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One Important Way a University Can Fail

"Their attitude was 'Keep a low profile and stay celibate.'"
--Reverend David Garrick, former theater professor, Notre Dame.
Quoted in Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor (edited by Michael J. Rosen), p. 247.

How pitiful.  The words conservative and stupid are not necessarily synonyms.  But in this case, the collective voice coming at the theater professor at Notre Dame was not merely conservative; it was also stupid.  To send such a message--"Keep a low profile..."--is to say either that the "voice from above" did not understand real theater or that they were more than happy to neuter any legitimate theater on campus.  Were the film professors there supposed to wait for a list of banned films from the Vatican before making out their syllabi?

Such a travesty is not confined to colleges and universities that are connected to the Catholic brand of Christianity.  Protestant colleges and universities fail here, too.  I once witnessed the banning of Ingmar Bergman's magnificent Cries and Whispers at a "protestant" university during "women's week" because someone on the staff in the administration had heard that there was a "lesbian scene" in the film; this "assessment" of the film made its way to someone with enough "authority" to censor it without ever having seen it.  Ahh...yes.  Brilliant! 

Such feeble "thinking" is not confined to universities with "religious" ties.  It is the responsibility of any institution of higher learning to teach, not to cater to philistine opinions.  A true liberal arts education will automatically clash with timidity and calcification.

Nudity Alert!

    Yes, there is nudity, again, in The New Yorker, the current issue on the stands, January 21, 2008, pp. 60-67 (and not only on the stands, but, gasp!, in private homes as well!).  The nude woman who served in 1930 as a model (and a student and a paramour) to a famous photographer--Man Ray--and whom you can see in this particular issue of The New Yorker is Lee Miller.  And she, herself, became a famous photographer.  Read the article for more on her life; she was the proverbial free spirit.  I had forgotten, and Judith Thurman, the author of this essay on Miller, reminds me, that Jean Cocteau, "looking for an actress with the features and aplomb of a Greek statue," selected Miller to play the lead in his film The Blood of a Poet.  (While I'm always interested in a nude photo of a beautiful woman, honesty demands that I tell you how much I prefer Miller's photo with no human being in it at all on page 61--Portrait of Space--to Man Ray's "topless" photo of her on p. 60.)
    Is the nude shot of this woman--and the very fact that she sat for Man Ray's photograph--a much more comfortable idea given the fact that she was also a woman who worked behind a camera with distinction?  For many it is.  Should it be?  I think not.  More credit to her for this excellence as both model and photographer, but these are separate fields, and excellence in being a model shouldn't be denigrated because excellence there is also complicated and difficult.  Not just anyone can be a model.  By saying this, I do not merely mean that not just anyone "looks" like a model: I mean not just anyone can do what a model does.  Some people have the "look," but they cannot model.
    I offer the following words on the photo of mine below.  I worked with a professional model.  She's a college graduate, by the way.  Is the topless shot of this woman a much more comfortable idea given the fact that she was already, at the time of posing, a woman who had graduated from college?  I think not, though I would wish a college education for everyone interested in working for one.  And, no, she's not someone I knew when she was a student in college, much less someone I ever taught.  I paid her modeling rate.  I have her signed "model release form" on file.  I was thinking of Georgia O'Keeffe as I worked on this shot in Photoshop: I was thinking of her watercolor titled Evening Star III.  My model from Seattle was the star I was photographing on that particular evening when we shot in Portland.  O'Keeffe, as you know, painted many flowers (a traditional but also a suitably innocuous subject that pleases many viewers for what it is not, not what it is); however, O'Keeffe also said this about painting flowers: "I hate flowers.  I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."  My model could move, stand still, pose, think, converse, participate intelligently as a fellow artist in the shoot, and set her own modeling fee (more expensive than roses).  Georgia O'Keeffe, many of those who valorize her as a feminist heroine in art do not know, also modeled nude...for her paramour, Alfred Stieglitz.  Those beautiful nude photographs are not hard to find, though they're not in this particular issue of The New Yorker.  Maybe next week.