Notes from the University of the Arts

All manner of news these days from Philadelphia.

We have a new president, Sean Buffington, wrenched away from Harvard. And Rick Lawn, our Dean of the College of Performing Arts, is serving as Interim Provost for the foreseeable future.

In the Liberal Arts Division, our new curriculum is now entirely in place. Only this year's seniors follow the old curricular model. Now the fine-tuning remains.

The campus-wide laptop initiative called Anytime Anywhere Creativity has been implemented. All incoming freshmen were presented with MacBook Pro computers, and most of the campus is now ready for wireless work--both in classrooms and dorms. (You should have seen the arrival of the Apple truck: seven tons of computers were delivered to the gymnasium floor.)

For a number of years now, I've been touting our Period Interpretation courses and have suggested that these courses--and their simulacrum siblings elsewhere might be good candidates for sharing across campuses. Or, at least, if we develop a library of teaching modules, these courses would be a place to start.

These are the Period courses we're offering this term:

Art Nouveau and Aestheticism
Rome: Julius Caesar through Nero
Religion, Art, and Apocalypse: 1850-1914
Age of Reason and Satire: 1730-1800
Age of Melancholy (the morose Renaissance)
Age of the Medici
Berlin in the 1920s
Age of Apartheid
New York in the 1950s
Les Amis de Paris: 1904-1919
Franco's Spain: An Open Wound
Age of Consumer Culture (America from the 50s)

Some new ones will be added in the spring term: Chartres Cathedral (and Medieval France), Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, Spain After Franco. Others will be developed over the nxt few years.

Cheers,
Peter Stambler
Dean, Liberal Arts