LITTLE ROCK — For the second time in less than three years, Arkansas Tech University President Robert Brown is tangling with the school’s theater faculty.
Arkansas Tech announced Sept. 15 it had closed the school’s theater workshop inside the Techionery building after the Russellville Fire Department found safety problems there.
In a news release last week, Arkansas Tech said administrators and faculty were trying to find space for theater students. But the school also said the theater program would be reviewed.
“It is regrettable that the condition of the Techionery theatre workshop has deteriorated to the point that it must be closed,” John Watson, vice president for academic affairs, said in the newsrelease. “It is equally regrettable that plans provided by the administration some 10 years ago to construct a black box theater were rejected” by the theater program.
Two days later, Arkansas Tech issued a second news release saying that “administrators and faculty members have worked together and identified spaces for Tech theatre students to continue their studies” this academic year.
The second news release also clarified an important point - that a request by the school for an accelerated state review of its theater program “is not directed toward discontinuing the program.”
“There are no plans to discontinue the theatre program,” Watson said.
In the first announcement last week, Watson said the school has shown “a cleardedication to preserving and promoting the arts on our campus.”
“With that said, we also have a responsibility to the people of Arkansas to invest wisely when allocating resources,” he added. “We have averaged five graduates per year from our theatre program over the past six years.”
The school has 30 theater majors or “0.3 percent of the university’s 10,464 students,” the release said.
In an interview in the time between the two news releases, Brown said he has been the target of “all sorts of false accusations.”
“I don’t care what kind of play they put on,” Brown said. “I don’t want to censor anyone, but I am concerned about safety. I’ve got a couple faculty members who have let that theater get in an ap-palling situation.”
Brown identified them as Ardith Morris, a professor and theater director at Tech since 1982, and Valerie Brugh, an assistant professor, and principal designer and technical director of the theater program.
“They’re going to tell you that I’m evil, and I want to censor,” Brown said. “You can’t imagine what kind of situation that is until you see it.”
According to Tech, the fire department found “obstructed emergency exits, unsafe storage of combustible materials, dangerous stairways with inadequate or non-existent handrails, excessive temporary and substandard wiring, evidence of welding conditions that do not meet the Arkansas Fire Prevention Code and stage construction that does not meet standardengineering practices.”
The theater area “is messy and it is overcrowded,” Morris said Friday.
It’s been in part of an old gymnasium more than 25 years and there is inadequate space for classes, a stage and storage, she said.
“There’s not a staff to take care of the place. For years, we’ve been asking for help,” she added.
She and Brugh are teaching courses, working with students on plays “and doing all the other things faculty members have to do,” she said.
Brown’s criticism of her and Brugh by name to a newspaper is “very disturbing,” Morris said.
“First of all, I’ve got a bunch of wonderful, wonderful students that have come to me because their teachers were my students.”
The students have been told that “if you do theater at Arkansas Tech, you can do theater anywhere,” she said. “We [have] given them a passion for art.
“But now he’s called into question publicly the only thing we really had to offer, which was our personal credibility,” she said, which hurts personally and hurts recruiting.
In 2008, Arkansas Tech postponed a student performance of the Broadway musical Assassins over what Brown called public-safety concerns, citing his fear that passers-by would mistake the play’s fake gunfire for real shots because of recent campus shootings across the country.
The school later allowed the play under increased security.
Shane Broadway, interim director of the Arkansas Department of Higher Education, said the agency will appoint an independent, outof-state evaluation team for which Tech will pay the expenses to evaluate “the current quality of the program and make recommendations for improvements.”
While college programs are reviewed every 10 years, Broadway said, this one wasn’t scheduled for another review until 2017-18. The evaluators will visit the campus, probably in March, and meet with administrators, faculty members and students, he said.
The review, “as a matter of procedure,” also will include a review of its degree program in speech communication, Tech said. The master of arts degree in multimedia journalism already was set for review this year.
“We’re trying to work together for a solution,” said Morris, who was pleased “the rhetoric has ratcheted down” since the first news release. “I feel a lot better,” she said.
The students’ next play will be Candide, a Leonard Bernstein musical based on the Voltaire novel. Performances will be in Tech’s Witherspoon Auditorium on Oct. 28, 29 and 30 and Nov. 3, 4 and 5.
“For a while, and I’m not sure why, the requisition for this play was held up even though I went through the process and got it vetted last spring,” Morris said. “I just kept getting little leading questions,” such as would there be any nudity in the play. “But no one called me in to talk to me.”
“Nobody’s naked” in it, she said. “This is Russellville, a small campus. I’ve never done that. ... It was kind of crazy.”
Members of the theater faculty “turned their noses up at” the school’s offer to build a better theater a decade ago, Brown said, “and said we won’t settle for anything less than the kind of performing arts center” the University of Central Arkansas has.
But Morris said she had only “like a two-minute conversation” with her department head then and was told Tech wanted to put the theater program in a building “something like you’ve got now.”
“I said that wouldn’t really be helpful just to move to the exact same circumstances,” Morris said. “That was everything I knew. I never saw any plans.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 10/10/2011