Weissman’s College Talk — Episode 33 Prof. Katherine Behar
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Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
“I was always artistically inclined from the time I was small, and I think I was fortunate to have parents who were very supportive of me.” This is how Professor Katherine Behar begins her life story, but she doesn’t claim that her family had no doubts whatsoever. “What I enjoy is doing a lot of different things. This was one of things that my parents were most concerned about, how I was going to find a career where I would be able to do all of the different things that I like doing.”
She has fulfilled her life’s ambitions by making art, writing, travelling, performing and engaging in all kinds of different creative activities. This native of Boston entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the idea of becoming a fashion designer, but then realized that instead of working under someone else she wanted to execute her own visions.
After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in Chicago, she decided to move to the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, where she obtained a master’s in arts and then to Hunter College, also in New York, where she was awarded another master’s in fine arts.
Behar, who today is an assistant professor of new media at Baruch College, became very interested in a new vehicle for artistic expression as soon as she graduated. “At that time, everyone was talking about cyberspace—it was like the virtual space that we were going to live in and communicate in and socialize in. I wanted to start to portray that in my work, so even from my day job doing web design, I started to think maybe these are ways I can incorporate some of these metaphors for technology into my artistic work.”
Her interest in technology would open new frontiers for her while allowing her to incorporate all the tools she had learned to use in college. “It opened up another space for performance. As a performance artist, you think about the body and space, and as we start to look at technologies, we can think about spaces that technologies provide as possible performance spaces. There’s such an influence of various digital technologies—computers and gadgets and things like that—in my work. I think about them as being the performers too.”
A common question put to artists is how they get inspired to do what they do. Behar has a very simple answer: “I tend to start with some weird idea in my head and look for the right medium, whether it’s a sculpture, a performance, a video, a photograph. I look for the right form to hold that together and to present that to an audience.”
As an artist and a human being, Behar is also very conscious about the way we perceive technology. “The way we treat our gadgets shows us something about how we think about people who do menial tasks. For example, Siri’s voice in our iPhones is a woman’s voice. They initially tried this out with a man’s voice and discovered that people didn’t like taking driving directions from men, so they changed the voice. There are a lot of these subtle ways that gender shapes our technologies.”
This is another way to remind lay people of something that artists have known for centuries. “Art is an object or an event that provokes an experience in the viewer. A lot of art is in the eye of the beholder, so it could be that it’s the mindset or it could be that it’s triggered by something that an artist made,” says Behar.
Like many other artists, she feels exhilarated once she completes one of her projects, and she witnesses that exhilaration among her students too. “It’s the moment when it’s almost like you’ve given birth to this art object. It’s out in the world and it has a life of its own. I think that’s something that is really important for an artist to experience. Within the safety of the classroom, we can try various different things and be very experimental, but it lends a whole different level of reality that something is out there, that it’s in front of the Baruch community, it’s in front of the public, it’s in front of family and friends who come to the reception,” she says.
Behar also feels fulfilled by her one-on-one experiences with her students. “There’s something about a one-on-one experience with another artist, with an artwork, where you’re seeing it in unmediated form. I think there’s no substitute for that.”
The way she gets ideas for her art is also different from what most people would expect. “I don’t think that there’s any right way to do it. I’m usually more inspired to make work by reading theory than I am by going to a gallery and seeing other work,” explains Behar. “Lately, I’m reading the news and thinking about technological developments and sort of trying to understand. I think we’re at a very odd moment right now culturally and politically, and I think technology is playing a very important role in some transformations we’re seeing in the U.S. and in the world at large.”
This summer Behar is spending her time in South Florida working on a very interesting project. “I’ve been commissioned by the Vizcaya Museum in Miami for a project that will open in December as part of Miami Art Basel. It’s a group exhibition called Overload. My project is to think about other voices that populate this state. I’m interested in the voice of the water. I will be putting a hydrophone into the ocean off a barge, recording the sound of the water, boosting it into the human vocal range, running it through speech recognition, and displaying what the water is speaking.”
“I was there in March, and it was amazing. I saw about forty manatees altogether, just hanging out playing.”
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Behar Unites the Arts and Technology
This is the video version of the “College Talk” radio interview with Dr. Elizabeth Wollman of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College about the world of Broadway musicals.
The world of Broadway musicals from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
If there is a statistic that all college administrators look at every year it is enrollments, the bread and butter of higher education for multiple reasons. First, all private colleges – and increasingly public ones – depend upon students enrolling in order to maintain the financial flow to their institutions. Second, many public institutions have their state budget tied to the number of students they enroll. Third, the attractiveness of an institution of higher education is partly based on its enrollment success. No wonder everybody looks at those numbers every year with apprehension.
Enrollment numbers for the spring semester of 2017 have just been released, and they are not good news in most cases. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which tracks 97 percent of students at federal aid-eligible institutions, found an overall national decline of 1.5 percent for this spring semester compared to a year ago. That means 272,000 fewer students were enrolled nationwide.
And this is not an isolated bump. The year when this country had the largest enrollment in degree-granting institutions of higher education was 2010 when the total enrollment was 21,019,438. Today the number is 18,071,004, a reduction of nearly 16 percent in seven years. Last year the decline was 1.3 percent and the year before that 1.9 percent. A closer look at the whole report gives us an indication of where the problems reside.
First, the decline is most pronounced among older undergraduates at for-profit institutions (10.1 percent decline) and community colleges (2.5 percent decline). In the case of the former the report showed a decrease of 244,000 students over the age of 24. That is actually good news. The for-profit sector of higher education is responsible for the greatest amount of student debt in this country, while the quality of the education is not comparable with that of either public or not-for-profit private institutions.
Changes for the other two major types of higher education institutions were minimal. In the case of four-year public institutions there was an increase of 0.2 percent, while enrollment at four-year private institutions went down by 0.2 percent.
When it comes to graduate students we have seen an increase in enrollment of 1.1 percent during the last year across the board with only the four-year, for-profit ones showing a decrease of 1.2 percent.
Across the board the greatest decrease has been seen for students over 24 years old. This may reflect the fact that the economy is doing well and the unemployment levels – the main driving force for non-traditional students to go back to school – is pushing fewer of them to go to college.
When it comes to gender, most of the decrease is among males (2.1 percent). In fact, the U.S. shows a larger proportion of females than males in college (10,352,322 vs. 7,718,682).
When it comes to geography, the state with the largest growth was New Hampshire, with a 16.2 percent increase in enrollment. The state with the largest decline was Alaska, with a 5.8 percent decrease.
Regarding specific subjects, the largest increase for four-year institutions was in the liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities with a 6.9 percent increase. The biggest decrease for the same category of institutions was in foreign languages, literatures and linguistics, with a 6.7 percent decline.
So, what does all this mean?
First and foremost, many states, particularly in the Midwest, are showing a decrease in the number of high school graduates, the main pipeline for college. No wonder all those sates show a decline of enrollment between 1 and 4 percent. In the past these declines have been compensated by the aggressive recruitment of international students, but the jury is still out on whether the level of enrollments of people who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents will aid enrollments for the upcoming fall semester. The report does not include international students because this organization feels that they do not have robust enough data in that area.
Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the good state of the economy hurts college enrollment. If people feel that they do not need further education in order to get a job, they will not spend time and money going to college.
However, there are other factors that we need to consider as having potential effects on decreased enrollments. One is student debt. So much has been made of this problem that many do not go to college just to avoid long-term financial debt, despite the fact that federal financial aid increased during the Obama administration and that many states have pushed forward the idea of tuition-free college.
Another factor could be the relentless bad press that higher education has been receiving in the last few years for being politically “too liberal”, or being “irrelevant” to get a good job, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown that a college degree increases significantly one’s lifetime income.
The other aspect we need to consider is that against conventional wisdom not all high school graduates go straight to college. According to figures for 2014 (the last year for which we have statistics in this regard) only 68.4 percent of high school graduates go straight to college.
Although there are no comprehensive studies analyzing the reasons for the gap between graduating from high school and entering directly into college, there is anecdotal evidence that seems to indicate some of the reasons. One is that for many women the only path after high school is college. That is not the case for men, who are usually benefited by gender biases when it comes to job attainment. That could also be the case for students that come from homes where their parents lack a college education. Finally, many complain that there is not good enough information about what to study in college. As pointed out in a previous article in this column, about one-third of college graduates and drop-outs say they would have chosen a different major if they had known then what they know now.
So, yes, colleges and universities need to do a better job informing high school students of their options and the benefit of having a higher education degree.
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College Enrollments Continue National Decline
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Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
“I grew up in a family where Yiddish was spoken around me quite a bit. I grew up surrounded by Yiddish and Jewish culture, but I didn’t grow up speaking Yiddish, so it was something that was sort of mysterious that I didn’t know very much about.” That is the way Dr. Debra Caplan explains how she became an expert in Yiddish theater.
A native of North Wales in Pennsylvania, she says she was always interested from a very young age in performing arts. “I studied theater in high school and in college and became very interested in theater history. I was very interested in the history of avant-garde theater and became a theater director,” she explains.
Caplan received her bachelor’s degree in Jewish studies and theater from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and her doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University. Today she is an Assistant Professor of Theater at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, CUNY.
She explains how her interest in Yiddish theater evolved: “I started reading a lot in Yiddish, and when I discovered that Yiddish had this incredibly rich modernist theater tradition that had not been extensively written about, that was sort of it for me. It set me on a path.”
Despite the long history of Jewish culture, the history of Jewish theater is relatively recent. “There was no professional Jewish theater anywhere in the world until 1876, which—if you’re thinking about European theater traditions—is very late. Then, suddenly, these professional companies burst onto the scene,” explains Caplan. By the 1920s major critics from The New York Times went to the Lower East Side and wrote, “This is where innovation is, this is where the avant-garde is going. We all need to learn from these performers.”
Because theater is a communal experience, Caplan thinks that Yiddish theater became the proxy for the nation that Jews didn’t have at that time. “Theater requires the creation of a temporary community where everybody speaks your language and everybody has the same points of cultural reference.”
New York became the epicenter of world theater, thanks to the many immigrant communities who created their own theatrical traditions, whether Jewish, Italian, Irish or German. “There were a lot of people moving between those spaces, especially in vaudeville,” she says.
Independent of its nature, Yiddish theater has many contexts. As Caplan explains, “the word ‘Yiddish’ in Yiddish means Jewish. If I showed you any book about ‘Yiddish theater,’ is it about Yiddish theater—that is, theater in the Yiddish language? Is it about all Jewish theater? Does it include theater in English, theater in Hebrew, Ladino or German made by Jews? It’s not clear.”
Things gets more complicated not only because Yiddish theater developed in many countries with Jewish communities that were influenced by the culture and language of those countries, but also because there is no such thing as a stereotypical Yiddish theater. It has produced comedies, tragedies, musicals—you name it.
Caplan is now working on a book about Yiddish theater as a transgressive cultural phenomenon. “It was not really ever approved of by Jewish law, but it comes into being at this moment when these traditional Jewish communities are modernizing, and they’re modernizing very fast. There’s a generational divide; it’s the young people who are running away to join the Yiddish theater. They don’t care about these norms of who should perform and who should not perform and whether a woman’s voice should be heard singing or not. It’s irrelevant because they’re already sort of secularized and invested in modernity as sort of a project.
When asked whether her students—Jewish or not—show interest in Yiddish theater, her answer is very clear. “I’ve been surprised by how often students choose to work on Yiddish theater and why. For a lot of students, it’s a sense of how deeply integrated this tradition is into the city and a curiosity about its place in their neighborhoods and their communities.”
Caplan tells her students that theater is like a laboratory for empathy. “If you want to create more empathetic people, theater is the tool kit. There’s something really uniquely powerful about seeing something acted out in front of you live on a stage, and that’s something that I think applies to all theater, regardless of who is performing.”
“There is not as much Yiddish theater today by a long stretch as there was in the 1920s and 30s. New York used to have permanent Yiddish theaters that did Yiddish plays year-round; they’d have eleven or twelve of them at the same time, permanent standing Yiddish theaters. Today, there are two Yiddish theater companies in the city, but they don’t perform every single day, and they’re much smaller. I think that one of the interesting things is that Yiddish is still very much spoken in the city, but the ultra-Orthodox and the Hasidic communities are by and large not permissive of theater outside of the bounds of single-gender theater, maybe in a school, maybe as an education exercise. Professional theater of the sort that we’re accustomed to seeing on the stages of New York is not part of that culture. So that’s not the community that’s coming to see, by and large, the pieces that are being produced today. It’s the more secular community.”
Caplan thinks that Yiddish theater speaks to everybody because it poses universal questions for any community. “‘How do you retain communal integrity in a modern world where things are changing really fast?’ That’s still a really important question for people.”
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Caplan studies, teaches the richness of Yiddish theater
This is a video blog about the Kanner Award that Ms. Olivia Sztanga, from Baruch College, who received this award for her work on issues about refugees.
Balance of Power in. U.S. Refugee Policy from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
This is a video version of the radio show “College Talk” interview with Dr. Nicholas Sibrava of the Department of Psychology at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College about issues of coping with anxiety and stress.
Coping with anxiety and stress from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.