Letter to the Editor
Professors, not buildings, matter
I know Pat Bigsby, like Pat Bigsby, and appreciate his writing. I do, however, take exception to one silly, perspective-less argument that Pat — and many others — have made. This argument, as Pat put it in Wednesday’s column, is that recruitment will suffer because “we can’t even show prospective students our plan for the future.”
It’s an apparently sensible but misplaced worry. When I first visited Voxman Music Building in the spring of 2006, I wasn’t really blown away by facilities. I was, however, amazed by my professor.
Then again, Voxman was in much better shape than the dilapidated, near-disgusting spaces and rickety offices at the podunk school in Connecticut to which I also applied. Did I come to Iowa for our facilities? No, I came because I didn’t get into Yale and because my professor was awesome.
(And I think, among grad students of many disciplines, this is a fairly typical route to Iowa.)
If we had classes in barns for 10 years and used the savings to fund faculty guest lectures, master classes, performance tours, and outside residencies, we would see a greater yield in recruitment than from a hasty ribbon-cutting. The “plan” we show prospective students should be a faculty and a curriculum that is second to few. When we confuse architecture with education, we betray how small our worlds, and our ambitions, really are.
Peter Gillette
UI graduate student
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