Art and soul
STUDENTS STUART MACLURE
Students show no signs of deserting the head- lines. Education reporters have been plying to and fro from Homsey College of Art where the students' soviet has taken over, to Cam- bridge where the vice-chancellors gravely de- bated student power, and on to LSE to listen to ideological claptrap from foreign agitators and attend the birth of the Revolutionary Socialist Students' Federation. For good measure there have been the press conferences called by the old-hat Radical Student Alliance, now at daggers drawn with the RSSF.
Undoubtedly the most important event in this particular catalogue was the meeting of the vice- chancellors and their decision to open talks at national level with the NUS. This signifies a fur- ther degree of recognition for the NUS. It also means another step by the vice-chancellors in building up their own central institutions. Not so long ago the Vice-Chancellors' Committee was a body which prided itself on its impotence. Now it is preparing to act as a bosses' organisa- tion in the new-style industrial relations of the higher education industry. Inevitably, what the vice-chancellors accept collectively will not be easily resisted by individual universities.
In the circumstances, of course, it is better that the vice-chancellors and the National Union of Students should meet each other than glare balefully across a procedural divide. But if the outcome is to be that the university authorities accept the role of employers vis-d- ris the new student proletariat and encourage the growth of a bogus trade unionism among students, this doesn't seem to me likely to pro- duce a better result than the old idea of senior and junior members of an academic community.
Perhaps the art students are the most engag- ing of the dissidents at the moment. A certain amount of anarchy becomes them well enough. Their press conferences, like the one at the Royal College of Art last week, are splendidly chaotic, and there is a gay readiness to mix arguments about elitism and student power with a condemnation of the aesthetics of their teachers. They are not the only people who are perplexed about art education. It is now fire years since the present set-up got under way, after the Coldstream report, which reorganised art qualifications in the higher educa- tion sector. Already, before the troubles began, the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design had begun to review progress. Members of the Council from the chairman. Sir John Summerson, downwards will tell you that they are eager for suggestions—including suggestions from the students themselves—but while student protests show where their frustra- tions lie, their slogans are too superficial to offer much help to those who are obliged to think systematically about higher education in art.
One of the riddles is whether there is any real conflict of interest between the design students and the fine art and sculpture students. The latter are more numerous and less vocation- ally orientated, mare likely to include social drop-outs in search of a temporary haven (art colleges serve an essential social purpose for them which ought not to be overlooked) and more likely to raise idealistic 'educational' argu- ments about qualifications and examinations. They want 'broader,' more 'liberal,' courses without being altogether clear what these terms mean in art education. Most of them—half of all the DipAD students—end up as teachers in secondary schools and, however much they dis- like examinations, their qualifications become important to them if they want to be paid as qualified teachers.
The designers on the other hand are liable to complain that their courses are insufficiently professional and to criticise the breadth and liberality their fine arts colleagues demand. Yet all insist on the need to be able to range freely across the departments and for course regula- tions which are flexible enough to permit this and there is a good deal of dispute as to what genuine professionalism adds up to.
Over the next eighteen months the Summer- son Council plan to send visitation teams round all the forty colleges now authorised to run DipAD courses, to vet them and renew or with- draw recognition as part of their quinquennial review. Changes are likely in the diploma course to allow alongside the present broad, general approach a more specialised, more professional course aimed to meet the demands of the de- signers. Some of the trouble may undoubtedly have come from colleagues failing to use the freedoms which the present scheme allows, and it is a safe bet to assume that the council will want to ensure as much flexibility as possible.
There is clearly no escaping the need for sonic clearly defined course structure in a strictly limited number of colleges with some kind of central institution to maintain common stan- dards if there is to be an art sector in higher education. That this is liable to be affected by a bit of the academic snobbery which students. to their credit, dislike, is probably inevitable. The young Turks won't like it, but who could —in charity—grudge Sir Robin Darwin his splash of the academic purple?
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