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Drama students want work-study changes
May 21, 2009
by Carole Bass '83, '97MSL
©Jacqueline Nelson/Yale Alumni Magazine
As street theater goes, it was fairly low-drama.
A handful of students, clad in black ushers' jackets, set up chairs and tables on the steps of the University Theatre on York Street. Munching cookies, textbooks before them, they called it a "work-study-in" -- not a protest, they emphasized, but a "demonstration," in the words of one student, "that academics are our top priority."
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A huddle with the dean produced a mixed response.
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Students staged the mini-performance this month to shine a spotlight on what School of Drama dean James Bundy '95MFA acknowledges is a perennial source of dialogue, if not conflict: the school's work-study program. The demonstration and a subsequent huddle with the dean produced a mixed response, with some changes as well as some that's-life shrugs.
The work-study program is integral to the overall enterprise of the drama school. All students -- regardless of their financial situation -- are required to spend between 150 and 200 hours per year working on productions at the Yale Repertory Theatre. For most, the $13 hourly wage helps pay their way through school. But the work is also part of the students' professional training.
The students who held the "work-study-in" this month are in the department of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism. Their work-study assignments largely consist of ushering and working on the lighting crew at Yale Rep productions. The main problem, they say, is scheduling -- being assigned nightly ushering shifts, with as little as a week's notice, at the busy end of the semester.
"We're in classes for four hours in the morning and then, often, rehearsal [for student productions] for four and a half hours in the afternoon," says Brian Valencia '10. Students might then be called to work a four-hour shift at the Rep in the evening, he says.
Jorge Rodriguez '10 offers an example: last December, he was assigned to usher at Tom Stoppard's Rough Crossing. After getting home at 2 o'clock in the morning, he says, it was time to start his schoolwork. "The quality suffered. The school has offered us fantastic financial aid, and we're very grateful. But I think that much can be done to make it more convenient for everyone."
Bundy specifies one change that should help: instead of pulling students out of class to work at matinees next year, the school will spend "tens of thousands of dollars" to hire outside ushers for those shows. More generally, he says, the school will do its best to accommodate students' academic crunch time. But, he adds: "I couldn't guarantee that they wouldn't get end-of-semester assignments, and I couldn't guarantee that they wouldn't receive short notice. With 180 students, it's not possible to guarantee that no one will be inconvenienced."
Students also say that the work is often irrelevant to their studies. As Valencia puts it, "we're not here to usher and run light boards." But Bundy is less sympathetic to this complaint.
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"We're not here to usher and run light boards."
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"I think [work-study] contributes enormously" to the students' education, "though not always in ways that students appreciate immediately," he says. "The director who knows what it's like to work on a wardrobe crew has a much greater sensitivity." And an usher who watches the same production night after night can "really understand what the nature of a live performance is," he avers.
Dramaturgy students, who make up a little more than 10 percent of the school, aren't the only ones to raise concerns about the work-study program, Bundy notes. He says the school is "working with all departments to achieve greater clarity" and that, for the first time this year, it's sending students an "extensive packet" about the work-study program instead of waiting until orientation.
Nonetheless, he gives the program a positive review.
"It's a very practical accommodation for an undercapitalized institution that wants to provide financial aid," the dean says. Besides, he notes, "the vast majority of students" choose to work more than their required number of hours. "Part of my job is to encourage them to look at ways to manage their time" so that they can truly put the study back in work-study.  |
