“Theatre in the ‘Engaged University’: A Context for Habermas’s Communicative Action” (2007)

Fall 2007 9 ‘‘Theatre in the ‘Engaged University’: A Context for Habermas’s Communicative Action” Anne Berkeley Throughout its history, the American university has learned to accommodate divergent functions—theological, humanistic, vocational, and scholarly, for example—that have been organized into curricula, and legitimized on the basis of changing ideas about the uses of knowledge. The growth of theatre studies has been complex and multifaceted but, in the end, its generalizable characteristics can be understood to fall into two prevailing curricular orientations. The ﬁrst, an aesthetically-oriented curriculum, teaches the values of the liberal humanist approach. The second, a market-oriented curriculum, is characterized by professionalism and vocationalism. These formulations mark the triumph of “Enlightened” objectivity that has afﬂicted our practices with discordant beliefs about whether to teach humanistic content or the crafts of theatrical production. In the 1930s, this debate came to be identiﬁed as a dichotomy between “craft” or “culture.”1 The ﬁeld has never resolved this clash and is still mired in disagreements about whether to emphasize intellectual growth or technical skills, or whether and how to do both. Currently, liberal arts education embraces a market-oriented, utilitarian aim as students’ intentions for the bachelor of arts (B.A.) degree have changed from developing a philosophy of life to that of preparing for economic security.2 This trend is especially troubling for theatre studies because it raises questions about the ethics of professional training for a labor market with so few careers.All too often now an entrenched dichotomy frustrates efforts to teach a theoretically coherent curriculum. Both foundations of the theatre curriculum—the liberal arts and the pre-professional—have been exhausted. Programs are notoriously disjointed and dysfunctional, quagmires of turf battles, ideological discrepancies, and ﬁscal scarcity. So in its 200 year struggle for recognition worthy of its potential in liberal arts education, theatre’s disciplinary potency and integration with larger university concerns remain illusive. The ﬁeld often suffers, in sum, from a crisis of legitimacy. But educational dispensations are neither monolithic nor neutral, not intransigent but malleable. Anne Berkeley is an assistant professor of theatre at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington where she teaches theatre history and theory. She has published articles in such journals as Theatre Topics, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Research in Drama Education (UK), and The Journal of Communication Administration. She is a contributor to Teaching Theatre Today: Pedagogical Views of Theatre in Higher Education and is on the editorial board of Theatre Topics. Her current research lies at the intersection of the history and theory of theatre studies in higher education, performance and critical theories, and community-based theatre. 10 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Historian of higher education Herbert Kliebard shows that disciplinary histories reﬂect, above all, struggles for legitimacy within arenas of shifting and contested ideas about the purpose of a university education. The undergraduate curriculum is therefore shaped by competing agendas for curricular content, with attempts to reform it necessarily bound by comprehensive academic agendas.3 So we can surmise that theatre studies will be legitimized to the degree that it appeals to the university’s deﬁning interests. The rescue of theatre programs depends, I think, on scholars’ and teachers’ willingness to understand temporal constructions of knowledge in higher education and to link the ﬁeld actively to their formulations. For unless the discipline vigorously participates in the university’s discourses, it can expect little control over its own affairs. I want to propose here a coherent approach for undergraduate, liberal arts theatre studies that, ﬁrst, repairs the aesthetic versus vocational impasse and, second, legitimizes the ﬁeld on the basis of current formulations of knowledge that tilt toward reﬂexive praxis—that is, of simultaneously understanding and acting upon the world.4 In this attempt, I put forth a theory that brings into focus a more contextualized, communicative picture of knowledge grounded in a current version of higher education, that of the “engaged university”—a model that advocates its public, communitarian mission and replaces the traditional bifurcation of applied and basic research with a commitment to praxis. The concept of an engaged curriculum inevitably alters our traditional view of the liberal arts...