Author: By Daniel Grant, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, January 10, 1999

Page: D6

Section: Learning

There are schools and programs around the United States and Canada that offer certificates in various media, such as Penland in Penland, N.C., and Haystack in Deer Isle, Maine. At most art schools, liberal arts colleges and universities, academic subjects account for approximately one-third of the credits in BFA programs, yet these classes are rarely highlighted in art school catalogs. There is often a conspiracy of silence, with art schools not emphasizing the academic courses required of students and many incoming students not asking about the non-studio classes they will have to take.

"I've complained that the admissions department actually shies people away from the liberal arts side, as if they would put a damper on things to talk about it," said Bill Berkson, director of letters and science at the San Francisco Art Institute. "They may show applicants the library but otherwise direct them away from the classrooms. It's seen not as a selling point."

As a result, he noted, "some students come in thinking they'll never crack another book or write another term paper."

The situation is found at most schools, as liberal arts faculty must prod students to take seriously their general education requirements. Elizabeth Wright, chairman of liberal arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said, "We get more than the occasional 18-year-old who says, `I am an artist. Why do I have to take these courses?' "

A range of academic courses is offered to art students, although two or more semesters of English composition and art history are fixtures in BFA programs at art schools and universities. One may also see courses in philosophy, literature, mathematics, the social sciences (anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology) and hard sciences (such as biology, chemistry and physics) offered as electives or requirements. At times, art schools create arrangements with neighboring liberal arts colleges where students will take their academic courses. The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for example, is affiliated with Tufts University, while the Rhode Island School of Design allows its students to register for courses at Brown University (Brown students also may take art classes at RISD).

Most often, however, art schools simply hire their own liberal arts faculty and establish their own programs in accordance with the curriculum guidelines set out by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, the membership group to which many of the art schools belong. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago once had an affiliation with the University of Chicago but severed that relationship as "problems arose over teaching style and course content," Wright said. "It's hard to subcontract out teaching."

The connection between Brown and RISD also has not been the easiest, despite the belief of many RISD parents that their children will get a Brown University education, because Brown operates on a trimester basis whereas the art school runs on traditional semesters: Students at one school generally find it impractical to take courses at the other.

There are often considerable differences between academic courses taught at art schools and those at liberal arts colleges and universities. Reading lists are usually smaller at art schools, and essay exams are more prevalent than true-false tests or term papers. "Students enrolled for the BFA have to spend so much time in the studio -- making art is such a time-intensive activity -- that they have less time to spend in a library," said Samuel Hope, director of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design.

Wright noted that academic faculty also tend to understand that, at certain times of the semester, the students' emphasis is on their studio work. "One cannot hold students accountable for reading everything on the syllabus," Wright said. "You need a lot of tolerance to teach in an art school."

For years, the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., administered the Myer-Briggs standardized personality profile to incoming students in order to assess their personality types and how they learn. According to Bettina Beer, dean of liberal arts, art students are "very project-oriented, hands-on learners, less abstract learners who prefer very concrete assignments. We tailored our courses to meet the traits of our students."

That tailoring involved a "less is better" approach to general education. "If you are teaching a survey course of world history, we pick out representative figures and trends and look at them in-depth, rather than providing a lot of information that may be more difficult for the students to process," she said. The approach also included greater visual reinforcement of information, using films, maps, and slides, and more hands-on projects. "Hands-on" may mean drawing a picture of life in Colonial America for a history course at Ringling. Students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design have designed Web sites and made weavings for their history courses, while others at the Art Institute of Boston have re-created Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in order to understand the artist's techniques and materials as part of an art history course.

"Students' interests here are perhaps different than at a university," said Robert Walken, head of liberal arts at the Art Institute. "It's not simply what it means and when it was done but how was it made, using which techniques."

Other liberal arts deans spoke about art students processing information in a "right-brained way," requiring classes that are more interactive and less "chalk-and-talk."

Not every art school takes this flexible approach with its students. In the minds of a number of educators in art schools and elsewhere, it is not clear that a student really learns art history by doing a hands-on project. At the Rhode Island School of Design, according to Baruch Kirschenbaum, dean of liberal arts, "We want our students to be visually and verbally literate. We discourage the emphasis on visuals or studio projects in classes, as studio projects get students away from the traditional focus on scholarship. We want papers, exams, essays."

However, Kirschenbaum noted that, at most liberal arts colleges and universities, "Undergraduate courses in art history are preparing students for graduate school, teaching them methodological and bibliographical skills as well as the need for specialization. Here, we're more broadly humanistic in orientation," meaning that academic faculty attempt to tie in humanities themes with the teaching done on the studio side, wherever possible.

Liberal arts electives at art schools are often geared to subjects deemed relevant to the lives and studio courses of students. The Memphis College of Art, for instance, does not offer an English major-type survey of literature or single courses in major historical writers, such as Chaucer or Shakespeare. Instead, the college has electives in Southern literature, Surrealist literature, African-American literature, women's studies, writings of the Beat Generation and other specialties as its literature program.

"The aim is not to be trendy or to teach down to the students," Bettina Beer said. "You don't have the luxury of teaching a broad survey of English literature when the students will only be taking one or, maybe, two courses. Instead of asking, what will a student miss by taking a course in a very specific area, one should ask, `What should a student get out of a literature class?' You want to draw students into an interest in literature that will get them to want to read, and give students the tools to analyze what they read."

As well as dissimilar approaches to teaching courses at art schools than at universities, there are distinct differences in the makeup of faculty. Most university faculty members hold doctorates and are full-time employees of the institution; it is on the basis of the credentials and publications of the faculty that tenure is established and that departments within these schools are rated. At art schools, on the other hand, most academic faculty are part-timers with master's degrees. "At art schools, a PhD is not the union card it is at universities," Beer said. Some art school faculty do research and publish, but that is not the institution's emphasis; rather, these are teaching schools, and, normally, faculty have heavier teaching loads than their colleagues at liberal arts colleges and universities.

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