As plans advance to enhance the arts at Haverford, we look at how some peer institutions feature the arts to advantage.

Haverford’s campus master plan foresees the eventual construction of a comprehensive arts facility, and both outgoing President Tom Tritton and the College Planning Committee are invested in making elevation of Haverford arts a strategic priority here. (See “Haverford Art,” Haverford Alumni Magazine, Summer 2003.) To that end, an ad hoc working group on the arts created by the College Planning Committee spent last year taking a preliminary look not only at the arts on campus, but also at the arts facilities, collections, curricula and programs of peer institutions such as Bowdoin, Carleton, Davidson, Grinnell, Middlebury, Pomona, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Williams Colleges.

The question the arts working group posed itself, says Provost David Dawson, chair of the College Planning Committee, was “What kind of arts presence and community would we like to see?”

While the preliminary report focuses on ways to build grassroots support for the arts at Haverford, rather than on large buildings,” according to David Dawson, Haverford has been doing some advance scouting, looking at how six other highly selective, private four-year undergraduate schools have handled things on their campuses. Skidmore, Smith, Bard, Williams, Vassar, and Colby all have long histories of investing in arts education, and all have exemplary arts facilities:

The Interdisciplinary Approach

Though Skidmore College (enrollment: 2,200) was originally chartered as the all-women Skidmore School of Arts, the campus infrastructure really didn’t reflect a strength in the arts until the fall of 2000, when the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery erupted like a Cubist outcropping on the Saratoga Springs, New York, campus. The $10.2-million, 39,000-square-foot Tang Museum was designed by visionary New Mexico architect Antoine Predock as a metaphorical building, its radial form reflecting both the limestone outcroppings of the local landscape and the unique interdisciplinary mission of Tang.

“We wanted it to be a place that made Skidmore visible,” says David Porter, president from 1987 until 1999. “We also wanted a building that would make visible the role of the arts. I think that has happened. It’s not just for the music student and the art student.”

A college art museum had been a priority at Skidmore for decades, but Tang curator Ian Berry credits former president Porter with encouraging the college to “dream of a museum that would serve the campus as a whole as opposed to just those interested in art.”

“The essence of a small college is defining what makes it different,” says Porter, and what made his school different when he came from Carleton was its spirit of adventure, a “willingness to try new things” such as hiring a classics professor “like me,” who played avant-garde piano. (As an undergraduate at Swarthmore, Porter served as accompanist for the Haverford Glee Club.)

College art museums everywhere occasionally boast of interdisciplinary programming designed to unite the arts and humanities with the natural and social sciences, but, in the end, many interdisciplinary exhibitions are simply art shows with some social or scientific relevance. The Tang Museum, on the other hand, is totally interdisciplinary, with a mission “to be provocative.” It’s featured exhibition for the 2004-2005 academic year, for example, was “A Very Liquid Heaven,” a cross-discipline show organized by curator Ian Berry in collaboration with an art and physics professor. Focused on our conception of the cosmos, the show featured historical photographs and atlases from the 16th century to modern times, along with actual meteorites, videos by visionary designers Charles and Ray Eames, contemporary works by artists such as Kiki Smith, Duane Michaels, and Vija Celmins, and a performance of George Crumb’s composition for piano and percussion “Makrokosmos III.”

“The Tang is a focal point of activity at the college,” Berry says.

With a staff of 13 and a modest collection of some 4,000 objets that grows only by donation, Tang features not only exhibition and storage spaces, but also classrooms and a 150-seat interdisciplinary conference space. Since it opened in 2000, one-third of the Skidmore faculty has taught classes there.

In a refrain to be heard on other campuses, however, Tang director John Weber cautions that Haverford, or any college undertaking a new arts building, should ask: “What’s it going to cost to operate?” The Tang has found its custodial and security costs, for instance, somewhat higher than expected.

“To do it right will cost much more than you dream,” warns David Porter, noting that the construction cost of the Tang rose from an initial $6.5 million to $10.2 million. “Endowing it is terribly important. Staff is going to be larger if you do it right.”

On the Tang’s wish list is also more dedicated parking to accommodate the museum-going public. Because Tang is located at the rear of the Skidmore campus, it has had the effect of re-orienting the public traffic.

“This now is the new entrance to the school for visitors,” says curator Berry.

The Public Face of a Private Institution

The Brown Fine Arts Center at Smith College (enrollment: 2,500 women) in Northampton, Massachusetts, is one of the first buildings visitors see when they approach the campus from downtown. This makes it—like many college art museums and performing arts centers—the public face of a private institution.

“The building metaphorically links the campus and the town,” says Suzannah Fabing, director of the Smith College Museum of Art from 1992 until her retirement in the spring of 2005. “It’s a symbolic representation of the two faces we have. We serve the campus and the community.”

The $35-million, 164,000-square-foot Brown Fine Arts Center, which opened in 2003, was designed by James S. Polshek and Susan T. Rodriguez of Polshek Partnership Architects in NYC. The fifth building to house the Smith museum and art department since 1875, the Brown Fine Arts Center was built on the site and on the structural steel skeleton of the 1972 fine arts center it replaced. Renovation and expansion was necessary both because the museum had run out of space and because the old building had chronic leaks.

“We looked at five options,” says Fabing, “that ranged from just doing needed repairs—we had problems with the exterior envelope of the 1972 building and needed handicapped access—to tearing it down and building anew. It was such a tight site that a new building couldn’t have been appreciably bigger.”

Smith could have elected to separate the museum from the art department and construct a new museum elsewhere on campus, but she says, given the museum’s strategic location, “I simply didn’t want to entertain that.”

Fabing opines it would have cost an additional $10 million to tear down the old fine arts center and build from scratch. Fortunately, Smith officials had the foresight in 1972 to erect a building that could be expanded upward. The renovation and expansion increased the museum’s space 35 percent to 60,000 square feet and added a new 1,000-square-foot print gallery. With a collection of some 25,000 works of art, the Smith museum is now considered one of the finest college art museums in the country.

“We gained a floor on top that had been planned in 1972,” says Fabing. “It had the right structural steel to take [it]. We also gained space by going to compact storage that increased storage capacity by two and a half times. And by enclosing what had been an open courtyard, we gained space for events.”

The enclosed court and café now connects the Smith museum to the classrooms, offices and studios of the college’s art department, its 350,000-image slide collection, and 100,000-volume Hillyer Art Library. Printmaker Gary Niswonger, associate chair of the art department, says faculty, staff, and students have generally been very pleased with the renovated Brown Fine Arts Center. Only the steel baffles placed along the front wall to modulate sunlight and screen the inevitable clutter of art studios from the street, are a possible exception.

If Niswonger has one concern about the new fine arts center, he says, it’s “Staffing, staffing, staffing. We now have a huge building, but it’s challenging to keep [it] up.”

Former museum director Fabing agrees.

“In our case, as so often happens, the cost of the building went up, so money for endowment got put into the building. The staff grew by three, but it was then cut significantly. We are definitely feeling the pain of that.”

As at Skidmore, Smith seems to have under-estimated the cost of security for its new arts facility.

“Our security system in the new building is much better, but it demands more people,” explains Fabing, “so our security costs went up hugely. There was not enough money for guards, so we had to add an admissions charge.”

Still, as academic construction projects tend to go in cycles, new science buildings one decade, student centers and athletic complexes the next, Fabing suggests the arts have to be ready when it’s their turn for capital improvements.

“You have to take the chances you get,” she says. “If you get the opportunity to build, you do that and work on staffing next. A bigger building inevitably creates the expectation that you are going to be able to do more with it.”

Paying for Culture

The grand new Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is far bigger and more ambitious than anything most colleges of 1,500 undergraduates would ever undertake. The $70 million, 110,000-square-foot Fisher Center, which opened in 2003, was designed by superstar architect Frank Gehry using a computer program originally created for aircraft design. It’s gleaming , free form stainless steel roof system makes the Center look rather like a wondrous strange spacecraft that has crash-landed in a field at the north end of the Bard campus.

“The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts was and is a far stretch,” admits Bard president Leon Botstein. “By any reasonable standards, the college could not afford it, but the college could not afford not to do it.”

Bard built the landmark Center with its two theaters (the 900-seat Sosnoff Theater and the 200-seat Theater Two) and four rehearsal studios to house the Bard Music Festival and Bard SummerScape series of operas, concerts, dance and theater when not being used by the Bard theater and dance departments.

Commissioning an internationally famous architect to design a world-class building, according to Leon Botstein was “indispensable, because it wasn’t built by a family of college donors.”

“We could not have financed it through traditional alumni donor pools,” Botstein says, “but there was a desire to see an international performing arts center in the Hudson Valley.”

The Tang Museum and Brown Fine Arts Center were both financed primarily by alumni donations, but the Fisher Center at Bard was not. The State of New York contributed $5 million. Richard B. Fisher, who gave the $25-million naming gift, was a Princeton grad, former president and CEO of Morgan Stanley investment bank, and chairman of the Bard board of trustees.

What Bard’s ability to garner support for the Fisher Center from non-alumni sources underscores is the power of the arts to attract patrons and philanthropy. Bard’s long commitment to the arts (Bard is one of the few originally all-male colleges to have cultivated a strength in the arts) and its idyllic location just upriver from New York City amidst the summer estates of wealthy art lovers inspired donors interested in bringing professional music, dance, and theater to the Hudson River Valley. And President Botstein believes the Fisher Center now inspires Bard students and faculty alike.

“The quality and ambition of the building and its programming is enormously inspiring and it’s a tremendous advantage in the recruitment of faculty,” says Leon Botstein. “The building underscores our belief that most curricula for the liberal arts are deficient in the integration of the arts–not the history of the arts, but the training and active doing of these fields.”

In addition to being president of Bard, Botstein is the music director and conductor of both the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Bard operates a conservatory of music and a conductors’ institute. At the graduate level, it also offers programs in decorative arts and design, photography, and curatorial studies. Having completed the Fisher Center, Bard is now in the process of adding a substantial new wing to its Center for Curatorial Studies.

The Shared Cultural Experience

Bard and Williams colleges are both noted for producing more than their fare share of museum professionals. Williams (undergraduate enrollment: 2,000) accomplishes this through a cooperative master of art program with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, located a short walk from of its Williamstown, Massachusetts, campus. While the Williams College Museum of Art has a fine 12,000-objet collection of its own, the Clark provides Williams students with access to a fabulous 50,000-piece collection and a library of more than 200,000 art books.

The coincidence of two great little art museums in one pretty Berkshire village has everything to do with the remote location of Williamstown. The Clarks, heirs to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, chose Williamstown to build their museum in the 1950s because, at the height of the Cold War, they wanted to keep it safe from a potential nuclear attack. Since the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA) opened in 1999, in a vast mill complex five miles south in North Adams, the Northwest corner of the Bay State has become a Mecca for art lovers of all types.

“The Clark runs deep in time but narrow in geography, focusing mostly on European and American art,” says Williams College Museum of Art associate director John Stomberg. “MassMOCA is very broad geographically, but very narrow in time, going back only 10 years or so. We have everything else.”

John Stomberg believes that Art 101-102, which 60 percent of Williams students take, “could be the greatest shared experience on campus.” But the cultural experience at Williams is not limited to students.

Colleges that have quality arts facilities and cooperative arrangements with other local institutions tend to become regional arts centers, cultural magnets that attract not only academic but public audiences.

“As a teaching museum we have a strong two-semester program geared to the curriculum,” Stomberg says, “then we shift directions as our summer audiences are the flocks of tourists who come to the Berkshires. We have more attendance in June, July, and August than all the rest of the year.”

The Williams College Museum of Art is a low-profile complex of 13 galleries built around an 1847 octagonal core with wings added variously in 1890, 1926, 1938, 1983, and 1986; but the big cultural news on the Williams campus is the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance that opened in the spring of 2005. The $50-million, 106,000-square- foot ’62 Center, designed by William Rawn Associates of Boston, is a sparkling, curvilinear, glass-front showplace on an otherwise traditional red-brick campus. Imagine Lincoln Center transported to Haverford.

One of several major construction projects undertaken as part of a five-year, $400- million capital campaign, the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance was originally to have been just a renovation of Adams Memorial Theatre, but then, in 1998, investment banker and major Coca-Cola stockholder Herbert A. Allen, Jr., a graduate of the Class of 1962, pledged $20 million to the project, the largest gift in the college’s history. The huge performing arts center proved controversial in Williamstown with some locals arguing that it was out of scale with their quaint New England college town, but now that it is a reality, the ’62 Center provides Williams with a 550-seat MainStage, a 200-seat CenterStage, a newly renovated 200-seat thrust stage, and a new dance rehearsal studio as well as a full complement of costume and scenery shops, dressing rooms, storage areas, and workshop studios.

“Our new president, Morton Owen Shapiro, assumed his position in the middle of the process,” says Williams spokesman Jim Kolesar. “He embraced the project, he has often said, for three reasons: to provide cutting-edge facilities year-round for the teaching and learning that takes place in our theatre department and dance program; to provide a fitting home each summer for the highly regarded Williamstown Theatre Festival; and to enhance the cultural offerings in the region during the academic year.”

The Williamstown Theatre Festival, established in 1954, makes Williams College a cultural destination all summer long with a series of some 200 professional performances. In 2002, WTF won a Tony Award as one of the best regional theaters in the country.

Robert Baker-White, chair of the Williams theater department, concedes that the new performing arts center might be considered an extravagance if it only served theater and dance students, but Baker-White says the college has inaugurated a new CenterSeries designed to link visiting artists and performers with the intellectual life of the Williams community.

“Theater was interdisciplinary before interdisciplinarity was cool,” says Baker-White. “It’s not always obvious to people outside, but in any good theater production you are rubbing up against the other art forms and you’re rubbing up against issues of history, philosophy, and the history of ideas. To do theater in a liberal arts context is to animate ideas across the campus.”

What’s Old Is New Again

In 2004, when construction of the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance began, the façade of Williams’ venerable Adams Memorial Theatre was razed to make way for the new glass palace, though the old theatre itself was renovated and incorporated into the center. Three years earlier, in 2001, when Vassar College (enrollment: 2,200) in Poughkeepsie, New York, decided to replace the crumbling Italianate pile of Avery Hall with a new drama and film center, college officials made the unusual decision to save the ornate west façade of the 1866 building that originally housed Vassar’s riding academy and later its drama department. Architect Cesar Pelli of New Haven was instructed to integrate the landmark Avery Hall, with its twin mansard-roofed towers, into his design for the $25- million, 54,000-square-foot Center for Drama and Film that opened in 2003.

Vassar’s Center for Drama and Film accomplishes this daunting architectural task in the simplest of ways, Pelli’s cool contemporary design simply deferring modestly in style and materials to the grand dame of a building. The result is suitably theatrical, rather like an actor donning a festive mask.

“It wasn’t for the cost savings at all. It’s almost the exact opposite,” says Vassar president Frances Daly Fergusson, of the decision to preserve one wall of Avery Hall.

Frances Fergusson is an architectural historian and one of the hallmarks of her administration has been the adaptive re-use of old buildings for new arts spaces.

“There are relatively few buildings on campus one wouldn’t want to preserve,” says Fergusson. “They are such an important part of who we are. Everyone is happy when they see a building they remember being used in an active way.”

Not only did Vassar preserve a vestige of Avery Hall in the state-of-the-art, hi-tech Center for Drama and Film, it also renovated its former power plant as the Powerhouse Theater, a black box theater for workshop productions of both student and professional drama, and it is currently in the midst of a $21.3-million, 70,000-square-foot renovation of Kenyon Hall, a 1930s athletic facility where a former swimming pool is being turned into a 242-seat dance theater.

“Each art needs its own kind of space,” Fergusson explains. “If you try to make a stage do too many things, it doesn’t work.”

Like the Bard Music Festival, Bard SummerScape performance series, and Williams Theatre Festival, Vassar uses its arts facilities to host professional performances of both the Powerhouse Summer Theater Program and the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre.

“This is a very art-aware campus,” says Fergusson, when asked how the arts contribute to the value of a Vassar education. “It keeps the whole life of the campus vibrant. It also helps to build community. Our sporting events are not as well attended as our arts events.”

Indeed, visitors enter Vassar’s suburban campus through an arched gatehouse that connects the college library to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the college’s 34,000-square-foot art museum.

“The museum is a permeable membrane between town and gown,” says museum director James Mundy. “It is free and open to the public. It tends to get people involved in ways that demystify what goes on on campus.”

Designed by Cesar Pelli and opened in 1993, the Loeb Art Center houses some 16,000 objects, but, oddly, it lacks the public amenities—restrooms, reception space, café, gift shop—one expects of a museum that serves both a college and a community.

“Fifteen years ago,” Mundy explains, “we thought of ourselves as a lean, mean, academic operation.”

Today, he says, Vassar is much more cognizant of the outreach function of the arts. The Loeb museum has had endowments for operations and acquisitions for many years, but it only recently endowed the position of public education and programming curator.

“We ran that position for five years on soft money, grant funding,” Mundy qualifies, “but outreach is such a critical part of what we do and what people expect us to do.”

Be Well Endowed, Be Very Well Endowed

The Colby College Museum of Art on Mayflower Hill in Waterville, Maine, is itself currently seeking a $3-million endowment to fund an education and outreach curator. Colby College (enrollment: 1,800) boasts an art museum that is the envy of its peers when it comes to exhibition space, but the museum has always been considerably understaffed. With a 5,000-piece collection housed in a 30,000-square-foot facility that has grown like Topsy since the 1970s, the Colby College Museum of Art might reasonably be expected to have a staff of 12 or 13, as comparable museums at Skidmore and Vassar do. It has a staff of five.

“It’s the Colby way,” says museum director Daniel Rosenfeld, former director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Art.

The Colby museum began as a single gallery room in a combined music and art building in 1959. In 1973, Mr. & Mrs. Ellerton Jette, owners of the local Hathaway Shirt Company, gave the museum their own collection of early-American art and a gallery to house it. In 1982, Maine textile mill heir (and former Smith College Museum of Art director) Jere Abbott left the museum a $1.7-million endowment for acquisitions. In 1991, Mr. & Mrs. Stanton Davis of Shaw’s Supermarkets gave the museum an additional temporary exhibition gallery. In 1996, collector Paul Schupf provided the museum an entire new wing to house painter Alex Katz’s collection of his own work, Katz being a prominent summer resident of Maine. And in 1999, Peter and Paula Lunder of the Dexter Shoe family built the museum another wing to house the permanent collection. Of these key benefactors, only Peter Lunder ’56, is a Colby alumnus.

“Colby is really a product of the good will and aspirations of people who were originally from this community,” says Rosenfeld. “Alumni are not as involved with the museum as they ought to be. My goal as a transitional director is to build alumni support. Alumni largely have not been in tune with the museum.”

The “Colby way” Rosenfeld refers to is really just the enforced austerity of most academic museum budgets. Museum directors at Skidmore, Smith, and Vassar each stressed, as Colby’s Dan Rosenfeld does, that endowment is critical to the operation of a cultural institution. Getting people to contribute art and architecture is the easy part. Finding sources of funding for staffing and operations is the tricky business.

“You can’t do it off tuition. You can’t do it off revenues. So you need to do it in terms of endowment,” says Rosenfeld. “If you can build an endowment base that supports your operations, you have more autonomy. You have more freedom.”

Hugh J. Gourley III, the man who oversaw the dramatic expansion of the Colby museum as its director from 1966 until 2002, agrees with his successor, pointing out that 50 percent of the museum’s operating budget comes from endowment.

“At Colby,” says Hugh Gourley, “everything is basically done [that way]. The college is getting visibility and paying a comparatively low amount in terms of the total budget.”

And as he looks back over what Colby College Museum of Art has managed to become with minimal financial support from the college, Gourley makes an observation that resonates with what has happened to arts facilities on campuses across the country, and with what could happen at Haverford.

“You don’t need a lot of people to make things happen,” Gourley says. “You just need a few people who think big.”

Thinking Big

Think arts. Think interdisciplinary. Think endowment. Think regional. Think big.

Haverford, of course, has been thinking big of late, with the construction of the Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center and the Gardner Integrated Athletic Center. Former Dean of the College, Joseph Tolliver, (now vice president and dean of student life at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.), reports that students had been telling him increasingly over the past few years that the school needed to make a substantial investment in the arts. The adaptive re-use of Ryan Gym as a potential new home for the Humanities Center and Peace & Global Citizenship Center may be a step in that direction, but Dean Tolliver, who left Skidmore for Haverford seven years ago (and left here at the end of the last spring semester), cautions that “Skidmore and Haverford are very different places [he’d left there just as Tang Museum construction was beginning]. It was easier for Skidmore to morph into the Tang than it would be for Haverford.”

“Haverford wants to go where Skidmore is, but that’s farther down the road,” says ex-Dean Tolliver. “Haverford needs to grow into a building like that. I think [your] focus on the arts needs to be a larger curriculum and [that will happen]. Haverford is headed in the right direction. [The school] has several good offerings and will grow the curriculum as it looks towards expanding the facilities.”

But before Haverford builds its own arts center, Dean Tolliver suggests, it needs to build its arts culture. And he sees the work of the College Planning Committee’s subcommittee on the arts moving that agenda along, identifying issues and opportunities, engendering dialogue, and raising consciousness about the importance of the arts in a well-rounded liberal arts education.

“When you take the arts,” Tolliver says, “you see physics differently.”

(Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer and art critic who lives in Yarmouth, Maine. His previous alumni magazine contributions include “Haverford Art,” and profiles of author Nicholson Baker ’79 and former University of Iowa and Cornell president Hunter Rawlings ’66.)

“A Haughty Indifference to Fashion”
Architectural historian Michael J. Lewis ’79 on the difference between the cultures of Haverford and Williams:

Michael J. Lewis ’79 was an economics major at Haverford, but he now teaches art and architectural history at Williams College. He is the author of The Politics of the German Gothic Revival (1993); Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (2001); The Gothic Revival (2002); and a forthcoming survey history of American art and architecture; he is also a frequent contributor of architectural criticism to journals such as The New Criterion and Commentary. It’s fair to say that Michael Lewis lives for architecture, but he is not at all sure that a new building is the best way to raise Haverford’s arts consciousness.

“I don’t believe the building does it,” says Lewis. “The building is a sign of success. The first line is the faculty, then the students, then the building.”

Lewis’ own aesthetic awakening came in his senior year at Haverford, when he took a course on urban history at Bryn Mawr. Upon graduation, he secured a Fulbright Fellowship to study the reconstruction of Germany after World War II, then earned a Ph.D. in architectural history at the University of Pennsylvania. After returning to Bryn Mawr for two years (1989-91) to teach the very course in urbanism that had sparked his professional interest, he served as a historian at the Canadian Center for Architecture before joining the Williams faculty in 1993.

When he got to Williams, Lewis says he assumed teaching at one highly selective liberal arts college would be pretty much like teaching at another, but he discovered that the cultures of Haverford and Williams were decidedly different, largely owing to their respective heritages.

“I tried doing exactly what had been done to me at Haverford and Bryn Mawr,” Lewis recalls. “I’d come in to class and say something like ‘Frank Lloyd Wright was a bad architect. Flat roofs leak, so that’s bad architecture.’ Then a student would say, ‘But, Mr. Lewis, is architecture just about keeping the rain out or is it about ideal form?’ When I got to Williams and I said ‘Frank Lloyd Wright is a bad architect,’ the students would just look at me and write it down. I could not push their buttons.”

Lewis came to believe that the difference between Haverford and Williams students was not a matter of intellect but of historical roots.

“Haverford and Bryn Mawr, while not religiously Quaker, have inherited the culture of a Quaker meeting house. Any moment, the spirit may move and someone will speak out. Williams is a Puritan culture. When I speak, I am Cotton Mather in his pulpit. There is a tremendous culture here of cordiality, the covenant of the camp. It may be the product of our remoteness. You don’t argue during the day with someone you’re sure to see that night.”

These cultural differences, Lewis suggests, inform the arts consciousness of institutions.

“Haverford is marinated in the Quaker empirical approach to education,” he says. “The arts do not loom large in Haverford’s history.”

Doing research on Haverford architecture, for instance, Lewis ran across minutes of the building of Founders Hall that specified “no showy portico.”

“The Quakers had a haughty indifference to fashion,” Lewis says. “Though Founders Hall was built at the height of the Greek Revival, there is not a bit of that in [it]. It is a farm building writ large.”

Williams, on the other hand, benefited from Yankee ingenuity, erecting the first panoptical college library in America, the octagonal structure that eventually became the first stage of the Williams College Museum of Art. And building on a college culture that stressed manly athleticism and business savvy, Williams developed an art history program that to this day produces not aesthetes but cultural movers and shakers. Indeed, many members of what has been called the “Williams Art Mafia” have directed key American art museums—Rusty Powell at the National Gallery, James Wood of the Art Institute of Chicago, Thomas Krens at the Guggenheim, and the late Kirk Varnedoe, a Williams football and rugby player, of the Museum of Modern Art.

Michael Lewis believes Haverford can build its own culture of the arts drawing on its historical strengths in empirical research, social justice, and activism. Photography, for instance, would be a natural fit.

“The key to everything is a couple of dedicated professors who are charismatic and dynamic and who will do the slow, patient, landscape-shaping that takes a generation. When our program started here at Williams in the 1920s, it was two guys, then three, then four. It took a whole generation to build up. But the generation after that took over the leading American museums.”

—E.A.B.

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