BY RACHEL ACKOFF

In print | Published April 7, 2005

We don’t tend to think of the fine arts as dangerous, but at Swarthmore they are by far the most perilous academic pursuit.

Thirteen years ago, the art department’s facilities in Beardsley underwent a “temporary” renovation, in which a sub-standard ventilation system was installed. This poses a serious health risk to students and faculty. All of the studio classes use media and substances that are highly carcinogenic if not used in a properly ventilated space. In photography, the lack of ventilation has forced an increasing number of students to drop the course, due to asthmatic reactions to darkroom chemicals.

The safety hazards associated with the art department’s facilities go beyond poor ventilation. The lack of space in the sculpture, woodshop, ceramics, photography and printmaking studios presents another serious health threat. The facilities have been evaluated by experts and deemed illegal according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s standards.

And health issues aside, the facilities of Swarthmore College’s art and art history departments are just plain inadequate, compared to all of the colleges in our peer group. In all seven studio classrooms, the shades that were installed during the renovation thirteen years ago broke long ago. Now professors and students are unable to precisely control natural light — an indispensable element in teaching studio art.

The Swarthmore administration understands that the functionality and appearance of the college’s facilities is crucial. That’s why we spent $72.7 million on the Science Center. In its printed material discussing the new Science Center, Swarthmore extols “the Science Center’s ability to attract exceptional faculty members and students, who inevitably compare Swarthmore’s facilities to those of other institutions.” In contrast, the poor functionality and appearance of the college’s art facilities reflects the overall perception and place of the art department within Swarthmore College.

I’m usually a cheerleader for our Quaker heritage. But the Quakers got one thing wrong. Our current dismissal of the visual arts comes in part from them; the Quakers considered the arts mindless fluff and limited the number of credits that a student could obtain from the study of any creative art.

It’s been almost one hundred years since Swarthmore was officially a Quaker institution — the college moved to nonsectarian control in 1908. It’s long past time we parted with the Quaker bias against the arts and recognized art making and art studying as equivalent to other serious academic pursuits. The study of art and art history offers students a language for the increasingly visual world we live in. The writing that is required in art history courses pushes students to translate visual images into words. The study of art provides a vital avenue for the development of critical thinking (what Swarthmore’s all about, right?).

But at Swarthmore our principles go beyond knowledge for knowledge’s sake — we subscribe to the higher ideal of ethical intelligence. Art making is central to that pursuit. Artistic work and freedom of expression are a vital part of any functioning democratic society. And art can be a powerful tool for political change. Pablo Picasso’s mural Guernica is one of history’s most powerful anti-war statements.

Yet throughout the country the arts are given short shrift. Even Dana Gioia, President Bush’s conservative head of the National Endowment for the Arts, says there’s a national “crisis” in funding. For many of America’s youth, public schools serve as the major provider for formalized arts instruction, yet the U.S. Department of Education’s arts-in-education programs are funded at only $35 million. That’s equivalent to how much we spend before breakfast each day in Iraq, according to Senator Leahy, ranking Democrat on the foreign operations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Swarthmore College, one of the premier intellectual institutions in the U.S., should be at the forefront of efforts to revitalize the artistic culture of our country. We consider ourselves an intellectual vanguard, yet our art facilities are woefully inferior to Pomona, Amherst, Vassar, Oberlin and the rest of our peers. The administration has promised that our facilities will get another “temporary” renovation this summer. Don’t we deserve more than that?

Rachel Ackoff is a sophomore. You can reach her at rackoff1@swarthmore.edu.

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