But the larger question for the Harvard community is what the mid-semester decision to replace Phelan as chair may mean about the Faculty’s commitment to the VES Department and the study of the arts at Harvard. The historical context of the events that occurred this spring traces back to the Buell Report issued in August 1993, where a Special Advisory Committee in Visual and Environmental Studies urged Knowles to strengthen the department and urged Harvard to affirm a commitment to making visual studies flourish at Harvard. Phelan was hired thereafter as Professor of Practice with the mandate to develop and direct a program in studio arts.
While, as your editorial concedes, Phelan did in fact achieve much of this mandate, she also challenged Harvard to solidify its commitment to the arts and to address historic problems regarding funding, space and faculty hiring. At the outset of her appointment as chair, Phelan wrote in September 1999 a detailed letter to Knowles outlining her concerns for the future of the department and her plans and ideas to build it. In January 2000 she received her first response from the dean, in which he acknowledged her “very thorough analyses and thoughtful recommendations for the future of Visual and Environmental Studies,” but wrote that the absence of Executive Dean of the Faculty Nancy Maull “will make it very hard for us to think through all the pedagogical, structural, and administrative, and educational issues, and to understand the intersecting concerns of appointments, space and resources that [Phelan’s] letter raises.” More than a full year later, Phelan still had not received any substantive response from the dean.
Phelan and the department looked forward to a substantive review of VES and its role at Harvard by an external review committee scheduled for the spring of 2001. This visiting committee of nationwide stature had not reviewed the department for five years and was to return April 10-11. Phelan’s unanswered letter to Knowles of September 1999 and thoughtful additional comment from many other faculty were scheduled to be sent to the visiting committee on Friday, March 16. Instead, on March 15, when Knowles asked Phelan to resign as chair of the department, he also informed her that he had cancelled the visiting committee that had been invited to campus.
As Phelan wrote to the dean the following day, “I had hoped that our visiting committee review would at least elicit some dialogue about our most pressing issues.” By removing Phelan as chair mid-semester, Knowles has thus avoided for the present this critical dialogue regarding VES’s pressing issues. In addition, though Phelan and other faculty have provided the new chair selected by the dean with their support, the new chair has neither expertise nor experience in the field, and it is unknown how or when this dialogue will occur. You write that you “hope that the new chair will be able to continue Phelan’s vision.” Instead of merely hoping, The Crimson and the Harvard community should challenge the dean to support that vision and to maintain a place for the arts at Harvard.
Indira Talwani ’82
May 23, 2001
The writer is an attorney retained by former VES department chair Ellen Phelan.