Students can get independent study credit for working on these programs, and the programs can be seen by other students in the Greenhouse Cafeteria, Science Center lobby, and Holyoke Center. Undergraduate producers can work free of charge since OIT funds it. But there are still kinks in this video opportunity. It is just beginning and therefore somewhat unstructured, it does not count for credit toward any particular major, and plans for placing monitors in the Houses have not yet been realized.
Other video opportunities are even more limited. If you can find an amenable professor at M I T you may cross-register there for a course in video. You can compete for one of the limited number of unpaid TV internships at one of the stations in Boston and petition for independent study credit for it. If you live in Somerville, you can take workshops at Warner Cable TV and use its battered public access equipment.
If you have some money to spend, you can rent equipment from numerous places. The School of Education occasionally rents equipment to the tune of $48 per day for a black-and-white porta-pak and monitor, and from $24 to $34 an hour for a studio set-up. However, the School of Education offers non-credit video courses to its students only--no cross-registration is allowed. You can rent equipment from OIT's studios, the Video Service Center at Cruft Laboratory and the Video Production Center at Kresge at even higher rates. You can also rent from various companies in the Boston area.
If your interest is in seeing works of contemporary video artists, you can keep your eye open for the annual Video Show, a series sponsored by the Massachusetts College of Art in cooperation with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard. The series is running right now and will continue through April 26, featuring such artists as John Godfrey, Jennifer Morris and Jerd Stern. The show will screen video tapes by anyone who brings them in that night. You can also keep your eye open for video showings at Center Screen, a public, non-profit film screening organization.
If you're really industrious, you might even breathe some life into the Harvard Video Club. Although the university established a charter for this club, it has never been active.
The biggest limiting factor in the video opportunities at Harvard is probably the fact that information about the opportunities that are available is limited. No one hands the incoming freshman a booklet on video at registration day, as happens with so many other opportunities. Bob DesMaisons, manager of the Video Service Center, says, "It's a chicken and egg problem." You can't make the opportunities broadly available until you have generated interest in them, and you can't generate interest in the activities until you have them and can tell people about them.
But if the situation at Harvard seems grim, it's no more grim than at many other colleges in Boston. Other schools are coping with the dilemma posed by high student interest and lack of funding in various ways.
At Tufts, students have organized a cable TV station, TUTV, which is supported by a $10,000 yearly grant from the student senate. The station is completely extra-curricular. Students train other students to use the equipment, which consists merely of one 3/4" color porta-pak (the size refers to the tape visual quality), two color cameras in the studio, and a special effects generator. About 40 and a special effects generator. About 40 students participate in the station, which puts out six hours of programming a week.
The University of Massachusetts Harbor Campus offers no credit courses in video this semester, although video production is usually taught in Theater Arts class. When such courses are given, the class gets its equipment from the UMass Media Center, which has been operating extensive video facilities since January 1974. Right now the Center offers 25 free video workshops each semester.
The Center is expanding its services by offering credit courses in Introductory Video and Media Production for Public Service during a summer institute. Past attempts to provide classes at the Media Center have failed owing to the need to concentrate funds on supporting the editing facility there. The Center's funding comes from the Commonwealth in the form of initial educational funding and a trust fund. This means that only non-profit organizations can use the center's facilities, and a student must be part of such a group to use them. In addition, Videcom, a UMass student video group independent of the Media Center is funded by the university and has its own equipment.
Boston University offers various courses in video, from video sociology to TV production to video anthropology. Any student who wants to do a video project and has a professor's approval can use free of charge, the equipment and studios of the Central Video Services, which include no fewer than 150 porta-paks. Director of Video Instruction at B.U., Peter Burrel, says the B.U. video program is oriented toward a meeting of the minds between the "artists and the plumbers" of the video world and further directed toward encouraging students to use their video skills in community service. The program is supported mainly by "hard" money--funding from the university--and only partially by "soft," or grant, money.
The place where video seems to be getting the most respect and where a stimulating environment for video work seems to be taking hold most strongly is at M I T, which has five major centers of video activity: the film section of the humanities department, the political sciences department, the Center for Advanced Video, the libraries, and the Center for Advanced Engineering Studies (CAES). CAES has taken the lead in encouraging M I T video: it's two-inch broadcast equipment, used for the continuing education of engineers, attracted two major video grants. Following the grants, a good deal of student interest developed, and CAES developed procedures for students and faculty to submit video project proposals for approval and funding.
Now CAES has two-inch, 3/4 inch, and half-inch production equipment, studio, and cable systems available free to M I T individual producers, student production groups (such as Basement Video, and the Video Club), students in classes, and cross-registrants from other schools. A group of student producers broadcasts seven hours of cable programming a day, consisting of student and faculty projects, as well as lectures and programs picked up from other cable stations such as Harvard and Tufts. M I T theses can now be done in video, and three have thus far been completed.
Niti Salloway, manager of the M I T cable system, says one problem with video there is that the only way for it to continue is for the Institute to endorse it. The video community at M I T exists now solely because of about a half million dollars in grants. But those grants run out in December, and if the video program at M I T is to survive, Salloway says, the Institute will have to support it just as it does the libraries and art galleries.
M I T, though advanced in offering video opportunities, illustrates what Guzzetti hopes to avoid in developing video at Harvard. "Grant money is not the answer. It just causes problems," he says. Soft money, he adds, "puts us in the position of losing things," because it permits a program to be built up only to be dropped if the grant money runs out.
The only thing standing in the way of further development of video at Harvard is, of course, money. Gardner says he sees no new economic dawn on the horizon. Guzzetti says his only hope is that the economy will change and Harvard will come up with more money for video. Gardner estimates $50,000 per year of University money would cover the costs of offering a more extensive video program. One possibility would be to follow the example of many European colleges and hook up with a TV station for expanded opportunities. Another possibility would be to apply for a grant in the hopes that the programs it funds would convince the University to begin permanent funding.
Meanwhile, Jane Q. Student will just have to ferret out her own channels of video expression.