By Louis E. Guzmán
PPCC’s Theater Arts Program, under pressure from meager student interest, high costs, and inconstant community support in a time of declining public funding, continues to lose enrollment and is at the point of unavoidable radical changes, according to Vice President for Educational Services, Dr. Edwin Ray.
Only four of the total Theatre Arts curriculum will be offered in the fall 2006 term. The implications of this drastic reduction can spell doom to a culturally popular program in the near future, administrators say.
Because of peculiarities in degree program requirements, not all the Theater Arts offerings are vulnerable to the red pencil. The general education objectives of the Theatre Arts curriculum, officials say, will be salvaged by retaining the four courses. This means that the more expensive, technical courses will be sacrificed in spite of their greater visibility. Discussions intended to salvage the program through a process of articulation with the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have not yielded encouraging results.
Like all college curricula, PPCC’s offers the normal general education courses (GE) that are understood to round out a full college education, whether at two-year or four-year educational institutions. They are intended to provide students with remedial broad scope education, well beyond their parochial specialization’s, and are thus considered indispensable to a well-educated citizen.
Students in all fields of concentration must, therefore, choose courses outside their areas to satisfy GE requirements. This means that student demand for literally all GE offerings, including Theatre Arts, is perennially high, thus justifying their continued inclusion in semester class schedules. The four courses to be included in the fall schedule of classes, compared to the 20 courses in the current semester (there are 39 courses in the Theatre Arts degree listing), are in the GE curriculum.
These are assured of sufficient enrollment to be retained in the future. The remaining Theatre Arts courses fall into the technical list of endangered subject matter.
Technical courses are the heart and soul of the community college’s existence. They are the foundation rationale for the institution’s curriculum. Loaded with purposeful courses, they inculcate students with marketable skills that qualify them for early employment, often concurrent with their training or shortly thereafter.
The range of such courses is as wide as the college’s curriculum, but their appeal to students varies from subject to subject. Auto mechanics will always be popular in a nation that runs on wheels. Journalism, photography, computer graphics, and the many electronic fields still proliferating have great appeal to students.
In contrast, the theatre has low appeal to students from a community drawn by other cultural interests. This is not say that the local art community has not supported PPCC’s Theatre Arts productions over the years. Faculty members credit community participation as enough to sustain the program in recent years in at least two important ways: attendance at performances and volunteer actors who have supplemented aspiring college fledgling thespians.
Still another factor is cost. In contrast to GE courses, technical courses can be costly. They often call for expensive equipment, specialized materials, and sizable facilities. Theatre Arts technical courses are among the highest cost to install and operate. This factor, combined with a low enrollment (currently 10), as calculated by college administrators, is sufficient reason to eliminate them at the present time.
The implications of radically reducing the courses offered in the Theatre Arts program, even for one semester, however, could be far more serious than appears on the surface. According to official information, if courses are not offered for a degree program three years in succession, the program may be eliminated from the college’s curriculum. This means that the current action has long run implications if no technical Theatre Arts courses are offered in the next six semesters.
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