by Jon Lackman | 30 July 2010 | Uncategorized
An article in The New York Times reports that the Mount Sinai medical school admits a certain number of students each year who don’t have the traditional credentials (high MCAT scores and extensive coursework in biology, chemistry, and physics). This hampers the school’s U.S. News ranking, and a small percentage of these students subsequently drop out, but the rest of the students seem to fare as well as conventionally trained applicants, and they help diversify the nation’s pool of doctors.
I think the art history field would benefit similarly were its graduate programs to recruit and admit a greater number of unconventional students. Admissions committees everywhere seem to focus on the same criteria — g.p.a., test scores, the number of college art history courses taken, and recommendations from respected figures in the field — as the best predictors of how well students will do in coursework and how likely they will be to stick around for the PhD. These criteria have validity, but they exclude some highly creative individuals who don’t score well on traditional measures and don’t have extensive background in art history but have the capacity to make a big impact on the field.
Note that many undergraduate institutions have anemic art-history departments (that may or may not even offer a major in art history). Even undergraduates with access to a good department may not discover it until late in their college career, particularly when their high school education and hometown museum offerings did little to ignite their interest in art history.
Art history graduate schools are going to have to get creative if we’re to have any hope of diversifying the field. As things stand, the population of graduate students seems to be composed overwhelmingly of wealthy white students who grew up with regular access to art and/or attended the private high schools that offer (or even require) art history courses — a population that, despite its merits, doesn’t have the widest possible set of experiences and perspectives.
Thanks for this great post.
The PhD program in Visual Studies at University of California, Irvine has some of this diversity in its grad students. Students come in with Art History and Film and Media Studies backgrounds, but also Sociology, Science Studies, American Studies, Gender Studies, and others.
The Irvine PhD program is interdisciplinary in nature (the faculty sit in the Art History and Film and Media Studies departments), which helps. But, visual studies is also a discipline more open to such diversity than art history has been traditionally.
I would imagine this diversity may also be found in Rochester’s Visual Culture program.
Thank you for this comment, Mary. It is very informative? Are you currently involved with University of California, Irvine?