan recalls. "I started to say that I knew there had been problems between certain faculty members and some of the recently appointed staff people, but Jeremy cut me off, saying, 'Oh, it's far worse than that.' He said the staff had complained that we had obscene nicknames for them, which we used behind their backs, and that we made them run personal errands for us, and that we criticized them publicly in awful ways. Obscenity was a word that kept coming up. 'For instance,' he said, 'you were overheard to say, "Those cocksuckers in University Hall." ' He went on and on about that, and about an obscene e-mail that somebody had sent to our academic coordinator. He also talked about lavish dinners I had given for visiting lecturers, and about absenteeism on my part. He said my faculty was out of control, and that I was therefore to resign immediately as chair of the department, and that Marjorie Garber, a professor from the English Department, was being brought in to replace me. I said something like 'Does this mean I'm fired?' and Jeremy said, 'Oh, no, no, no, what a calumny, nothing like that.' He became more conciliatory, holding my hand and saying, 'We must meet again, we must talk.' I ended the meeting. I was in a state of shock." As she was leaving, Phelan learned that her two new faculty appointments had been approved.

The Dean had academic procedure on his side. Chairs of Harvard departments serve, on a rotating basis, at the Dean's pleasure. Phelan, who was not tenured and who often complained about the administrative burdens of being a chair, was still employed, and theoretically, at least, she could keep on teaching, proselytizing, and leading the charge for the studio-arts program at Harvard. To Phelan and many of her colleagues at V.E.S., though, the way she was called to account made it pretty clear that her presence was no longer desired. Angry and humiliated, she refused to resign as chair, whereupon Knowles formally removed her and named Garber in her place. Some people in the department saw it all as a personality clash: the brash, mouthy art dame versus the all-powerful Dean. "The funny thing is I actually thought Jeremy and I were good friends," Phelan said last spring. To others, though, the larger question was whether Dean Knowles wanted to curtail or even to get rid of the studio-arts program. Phelan was committed to teaching art as an ongoing experiment, and to do so by bringing in practicing artists, with all their anarchistic and disorderly attributes. Harvard, like most universities, wants to teach art as an academic discipline. In the absence of any clarifying statements from the Dean's office, no one could explain why the V.E.S. situation had got so lamentably out of control, but the whole spectacle could be viewed as one more chapter in the evolving and sometimes uneasy ...