Just recently, a particular subgroup of Amherst musicians suffered the consequences of our school's negligence regarding the arts. The drum set that percussionists were using for music lessons and for practice––formerly located in Pond Dormitory-was removed due to noise complaints from residents.
It is understandable that students would find it irritating to have drums pounding downstairs at any hour of the day. It is not forgivable, however, that the College offered the percussionists no alternatives, leaving them without a place to practice even though some are enrolled in private lessons for credit.
The College should, at the very least, provide sufficient resources to support its students' curricular endeavors. The arts for students at Amherst are more than extracurricular activities. They are, for many students, an integral part of their studies here.
This is something that sets the arts apart from other activities at the College: They are approached as an academic discipline. For the percussionists on campus, this means studying with private instructor Claire Arenius, a nationally-renowned jazz drummer; certainly, asking the College to provide her students with the means to practice the lessons that she teaches is no more extreme than asking for a computer lab or library.
With a billion-dollar endowment, I'd think that by now the College would have coughed up a few hundred bucks to sound-proof some space in Buckley. In fact, the College did make a feeble attempt to address the issue of percussion practice space a few years ago, designating space in Pratt Dormitory to house a drum set on which percussionists could practice. However, the College forgot to take into account the high volume that the drum set produces and decided not to sound-proof the facility. Within days of the set being moved in, residents complained; and the drummers were forced to leave. Since then, drummers had been practicing in Pond, with limited hours so as not to disturb the residents––until now.
Obviously, moving the set to Pond is not an acceptable solution. Some music faculty members have been making noise in the Dean of Student's office, their actions have not yet yielded results. Now, with the drum set packed up in the music building, it's time for the College to act. For too long, negligence has caused the arts at Amherst to deteriorate––it is only thanks to some of the wonderful teachers that students have been able to grow musically. It's time for the College to recognize this negligence and to change the way it views the arts: both as an extracurricular activity and as a field of study.
This has always been a difficult reality for the arts departments at the College-one other departments rarely face-the need to support both the extracurricular and academic interests of students with resources barely adequate for just one of those tasks. Last week's editorial pointed out that "the performing arts do not accrue the same financial attention as other extracurricular activities on campus." Also, the arts as academic departments don't receive the same kind of support and attention that other departments do––if that were the case, our percussionists wouldn't be in the position that they are now.
Imagine that somehow students in the English department were unable to use their books for classes. Surely, this would be deemed unacceptable by the College, and the College would take steps to find a solution. Or, on the extracurricular side of things, if the baseball team was unable to acquire bats for its players, certainly the College would take steps to assure that they had everything they needed to play their sport.
In the case of the College's percussionists, both analogies hold-they are being deprived of their curricular obligations and their means to make music. This result is terribly disappointing. Some people in the music department have been making their voices heard at the Dean of Students' office, with no results yet. The fact that the College has done nothing to find an acceptable solution is an insult to musicians across campus, construed perhaps as a slap in the face to every artist who feels marginalized by the low priority the College places on his or her work.
Even the much-heralded Committee on Academic Progress is not focusing on how to retool our arts departments to suit the needs of today's students. Despite the suggestion from some faculty, the committee created no such focus. Instead, student artists' condition at the College remains epitomized by the plight of the percussionists: unappreciated, deprived of resources and lacking a voice in the administration that will stand up for their needs.
Rodriguez can be reached at awrodriguez@amherst.edu