“The purchase order book would be lying behind the counter,” Davenport said. “Anybody could buy things and wouldn’t have to justify it until after the fact.”
“I could say, ‘I’m busy,’ and give Karen [Brown] a stack of receipts and say these are my course receipts, and she would take care of it,” remembers Mitchnick. Brown refused comment.
According to Snow, when she arrived at VES last summer, many department faculty were entirely unfamiliar with the official University policies regarding budget requests.
Some faculty are frustrated by Snow’s insistence on procedure. “Should I learn how to fill out forms?,” Mitchnick asked. “Yeah, I suppose so. But it’s a nuisance. Who has time to do the bloody receipts? This is about corporate business. Do it right or you won’t get reimbursed.”
Creative Art in the Liberal Arts
Garber will not have any more official power over her colleagues than Phelan did, leading Phelan to say she thinks that staff complaints were not the underlying reason for her removal.
Instead, she says, the complaints served as an excuse for Knowles to cut off the growth of VES. She speculates that Knowles wanted to run the VES department more like FAS’ more academic departments rather than as a group of practicing professionals.
“Why would [Knowles] do what he did on such flimsy hearsay?,” Killip asks. “It’s fairly self-evident that Dean Knowles does not prioritize the making of art, only the study of art within the confines of academia.”
Most of the premier artists Phelan hired as visiting faculty have careers outside of academia, don’t depend on Harvard for their income, and aren’t interested in taking on the administrative burdens that come with professorship.
In a detailed five-year plan for the department that Phelan submitted to Knowles nearly two years ago, she expressed interest in an array of non-ladder and half time appointments, as well as a fifth-year graduate program.
“I’ve been saying to Dean Knowles for some time, how far do you want this go?,” Phelan said. “How good do you want this to be? You tell me where the limit is. Right now we have a very strong undergraduate program. If you want to maintain the status quo, you don’t need me...We’re seen as too vibrant and innovative and kids are flocking to us. It might mean more resources.”
Garber is a longtime veteran of FAS bureaucracy, and has a reputation for academic professionalism devoid of the laissez-faire art world attitude that Phelan brought to VES.
Department faculty say that Garber has already started to clamp down on the administrative confusion that Phelan and Killip presided over. The Carpenter Center has already completed its list of guest lecturers for next year, the earliest it has done so in recent memory. And course information, though still late, now appears to be on track.
But Garber’s presence comes at a price—Phelan has already decided to take a leave of absence next year.
“I’m not someone who goes to parties where I’m not invited,” Phelan said, “and I’m not someone who stays places where I’m not welcome. This is an untenable situation for me... It’s their school. They can do what they want with it. If they don’t want to have an art program, fine.”
—Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.