[SML] Student workers (was: Aggregrate hours for majors?)

[Larry Stahl]

Richard:

The assumptions in my post are based on the clear implications of your phrasing.   "Slave labor" is not an accusation I take lightly, and it is most definitely an accusation.  You are equating me with the slave owners of America's past, which is not a group I care to be associated with either in fact or in analogy.  If you don't consider that phrase inflammatory, then you and I have very different ideas about the meaning of that term.


I'm sorry that you perceived your experience working on college productions to be largely a matter of being taken advantage of for free labor.   I would be interested to know if you ever spoke to the faculty of your program about the rationale for those assignments, or if you simply concluded that you were being used and left it at that.   That you were also working off-campus at paying theatre jobs is laudable but essentially irrelevant to whether you ought to have been paid to work on college productions.   A student who works at the local newspaper part-time still doesn't get paid to write his term papers in Journalism class.   Meanwhile, you seem to assume that all (or most) students share your long-held negative perception of why theatre departments have students work on shows without getting paid in cash.  No doubt some do, but I believe that most do not..


My college does not save one dime from students working on their shows.   That would only be true if the alternative to students working on the shows would be that we would hire in others to take up the slack.   Not even close.   In our program, it is a given that the students control how many shows we do.  If they don't want to do the work, the shows just don't happen and life goes on.   In either case, the labor cost to the college is identical.  


There are budgets for things besides money in this world.  One of our key "budgets" is the number of students interested and available at any given time to work on a show at a small college in a small town a couple hours away from the nearest city.   When the number of majors in our department rises and falls over the course of years, the number of shows we do also rises and falls.  The bulk of our season is chosen by the rising senior class, most of whom will be directing one of the shows as the centerpiece of their thesis project.   The juniors, sophomores, and freshmen who "get it" pitch in mainly because they see the connection between helping out on this year's shows and learning as much as they can along the way, and the subsequent success of their own senior thesis production in one, two, or three years down the road.  When that dynamic falters, as it does on occasion, the quality and sometimes the quantity of productions suffers.  The students see that, too.  And life goes on.


Your passion about the financial side of the business is obviously deeply felt and in many ways admirable, but your apparent view that money is the primary means of measuring success or failure is less so.   I suspect that there is a lot more to you than that, but that is what comes across in your posts.  Money is a useful tool, but you make it sound like a cudgel used to control the world around you.  That's unfortunate.


And once again I apologize for the length of my post.  I am a leader of the anti-Twitter movement that is sweeping the globe, several paragraphs at a time.


—Larry

Larry Stahl
Technical Director
Gibson Center for the Arts
Washington College
Chestertown, MD 21620

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Dear Larry,
I'll try not to take such an inflammatory approach as you have in your previous response: many of your assumptions are untrue, and you have misquoted my advice given freely. Students conscripted to do work that they neither then, nor now, see the value of appear to resemble young adults drafted into the armed forces, in that it may be a valuable experience for them, but may still be perceived as 'Slave Labor' at the time. Before earning my Doctorate in 1982, I produced shows starting in 1970 and took a wide variety of classes, and did plenty of what I felt was labor done primarily to lower the University's production costs, while still paying full tuition and working on Productions at IA-signatory theaters in the Southern California market, whence I was paid. The rationale: I wanted to work at every possible assignment, and take classes in every relevant discipline so that, as a Producer, few artists Directors, Designers, Actors, Stage Managers, Investors, or other above-the-line persons could influence me to allocate resources where they were not actually needed, contrary to my fiduciary duties as a Producer and Artistic Director. Over the years, I successfully learned to spot Waste, Unsafe Conditions, Illegality, and 'Creative Accounting', not mention elements that I thought would turn off audiences - not because that they were controversial, but merely boring, the anathema to Earned Income.
/s/ Richard. 

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