From: bob@dolores.Stanford.EDU (Bob Lodenkamper)
Subject: Re: discrimination at CMU
Followup-To: soc.motss
Organization: Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University
	<BOB.92Nov11202308@dolores.Stanford.EDU>
	<mattm-121192102050@mcmelmon.apple.com>
Date: 12 Nov 92 16:40:02

In article <mattm-121192102050@mcmelmon.apple.com> mattm@apple.com
(Matthew Melmon) writes: 

   In article <BOB.92Nov11202308@dolores.Stanford.EDU>,
   bob@dolores.Stanford.EDU (Bob Lodenkamper) wrote:

   > But I strongly suspect that some hypothetical "hyper-manly" actor
   > who was purely incapable of acting in any other way (i.e. the
   > role of a swishy gay man, sensitive guy, crossdresser, whatever)
   > would not be flunked out.  It would likely be said that such
   > roles are sufficiently unusual that an inability to act them out
   > properly was not a fatal failure of professional competence,
   > while inability to act the role of standard American straight man
   > is too unprofessional.

   You are almost certainly correct.  This is, I believe, what Dolphie
   called 'The brute fact of life.'  It is certainly true in the
   'real' world of theater.  And so the argument turns on whether or
   not it is the responsibility of a drama school to turn out students
   who can 'make it' on the professional stage; or, whether or not the
   school's responsibility is purely one of teaching some absract
   combination of 'fundamentals' - but stop short of forcing the
   realities of the professional world upon the students.

   I believe it is acceptable for a world-class institution to treat
   its students as 'professionals.'  If the student is simply
   interested in acting as an art, and not as a career, then he (or
   she) should look for a more 'artsy' school.  A very major point in
   going to a top-of-the-line institution is prestige, for use as a
   calling card.  The school's prestige is dependent on turning out a
   'product' that sells well.  In this case, for the drama department
   to remain prestigious, the actors it trains must get prestigious
   parts.

How do you draw a distinction between the CMU drama program in the
1980s and nearly all law, business, medicine, and engineering schools
in the 1950s wrt "professional realities"?

Back then, those fields were extremely male dominated (they still are,
of course, but it was more extreme back then).  A law school could
have said (and many probably did) "Why bother to teach law to a woman?
No jury will take the arguments of a woman as seriously as the
arguments of a man, therefore exclusion of women is justifiable on the
grounds of post-graduation professional effectiveness.  Anyway, the
law firms don't want to hire women, they want to hire men.  If we
graduate a woman, she'll be reduced to doing public service law, and
that will look terrible for a graduate of XXX Law to be doing such
things."

What is especially unpleasant about this line of reasoning is that if
the schools go along with it, there will *never* be counterexamples to
whittle away at the assumption that women can't make effective lawyers
because there will be no women lawyers (not even unemployed women
lawyers).  There will never be any pressure on law firms to be more
diverse, since all law school graduates will be straight white men.
This is what I meant by "passively mirror the status quo of the
relevant profession", and I don't really think professional schools
ought to be doing that.

- Bob