But delivering a good education is not, at bottom, a matter of money. Goddard, where Harris first began to operate as an administrator, was deeply imbued with the educational ideas of John Dewey, and Harris' Ph.D. thesis dealt with Dewey's (and Hannah Arendt's) ideas about how judgment and discipline apply to education. One of Harris' biggest interests upon coming to Cornish was to toughen and focus the school's general-education program, which now is the basis of every entering student's first-year Cornish experience. "We want to help them start making links between what they care about as artists and how that fits into the world," says Harris.
And Cornish has an almost-forgotten ace in the hole. Almost from its beginning, Cornish aspired to encourage artists from different disciplines to work together on their creations. It was that no-rules, no-holds-barred atmosphere that led directly to the multidecade collaborations of Cunningham, Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. As intergenre barriers continue to fall under the disruptive yet invigorating assault of new technologies and forms of communication, Cornish is positioned by pedigree to surf the wave of the future.
Marcy Sutton
Cornish Provost Lois Harris, center, with Cornish kids in the hall: (left to right) Adam Kessler, Robert Zwiebel, and Cynthia Spurgin.
Marcy Sutton
Cornish Provost Lois Harris, center, with Cornish kids in the hall: (left to right) Adam Kessler, Robert Zwiebel, and Cynthia Spurgin.
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Cornish at a glance
Established: 1914
Enrollment: 750
Faculty: 145
Degree programs: six (art, dance, design, music, theater, performance production)
Degrees awarded: Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.), Bachelor of Music (B.M.)
Tuition: $21,200 per year
Well-known alumni: Choreographer Merce Cunningham, broadcaster Chet Huntley, rock musician Ann Wilson, film actor Brendan Fraser
Well-known artists who taught or worked at Cornish: Painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, choreographer Martha Graham, photographer Imogen Cunningham, composer John Cage
Current faculty members/artists whose work you may see around town: Wade Madsen (dance); Chuck Deardorf, Janice Giteck, Julian Priester, James Knapp, Bern H. Herbolsheimer (music); Amy Thone, Timothy McCuen Piggee, Mame Hunt, Bill Johns, Sheila Daniels, Richard E.T. White (theater); Judith Allen, John Overton, Kathleen Rabel, Robert Campbell (art)
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The ultimate test for any educational program, though, is what its products do once they've returned to the supposedly real world. It's impossible to measure, incredibly hard even to come up with an impression of a school's impact on its graduates five, 10, 20 years down the line. Those one-sentence summaries of "what our graduates are up to" that appear in every school's alumni magazine are a lousy index. Maybe "Mary Jones has been appointed director of the music program for the Clallam County consolidated school district" is a good thing or a bad thing, for Mary or Clallam County. Who knows? Is the fact that Cornish theater grad Brendan Fraser has played opposite both Ian McKellan and a gorilla evidence of the breadth of Cornish actor training?
Jane Ewing, vice president for institutional advancement.
(Marcy Sutton) |
The only way to evaluate the quality of an education is to ask the experts—the people undergoing said education, and the products of the education—both looking back on their own experience and at others emerging from the same process. Joshua Kohl, leader of the multimedia and new-music collective the Degenerate Art Ensemble is a veteran of both the Cornish music program and the rigidly traditional training offered by the Boston Conservatory of Music. "At Boston, they work you so hard that you feel every day that if you don't keep up, you're going to fail completely. There's something to be said for that kind of discipline. Cornish is different. It's possible to coast, if that's what you want to do. Nobody is going to make you take advantage of all the resources. You have to be self- motivated, you have to actively pursue the training, take advantage of your proximity to your teachers. Not everybody does that. The ones who do can go as far as their abilities can take them."
Lane Czaplinski, artistic director of the performance presentation facility On the Boards, goes even further. "I was an adjudicator for the last American College Dance Festival's regional, and I was really impressed with the work submitted by Cornish students—not just their skill in modern-dance technique, but the sheer quality of their choreography. You hear a lot of doubts about the future of dance in America, but looking at this work, I have no doubts on that point. And you have to credit a lot of that to the Cornish faculty, Kitty and Wade [Madsen] and all the rest. They are not just teaching technique but giving the students the information they need to figure out where they stand with the art they're making. I've come to believe that Seattle is the richest creative community in America outside New York, and I believe a lot of that is due to Cornish, to Cornish grads who have stayed in the community."
rdowney@seattleweekly.com
