Robert Ware: Running Beside the Train

The painful layoffs of 1992 returned many associate deans to the classroom. Robert G. Ware, professor of theatre arts and former associate dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, was among them. In recent years he has been a moving force on campus in the Academic Senate, the Academic Policy and Planning Committee, FACEL, the Events Center Committee, and now the new Honors Program. While an associate dean, he was involved with such projects as the Festival of the Arts, the Pacific Rim Film Festival, London Semester, the computerization of Arts and Humanities facilities, and the establishment of the Madden Library video collection. With his wife, Anna, he translated from Polish a book by Franciszek Palowski, The Making of Schindler's List: Behind the Scenes of an Epic Film (Birch Lane Press, on bookstore shelves May 6). Last week he spoke with publications director Carolyn Skei.

Q. You have a reputation, since the layoffs of 1992, of having reinvented your role at the university. Is that a fair assessment?

A. Well, I'd have to let somebody else speak for that, because I didn't consciously set about to reinvent anything. I think I found it difficult to be unengaged. I guess my history is that I have tended to thrust myself into helping shape whatever is going on. I was taught by my father that if I didn't like the way things were going, it was not enough to sit on the sidelines and criticize . . . .

Q. You're often in the center of campus politics, though you may not think of yourself as a politician . . . .

A. That's right, I don't. The president called me one day two or three years ago and said, "I would like you, as a campus leader, to do something," and I was quite surprised to be considered one of the leaders.

Q. How do you see your role in the classroom and the realm beyond it?

A. As a teacher, my job is to convey as much as I can about the subjects that I teach - not so much what I know, but what I think my students ought to know - to be as infectious as I can with my enthusiasm for my subjects. I teach Theatre History and Dramatic Literature and a couple of sections of Theatre Today. I teach that "All drama is about life." Basically all our art stems from our reflections on life - our efforts to, in some way, extend our feelings . . . to share. It's interesting to be able to teach students how they can inform their own understanding of life as they live it, by their ability to experience theatre as performance.

I feel my responsibility, in the broader sense, in terms of the total campus, is to participate in the process of analyzing and suggesting and urging things . . . in directions that extend our ability to be excellent as teachers, to extend opportunity for students.

Q. What have you been most vitally involved in for the last few years?

A. Probably the most important one I'm working on at the moment is the Honors Program. I'm chairing the committee that's coming to grips with trying to define it and give it form and shape and palpability. What kind of a student experience should an honors program provide? What can we do to make ours available to the broadest segment of our region and, at the same time, what can we do to make it distinguished and unique? We're crafting right now the admissions standards and the design of the program. We're introducing something new to our campus - an Honors Colloquium each semester, and we're proposing that the honors students be required to take one colloquium per year for a total of four for a four-year course of study. In our pilot scheme [to be proposed to AP&P next week] these colloquia will feature guest scholars, experts and luminaries like those who come to campus for the Lecture Series, as well as presentations by our own faculty. The scheme is one where these presentations will be organized around a theme. Each semester will have a different theme - Ethics and the Presidency, The Role of Civic Governance as it relates to the body of society . . . .

Q. I think a lot of people on campus are trying to envision the numbers and places and other particulars involved in the Honors Program.

A. What we would like to believe we could do is draw students to our campus that we might not otherwise enroll. We know that there are many students who want the experience of an honors program at the level of higher education who, because we don't have one, are not coming here but going to other CSUs or to the UC campuses. We would like to be a presence in the Central Valley that offers that opportunity - one that is uniquely different. We're proposing a pilot year where we select 50 students [who] take a prescribed set of interlinked courses. We're going to ask faculty to develop proposals for courses that link themselves together in a particular way and that will fulfill elements of the G.E. program . . . .

Q. How will the students be grouped together and interface with the rest of the university?

A. One of the foundations that we've identified for a good honors program is that students work together as a learning community. There's a lot of research that suggests that if you can make that happen in a way that's stimulating to the students and yet gives them the sense of freedom, it can be extraordinarily successful. This is why we foresee having them all take the same courses the first semester. The proposal is that they would take 12 units a year of honors courses during the freshman and sophomore years and something on the order of six units a year during the junior and senior years. Our goal right now is to be sure we can define that "pilot year." It's the difficulty of being the conceptualizers and then finding the process by which we can actualize . . . and make it become a part of the whole.

Q. You've specialized in making concepts become actualities . . . .

A. I played a significant hand, I suppose, in shaping the character of the FACEL (Facilities and Campus Environmental and Liaison) committee as a liaison committee - one that works by virtue of its linkages . . . . It endeavors to become a forum where we can discuss all issues associated with campus environment and facilities - lighting, signage, naming of buildings, moving of entities from one building to another. I was deeply involved in the definition of it, and it became this committee that has this curious acronym, FACEL - and it should be facile. Something can be discussed there and, within 24 hours, all these different aspects of campus are informed and being consulted or offering feedback to those who need it.

Q. You don't just wave a magic wand when you do these things . . . .

A. It takes other people, too. And you work with logic and try to be reasonable and try to be consultative. I'm chair of AP&P, which is busy on a whole other set of fronts to help refine policy, working very closely with the G.E. Committee . . . working with grading issues . . . athletics issues. Then I ran to become an Academic Senate senator-at-large so that I could get up and speak [without being limited to AP&P issues].

Q. What makes you love the debate?

A. I guess I have a personality that always likes to see as many different ways to solve a problem as possible. I wouldn't claim to always have the right answer by any means . . . . I have to say I enjoy the fray, [though] I find myself wishing oftentimes that we could be talking on a more idealistic plane. This is where I don't consider myself a very good politician - because I tend to work from what would logically be the ideal answer to something. I've found over the years that you have to manage a way to get from whatever the ideal is to what the practical must be. It's important to be able to accept the expressed will of the majority of your colleagues. Sometimes you'll walk away in disgust, but by having engaged with it, you can vaporize the experience more quickly and go on to the next thing.

I'm a scene designer; I have designed stage scenery for 40 years - and loved it, but every project goes through a process of conceptualization and design and getting an ideal solution and then modifying that ideal to something you can actually get done. Then you set about doing it, but the knowledge that you have is always that you're coming up against an opening night - and from that point on, your problem will be solved! Either it's exactly what you want, or you have exhausted all chances to make it what you want. Either way you must turn loose of it [and look] forward to the next project.

Q. Let's not forget the role you've played in the university's Vision for the 21st Century.

A. There's a sense in which everything I'm doing feeds into that. I'm sitting on the Steering Committee for that, and it's rather terrifying to look at the list of things I have some responsibility for. We're trying to make an Honors Program, to make a better G.E. program, to make a better context for faculty to teach and to pursue research and creative work, and we're trying to make a better context for students to learn in - to somehow refine the way in which they engage with faculty. The opportunity to have dialogue is vital.

At this point, we at the university have an opportunity to redefine our own future. If we turn away from it and let it go by, we'll have to look at its back.

We somehow have to be like the mailbag ­ if we can go back many years. At the whistlestop, on the pole by the tracks, there was some kind of hook that enabled the train, as it sped through town, to grab that mailbag. Our institution has to be in a position that it is not passed by. We have to make the choices when we have the chance. There's the old hymn that begins, "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide." Every day is that once. It's about the process of making choices, and I guess I've chosen to run beside the train.

Back to University Journal, 5/11/98 Issue