Providing our students with an intellectual and creative foundation for a life-long involvement with the Arts
We believe the arts are not merely an entertaining distraction from an over-compartmentalized modern life, but an integral, unifying, and fundamentally humanizing part of life itself. Theatre, music, and visual arts deserve study as distinct entities, much as chemistry, biology, and physics do in the natural sciences, but just as there is biochemistry, there is musical theatre, and the arts, while distinct, work together, complementing one another and occasionally overlapping, in serving the common goal of human expression. College may teach us to measure and calculate, to explain and justify, to organize and prioritize, but to be fully human, we must also know how to feel and express. Jean-Bernard Bucky, the William Dwight Whitney Professor of Theatre at Williams College, contends "the arts provide direct and forceful means for expressing fantasy and irony, extravagance and eccentricity, irrationality and hope, frustration and anguish, and, indeed, failure - qualities not often embraced by other academic disciplines." In this way, all the areas of the liberal arts work together to form a complete person.
