The other factor that will keep the number of concentrators down is limited equipment and space. Over 200 applications for 24 places in courses like Vis Stud 140 have kept this course and others right up there with Robert Lowell's versification seminar as the toughest to get into in the University.
The structure of the basic program of courses is still a little bit up in the air as the new department gets ready to float its trial balloon next year. But as it now stands the course requirements go like this:
* Rudolph Arnheim's new course (V.S. 100 a,b), Introduction to a Psychology of Visual Studies: Perception and Expression in Art and Design. If his course is like his book, Art and Visual Perception, it will start with tension between two dots and go from there.
* Vis Stud (formerly Arch Sci) 125, Design in the Visual Environment. Like Arnheim's it will be a lecture course taught, in this case, by two architects (Donald Freeman and Eduard Sekler) who will probably emphasize form, structure, and materials in modern buildings and city planning.
* Three terms of studio work--divided into either two terms of graphic design (V. S. 20, 21) and one of Light and Communication (photography, animation, film, etc.); or two terms of Light and Communication (V.S. 40), and one of graphic design.
* Junior Tutorial.
* Thesis. Usually a project done under one of three different courses.
* A required related course chosen from Math 1, Stat 1c, Physics 1, Nat Sci's 2, 5, 7, and 115, Ec 1, Soc Rel 10 and Phil 2 or 140.
* Two and a half more courses in the department, one of which can be chosen from a huge list of optional related courses.
The concentration requirements are pretty good. There is a total of seven and a half required courses, including tutorials and an optional course that can be almost anything. Not counting tutorials, there are only one and a half courses that you have to take. The rest of the requirements are filled with options that let you concentrate at least three completely different ways without committing yourself to a special program.
The vac idea is that you learn how to look at things, how to create things, and how to interpret things in the visual environment. For example, last fall's final exam in arch sci (next year called vis stud) 125 was a slide show of material studied in the course and only some of which were pertinent to the test questions.
In most courses the student is on his own to create and then deduce what he may. In studio courses both upstairs at the Carpenter Center in graphic design and downstairs in Light and Communication involve themselves almost exclusively in work on projects with most student-instructor discussion concerning technique rather than theory.
GIVEN that most of the same people now teaching in the Carpenter Center will return next year in the new program to teach the same or similar courses, a few criticisms of present teaching will probably still be relevant next year. The remarks are often made of the department in general although they deserve application in one course or one field of teaching.
First, instructors are too concerned with the legitimacy of the department and the courses they teach. It was perhaps this sort of worrying about what the Faculty would think that confused freshmen. And attempts by teachers to go too far into sociology puts them where they are often weakest instead of most helpful. Their desire to seem academically legitimate in a society that defines intelligence in terms of the ability to use language sometimes makes an uneasy tension.
It also seems extraordinary that so many positions on the VAC Faculty are held by Europeans. If there is a compensating reason for this unusual balance (American design schools are not very good?) that reason isn't evident to the student. To him, it seems possible that importing instructors Europe might be another way of lending legitimacy to the department. But part of this might be due to the lingering influence of Walter Gropius, former dean of the Design School, and the Bauhaus school of thought.
Secondly, students sometimes see in each others' work media used for effect instead of for a purpose integral to the motive idea. For example, it was remarked of the recent showing of a student thesis called The Production that color slides and a strobe seemed to be worked in just because they could be used, and not because the show called for them.
Lastly, some see a cut-off in how far VAC courses let you go above a certain level of competence in a field. There is always the possibility of do- ing a special project for credit--the only way you can go above that level of competence. But these are difficult to get approved. And if there is a tendency to favor a certain kind of project, it is for those of mixed or experimental media. A simple painting project might be rejected because the Center wouldn't want to legitimize what outsiders might consider a craft.
But this last criticism is the most tenuous. And next year and the year after most of the new courses will be upper-level studies that should call for higher levels of competence.
Some of the best things that can be said of the program are that the members of the department, especially in Light and Communication, are quite interested in student work, the projects are personally meaningful to the students, and the atmosphere is experimental and flexible. Most important, Vis Stud offers not only a different subject to study, but a different way to study