In His Own Words

Stefan Dreisbach-Williams '00, like many Earlham arts alumni, is enthusiastic about Purpose and Passion: The Campaign for Earlham and what it means for the arts program at the College. He and his family have a long history with the College and the arts, and were recently featured in an Alumni Spotlight.

Stefan submitted a written piece for the consideration of all Earlhamites.

"You do realize this is heresy?" These were the first words I heard from my thesis committee as I began the defense of my master's thesis in theatre education at Emerson College titled "An Argument for a Quaker Theatre". The speaker was Earlham theatre professor Michael "Mickey" White, and though largely meant in jest, Mickey rightly acknowledged the historically strained relations between Friends and the arts.

Given this history why does Earlham need an expanded arts center and what do the arts have to do with Earlham? If you graduated before 1970 the arts may not have been a large part of your Earlham experience, but today the arts are an integral part of the Earlham community.

Despite Friends' tradition of skepticism toward the arts, Quakerism and the arts have grown into so close an association during the last half-century that artist Friends often find little separation between their creative and spiritual lives. This has been my experience as querying and seeking through Quakerism led to my own work as a theatre educator. In my classes and productions, my students and collaborators work as a collective, make decisions by consensus, learn to empathize through character study, and pursue simplicity in form and content for elegant, effective communication without excess.

My story is just one example of the ways arts programming strengthens Earlham in its mission. What sets Earlham apart from every other college is not its academic programs so much as its character, its ethos and ethics, its culture. This is a culture strongly rooted not only in Quakerism but also in the liberal arts. The arts are an integral facet of both Quaker life and liberal arts education.

The arts serve every field of study whether it's a chemist blowing her own glass instruments or a social worker reading the gang news in the latest graffiti tags. The arts also have academic value unto themselves. Fields of research such as reader-response theory and performance theory recognize artistic process and production as a legitimate means for analysis and its expression. The arts help us communicate complex ideas in elegant ways like the marketing of whale song to promote conservation or the design of the national debt clock to bring attention to our fiscal habits or a performance of "The Persians" to stir thought on war.

In a world glutted with information our students have an unprecedented potential to connect spheres of knowledge once seen as hopelessly disparate. Students of the liberal arts break down the barriers between academic disciplines and open new worlds of understanding. The arts are a powerful force in forging these links and promoting the conclusions of their analysis.

We owe it to future generations of Earlhamites to provide them with the tools to explore the broadest possible range of studies within our guiding ethos. The planned arts center expansion will ensure that an Earlham education in the liberal arts includes all the arts. Far from heresy, the arts at Earlham are a necessity.