Dear Committee Members,

I cannot attend the committee's meeting with the Music School, so I am writing to let you know my thoughts. In my view, a true liberal arts education should include something on the arts. As it stands, the only exposure to either the fine arts or music that undergraduates are guaranteed to get is a laughingly small one in the humanities foundation courses, and the music component is minuscule to nonexistent. Students are expected to understand the arts on the basis of two or three lectures--an amount that would be considered unthinkable for any other field. Yet making a case for inclusion of the arts is by no means difficult, not least because they are inherently interdisciplinary, one of the stated aims of undergraduate education at Rice. Further, growing evidence shows that students test better after listening to classical music and that adults involved in amateur performance into their advanced years show less deterioration of the brain. On another front, David Gelerntner, the Yale computer scientist who was severely maimed by the Unibomber, has argued eloquently that having decisions made in our increasingly technological society by those without significant exposure to the arts is a serious mistake.

I would suggest that each undergraduate at Rice be required to take one course in either the Art and Art History department or the Music School. This course could be as small as a single credit--participation in Rice Chorale, for example--or it could be a full-blown three- or four-credit humanities course such as Art History 205 or Music 327. Studio art, film, and photography courses would satisfy the requirement, as well as private lessons in voice or on individual instruments. In this way students would spend one semester either studying art and music, creating it, or performing it.

This is hardly an outrageous suggestion. Harvard, for example, requires this of their students. At the large state university where I received my undergraduate degree, all students were required to take not one but two courses in the arts. Similar examples could be culled from institutions throughout the country. Indeed, Rice is astonishingly reactionary in its avoidance of the arts in education.

Adoption of such a proposal would doubtless require some shuffling of course loads, and in a department such as mine where we cannot even meet the needs of the majors, much less an influx of nonmajors, additional faculty as well. But if Rice is truly interested in providing a genuine liberal arts education, we should not focus exclusively on the "liberal" component at the expense of the "arts."