Nearly four years ago, the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) was faced with some difficult decisions.

After being handed a long list of recommendations by Dean for Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell and a special advisory committee that Buell had assembled for the purpose of reviewing VES, the department had to make some changes.

Originally composed of three different tracks--film, studio arts and design--the 1993 committee recommended that the design track "beyond the elementary level be largely if not entirely recruited from the Graduate School of Design [GSD]," and that the department focus on the remaining tracks.

"One of the things the department was criticized for, and rightly so, was that it tried to do too many things too broadly," says Ellen Phelan, professor of studio arts and acting chair of the department.

Phelan, who did not receive a copy of the Buell committee report until six months ago, says the direction in which she has steered the department is in line with the committee's vision.

"I was amazed at how many of the changes I've made reflected the recommendations of the Buell committee," Phelan says. "But the committee's recommendations were all so sensible."

Phelan, who is also director of the Carpenter Center, says that in the time she has been at Harvard she has seen the studio arts track and cooperation within the department grow.

"We've tried to create a more cohesive program of beginning, intermediate and advanced courses, particularly in the studio arts," Phelan says.

Elimination of Design

But while the department may have succeeded in meeting the committee's recommendations, the design track has been lost in the process.

"The department has since then developed film and studio arts, but the GSD has not been forthcoming in doing what the committee recommended," says Alfred F. Guzzetti, a professor of Visual and Environmental Studies.

But Phelan argues that an understanding between VES and the GSD may never have existed.

"It was a recommendation from an outside committee," Phelan says. "They had all thought it would be reasonable to think that architecture-based classes would more logically be picked up [by the GSD]. I don't know if anyone was consulted or if anything was agreed upon."

Phelan explains the GSD doesn't have a basic design course suitable for undergraduates.

"We were teaching design in the normal sense--vocabulary and the language of the visual and spatial--but it had gotten to the point where all roads led to architecture, and all roads don't lead to architecture."