Colleges and Universities

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      His ‘Dracula’ Project: Creating a Funny Vampire

      by

      The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker has written a comic version of “Dracula” that is appearing Off Broadway.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he’s like family. We’ll also find out why grade inflation has become an issue at Yale University.Matthew MurphyIn the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. Tonight, the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” is playing.He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: “Loved the performance. You might need a transfusion.”The prop won’t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, “the state below Transylvania,” he said. “We have given vampires to the country — why not get involved in commerce?”Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor “so the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”He added: “This is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours — asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.”He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that’s been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” at New World Stages, “a gender-bending play” that “pays no mind to the ‘terrors’ part of its title.”)Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,” he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s in math, “had to hold him back while he crunched the numbers” at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.” Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “like this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.” He used material he found for “Dracul,” a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.WeatherA system sliding across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, clouds will give way to a clearer sky, and the temperature will drop to around 30.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).The latest Metro newsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesConflict and CrisesIsrael-Gaza: Long before the temporary cease-fire ended in Gaza, the mood in Paterson, N.J., home to one of the largest communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East, was tense.Migrants and the mayor: New York City’s comptroller has restricted the mayor’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis — a major blow to his emergency powers.A Changing CityToward a quieter city: New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of “noise cameras,” which ticket the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.The rich are back: At the height of the pandemic, the richest New Yorkers left in droves. A new report based on census and state tax filing data has found a reversal.Small theaters: New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three performance spaces, a history of cultivating major playwrights, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton. What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays.Lots of A’s at YaleChristopher Capozziello for The New York TimesOne consequence of the pandemic has proved lasting at Yale University: Nearly everyone is getting A’s.A new report found that nearly 80 percent of the grades given to Yale undergraduates during the 2022-23 academic year were A’s or A minuses. The mean grade point average — 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 — was also up from before the pandemic.My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale if 80 percent of the students get the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every class? Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor with a reputation as a tough grader, said that when “virtually everything that gets turned in” receives an A, “we are simply being dishonest to our students.”The post-pandemic spike in grades is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, 79 percent of all grades given to undergraduates in the 2020-21 year were A’s or A minuses. A decade earlier, that figure was 60 percent. In 2020-21, the average G.P.A. at Harvard was 3.8, compared with 3.41 in 2002-3.“Grades are like any currency,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation: They tend to increase over time.This is not just happening at elite schools. G.P.A.s have been increasing at colleges nationwide by about 0.1 per decade since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public colleges and universities.At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the proportion of A’s and A minuses has been climbing for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale — 67 percent — were A’s or A minuses. By 2018-19, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were in the A range.Then, during the pandemic, the figure jumped. Almost 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-22. The figure slipped slightly, to about 79 percent, in 2022-23. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.Does any of this really matter?Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students could be overly concerned with G.P.A.s.But he added: “I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale. They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.”METROPOLITAN diaryTiffany frameDear Diary:I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. Much to my surprise, it did not appear to have ever been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a lovely sterling silver picture frame nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.Unfortunately, on close examination I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried to clean it, but to no avail.I called Tiffany and was told to bring it in for repair. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, brought the box into the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women over to take a look.The three of them admired it, but then said that they didn’t sell Tiffany items.“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I asked.“You’re in Saks Fifth Avenue!” one of the women said.— Eileen RosenbergIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      A Harvard Professor Prepares to Teach a New Subject: Taylor Swift

      by

      Swift-inspired classes are sweeping colleges across the country.The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise budding scholars.Taylor Swift.In the spring semester, Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, will teach a new class, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Nearly 300 students have enrolled.The class is part of a wave at academic institutions around the country, including New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. Stanford has invoked the Swift song “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)” with a course planned for next year titled “All Too Well (Ten Week Version),” and Arizona State University offered a psychology class on Ms. Swift’s work.Next year, the University of California, Berkeley plans to offer “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” and the University of Florida will school undergraduates in Ms. Swift’s storytelling. The Florida course’s description begins with the words “ … Ready for it?” — an allusion to the song from the album “Reputation.”In a conversation with The New York Times, Professor Burt, 52, discussed her love of Ms. Swift’s music and what exactly her students will be studying. This interview has been edited and condensed.Let’s start with the big question. Are you a Swiftie?Ten or 12 years ago, I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was “You Belong With Me.”“Fearless” got you!It turned out she had a lot of other great songs. The thing that made me really think about her as an artist whose process and career I wanted to learn more about and thought about a lot was when I saw “Miss Americana,” the documentary.What about it?It really does such a great job of showing both how much support she’s had — she’s someone who’s come from a good deal of privilege and had parents who really wanted to help her realize her dreams, which, you know, honestly, I have, too — but also how she worked to become herself, and how she has become someone who makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people. I realize that she could probably take fewer private jet flights.The Harvard campus.David Degner for The New York TimesMs. Swift during an August concert in Inglewood, Calif.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDo you have a favorite era?It bounces between “Red” and “Folklore”-slash-“Evermore.”Let’s talk a little bit about the coursework. What is on the syllabus?Each week pairs some body of her work with some body of work by other people. We are reading two different Willa Cather novels. We’re reading a novel by James Weldon Johnson about a performing artist who’s got a very different relationship to his own career in his hands. We are reading a contemporary novel by Zan Romanoff about One Direction fandom.We’re going to read some Wordsworth, Wordsworth being a Lake District poet. She sings about the poets of the Lake District in England. Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.What songs are going to be paired with those texts?We are reading Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope.” “Work Without Hope,” of course, being Coleridge’s version of “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”Of course. How about homework?The written work will include a couple of conventionally argued academic essays, where the student needs to make a well-supported argument with clearly framed evidence in easy-to-follow prose. One of them has to be on a Taylor topic. One of them has to be about something else that we read for the course. So you can’t write about nothing but Taylor Swift and get a good grade.Is there a final?The third of the three papers is the final assignment. I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun. On the other hand, Harvard students are also often taking other classes that absolutely demand a lot of time from them, especially if they’re, for example, future doctors. Or they have other commitments that eat up a lot of the time. If you don’t do something to make sure they feel like they have to do the reading, they will sometimes, regretfully, blow off reading.Any chance of a guest lecture by (the honorary) Dr. Swift?I have tweeted at her, and I would welcome her presence if she would like to pop in, but she is quite busy.A Harvard class about Taylor Swift feels ripe for detractors. What would you say to people who might criticize such a subject as unserious or not worthy of rigorous study?This is a course that includes plenty of traditionally admired dead people who’ve been taught in English departments for a long time, who I not only admire but am teaching in this course. Taylor’s work is the spine. If you don’t appreciate this body of songwriting and of performance, that’s not my problem. But they should remember literally everything that takes up a lot of time in a modern English department was at one point a low-prestige popular art form that you wouldn’t bother to study, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and, in particular, the rise of the novel. Can I quote Wordsworth?Please.Others shall love what we have loved and we will teach them how. If you’re going to teach people to love something that they see as obscure or distant or difficult or unfamiliar, your best shot at doing that honestly and effectively is to connect it to something that people already like. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Robert Brustein, Passionate Force in Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 96

      by

      A critic and dramatist himself, he started repertory companies at Yale and Harvard and fiercely defended the art form, even if it meant feuding with playwrights.Robert Brustein, an erudite and contentious advocate for profit-indifferent theater, in the service of which he wore many hats — critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and even actor — died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his wife, Doreen Beinart.Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays and securing them in the regional theater firmament. He also taught at Yale as well as at Harvard.A prolific writer with the zeal of an environmentalist and the moral certainty of a martyr, he reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years. In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, nonpandering theater, and worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.Mr. Brustein was a passionate defender of the resident, nonprofit theaters whose ranks expanded across the United States in the last decades of the 20th century, and as such he was perpetually concerned that they not be corrupted by commercial interests. The Broadway megahit “A Chorus Line,” in one instance — originally produced in 1975 by the Public Theater in New York — had made it clear that a hit show could funnel many years of economic fuel back to the source.“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”A public intellectual and supporter of the arts, Mr. Brustein delivered opinions that were often respectfully received but that just as often incited exasperation or outrage. Theater people, after all, are not especially fond of being called sellouts. When Frank Rich left his post as chief drama critic for The Times in 1994, his valedictory essay singled out Mr. Brustein:“I rarely had ugly confrontations with anyone in the theater, and my mail from theater people, even at its angriest, was civilized,” Mr. Rich wrote. “In 13 years the few significant exceptions invariably involved Robert Brustein.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Hattie McDaniel’s Historic Oscar Will Return to Its Desired Home

      by

      The plaque that McDaniel, the first Black winner of an Academy Award, bequeathed to Howard University has been missing for about 50 years. Now a replacement is on its way.After becoming the first Black person to win an Academy Award, in 1940, Hattie McDaniel called the plaque she received a cherished beacon for all that could be accomplished.McDaniel had earned the award for her portrayal of Mammy, an agreeable slave at the whim of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” a movie that arrived as a cinematic triumph but has since been rebuked for its blind eye toward slavery.Before dying in 1952, McDaniel deflected the criticism she received for taking many stereotypical roles throughout her career.“I’d rather play a maid than be one,” she would say, envisioning that her work would open better doors for future Black actors. She also had an eternal resting spot in mind for that beacon, bequeathing the Oscar plaque to Howard University in Washington.But for about 50 years, McDaniel’s plaque has been missing, a cinematic void that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now filling. The university will receive a replacement plaque this weekend in a ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home.”“It’s 100 percent overdue,” said Jill Watts, the author of “Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.” “It was so meaningful historically as an award. Not just in the history of film, but also within American history and it was meaningful to her personally. She would be absolutely delighted to know that it’s going home to where she wanted it to be.”Kevin Goff, McDaniel’s great-grandnephew, said that his father started petitioning for a replacement plaque in the 1990s, and that the decision would help cement McDaniel’s legacy.Over the years, theories have circulated about the whereabouts of the plaque, which was given to all supporting acting winners from 1936 to 1942 rather than traditional Oscar statues. A spokesman for Howard University did not respond to a request for comment.Goff said there were rumors that the plaque was stolen during student unrest about the university’s mission in the late 1960s.“Apparently, a gentleman said he had thrown it in the Potomac,” he said. “Someone said maybe a drama professor took it with him. But none of it has been verified or proven. It’s never shown up on eBay. So, here we are 50-plus years later and no one has a clue where it is or if it still does exist.”W. Burlette Carter, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, wrote a paper about the missing award more than a decade ago. Her best guess is that it may still be somewhere at Howard, misplaced during a move by the drama department.“That makes sense to me, having worked at a university, that when they moved the department, it got packed and it got lost,” Watts said. “I have this feeling that it’s probably still someplace, tucked away in a box.”Watts said she and several others approached the Academy about replacing the Oscar following her book’s publication in 2005. “We were told no,” Watts said. “Just a flat no.”That stance has shifted. The replacement plaque will soon reside at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.Jacqueline Stewart, the president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy, said in a news release that the upcoming ceremony would celebrate McDaniel’s remarkable craft and historic win.“Hattie McDaniel,” they said, “was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her.” More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Juilliard’s Top-Tier Graduate Acting Program Is Going Tuition-Free

      by

      Starting with the next academic year, the drama school will eliminate an “unrealistic burden” for graduate acting students.The Juilliard School, one of the world’s most elite conservatories, is making its top-notch graduate acting program tuition-free.School officials said they hoped that the move would make the drama division accessible to a broader array of students, and that it would make it easier for graduates to pursue careers in the arts because they will have less debt.“There’s a mythology around a place with a name like Juilliard, and I know too many people who didn’t apply because they thought, ‘I couldn’t afford it,’” said Damian Woetzel, the school’s president. “We recognize that talent is so much greater than opportunity.”Juilliard’s drama division, in which undergraduate and graduate acting students train together, was (once again) declared the best in the nation by The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. The school’s alumni have included Robin Williams, Jessica Chastain, Adam Driver and Viola Davis.The acting program’s Master of Fine Arts track, established in 2012, is relatively new; previously, postgraduate acting students received a credential called simply a diploma. The master’s degree program, which currently has 35 students, is a four-year program — one year longer than most — and the fourth year has always been tuition-free to keep Juilliard competitive with three-year programs elsewhere.Juilliard’s tuition, for both undergraduates and graduates, is $53,300 per year. About 90 percent of undergraduate students receive some financial aid.“The expense of being educated these days is an unrealistic burden, particularly for young artists,” the actress Laura Linney, who is a Juilliard alumna and the vice chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees, said in an interview. “Members of my class were paying debt into their 40s. That doesn’t encourage young people to go into the arts.”Tuition for all graduate acting students will be free starting with the next academic year. To eliminate tuition, the school said it had raised $15 million, with key gifts from the commercial theater producers Stephanie P. McClelland and John Gore.McClelland, a Juilliard trustee, has been credited as a producer on 87 Broadway shows over the last two decades; she donated with her husband, Carter McClelland, a longtime Wall Street executive. Gore is a British producer whose many ventures include the touring behemoth Broadway Across America and the website Broadway.com. Other gifts, and existing scholarship funds, were combined to permanently replace tuition revenue.“Many of our M.F.A. students come in with significant undergraduate debt, and some have maxed out the federal loans they can take,” said Evan Yionoulis, the dean of Juilliard’s drama division. This will “allow them to be here without that financial weight on their shoulders, and allow them the freedom, when they graduate, to make choices to build their craft and to have the patience it takes to build their career.”Juilliard’s move comes two years after Yale University made its drama school, which is also top-ranked and is larger than Juilliard’s, tuition-free with a $150 million gift from David Geffen. James Bundy, the dean of what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama, said the waiving of tuition had already had a significant impact at Yale.“We’ve seen a rise in applications — we’ve had the two highest years in the school’s history, which tells me that a great many more people saw the school as financially accessible,” Bundy said. “We’ve had a substantial increase in the portion of the applicant pool that identified as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. And taking tuition out of the equation has enabled us to increase stipends for living expenses for students with need, which has the long-term impact of driving down indebtedness.”Juilliard already has several other tuition-free programs, including the drama division’s two-year playwriting program, which currently has eight students, as well as several specialized music programs. Once the graduate acting program goes tuition-free, 26 percent of all Juilliard students will pay no tuition to attend.But many music and dance students, as well as drama undergraduates, will continue to have some tuition obligations; the graduate acting program is going tuition-free now because there were donors who stepped forward to make that possible.“My aim is to make the school tuition-free — the ultimate artistic education deserves that access,” Woetzel said. “Wouldn’t that be something?” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

      by

      In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, a documentary recalls the occupation of City College 50 years ago.Among the wave of student protests that occurred across American university campuses in the late 1960s, the student occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a highly local yet pivotal act of civil disobedience. The more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for two weeks did so in protest of the school’s admissions policy and the lack of diversity in its student body. At a time when 40 percent of New York City’s high school graduates were Black or Latino, the film reports, only 9 percent of City College attendees were part of those communities. “The Five Demands,” a new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former students, now in their late 60s and 70s, who participated in the protests.In interviews, City College alumni who were recruited through the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared in their education and made to feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white peers. And indeed, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not only around making efforts to admit more students of color, but also to provide them with adequate support once they were enrolled — a commitment that many elite colleges and universities still struggle with to this day.In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected affirmative action, the film feels eerily timely. Schiller and Weiss’s direction is utilitarian, cutting together talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit, the lack of flashiness puts the students’ struggles for racial justice front and center, and ultimately serves to highlight a less-remembered aspect of the countercultural student movement.The Five DemandsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Juilliard Fires Professor After Sexual Misconduct Inquiry

      by

      An investigation found “credible evidence” that Robert Beaser, a composition professor, had engaged in “conduct which interfered with individuals’ academic work,” the school said.The Juilliard School has fired a professor who had been accused of sexually harassing students after an independent investigation found “credible evidence” that he had “engaged in conduct which interfered with individuals’ academic work,” the school said in a letter to students, staff, faculty and alumni on Thursday.Juilliard said the professor, Robert Beaser, 69, who served as chair of the composition department from 1994 to 2018, had behaved in a manner that was “inconsistent with Juilliard’s commitment to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for its students.” The school did not elaborate, saying only that the investigation had found evidence of a past “unreported relationship” and that Beaser had “repeatedly misrepresented facts about his actions.”Richard C. Schoenstein​, a lawyer for Beaser, denied that his client had misled his employer. He said the relationship in question took place three decades ago, had been known to Juilliard since then and had been the subject of previous inquiries. He called the school’s findings “unspecific and unattributed” and said that Beaser would “pursue his legal rights in full.”“Dr. Beaser is shocked and dismayed by Juilliard’s conclusions and actions,” Schoenstein said.The inquiry was ordered after an investigation in December 2022 by VAN, a classical music magazine, that detailed accusations against Beaser and other Juilliard composition teachers. VAN, citing interviews with unnamed former students, said that Beaser had made unwanted advances toward students and engaged in sexual relationships with them.The accusations prompted an outcry among students, faculty and alumni, as well as prominent composers and musicians. Juilliard placed Beaser on paid leave during the inquiry.Juilliard said that it had also looked into complaints against Christopher Rouse, another professor named in the VAN investigation. While the school determined that these allegations were also credible, it said that the complaints could not be fully investigated because Rouse had died in 2019.In the letter on Thursday, Juilliard said administrators had previously investigated some of these accusations of sexual misconduct in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and again in the 2017-18 academic year. These investigations “were handled based on their understanding of the information provided at that time,” according to the school.Juilliard said it had ordered the latest inquiry because of new information in news reports, and that the investigation had determined that “some students, especially women, experienced an environment in the department that did not live up to the school’s values and expectations.”Juilliard’s leaders said they were “dismayed by the negative impact” the events had on students at the time. They vowed to strengthen oversight, with measures including banning all sexual relationships between students and professors, beginning this fall. While professors have long been barred from having romantic relationships with undergraduates, the school has sometimes made exceptions for relationships between faculty members and graduate students.Juilliard said it would also seek to clarify channels for reporting harassment and bias.“Juilliard is committed to providing a safe, supportive and welcoming environment for all members of our school community, and to addressing concerns past and present,” the letter said. “No form of discrimination or harassment is tolerated, and we take all allegations reported to us seriously.” More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      A History Professor Takes On Hollywood

      by

      The life of a scholar used to be simpler, with success or failure whittled down to an easy dictum: “Publish or perish.”Today it’s more like publish and podcast or perish.“The definition of ‘public intellectual’ has really changed, and I’m proud to be a part of that,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela said, moments after delivering a lecture to a class of undergraduates.Dr. Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School in New York, belongs to a group of scholars who are fluent in pop culture. In addition to publishing her work in peer-reviewed publications, she often presents her research through podcasts and other media outlets. And in a nod to her embrace of the new media economy, she has a side hustle: fitness instructor.But her decision to mix it up beyond the halls of academe has also landed her in the middle of a nasty social media drama and a Hollywood dispute. “This is the price of participation in a public sphere that is enormously different than academia,” she said.Estelle Freedman, a history professor at Stanford University who advised Dr. Petrzela on her Ph.D. thesis, described her as “a very serious scholar and a public intellectual who is quite unique in imagining, ‘How do we get scholarship out into the world and affect social change?’”Dr. Petrzela said she aims to be a “history communicator,” someone who’s able to reach large numbers of people with deeply researched works on the subjects that interest her. “I’ve got to meet the established standards of publishing in journals and being peer-reviewed,” she said, “but I’m also doing this other stuff and fighting for the legitimacy of topics that venture outside of politics and policy.”In her book “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” Dr. Petrzela describes the cultural significance of fitness celebrities including Jack LaLanne and Richard Simmons and traces the rise of jogging, Jazzercise, yoga and Peloton. The book was published last month by the University of Chicago Press.Fitness is a topic that can easily be denigrated as an expression of trendy vanity, Dr. Petrzela said. “For that reason, I thought it was important that it was peer-reviewed and released by an esteemed press,” she said. “I don’t want to give fodder to skeptics who would say, ‘This is not serious.’”Cultural history is not a new discipline, but the academics who have ventured into that territory have tended to focus on eminent men, according to Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.“Historians have studied popular culture throughout the 20th century and beyond, but the topics that have been taken seriously are those like Bob Dylan, his songs and political change,” Dr. Hemmer said. “Taking a serious look at the socioeconomic genesis and impact of Orangetheory and Peloton is pretty novel, and Natalia has put herself on the cutting edge of a realm of scholarship.”Dr. Petrzela’s wanderings from traditional paths of academia have also led her to podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and another historian, Neil J. Young, she is the host of “Past Present,” a weekly show that analyzes cultural trends. In recent episodes, the three have taken a historical lens to “nepo-babies” — that is, the role of family relationships in Hollywood — and Ozempic, a diabetes medication that has gained popularity as a weight-loss drug.She has also found herself in the middle of the furious debates that are a daily part of social media.Late last year, Time magazine published an interview with Dr. Petrzela that included a mention of her research indicating that, in the early 1900s, amid an influx of immigrants into the United States, some exercise proponents encouraged white women to work out so that they could be strong enough to populate the country with white babies. Time’s headline seized on that point: “The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness.”In a post on Instagram, Donald J. Trump Jr. reacted to the article, saying, “Remember folks if it’s not climate change it’s white supremacy.” Amid the criticism that followed, Dr. Petrzela said she received death threats. “It escalated into a Twitter storm about ‘the woke professor’ who says exercise is racist, which was not the way I dreamed of introducing my book to the public,” she said.Dr. Petrzela was raised in Newton, Mass., the child of two professors of comparative literature at Boston University. Growing up, she hated sports and earned P.E. credits by taking a step-aerobics class at a Jewish Community Center. It was love at first v-step. “I couldn’t believe how much joy I felt doing something I previously thought I hated,” she said.After graduating from Columbia University, she completed stints as an analyst at an investment bank and a public-school teacher before earning a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University. Around the time she was defending her doctoral thesis, she became a Lululemon ambassador. The thesis became the basis of her first book, “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex and the Making of Modern Political Culture,” published by Oxford University Press in 2015.While working on “Classroom Wars,” she moved back to New York, where her boyfriend (now husband) lived. They joined an Equinox gym, where she encountered Patricia Moreno, a well known instructor in the New York fitness world who had created a program called intenSati, which blends roundhouse kicks and grapevines with shouted affirmations — think Jane Fonda at a self-help tent-revival.After studying under Ms. Moreno, Dr. Petrzela became a certified intenSati instructor. “She is the only fitness instructor of mine that I can securely say has a Ph.D. from Stanford,” said Tara Abrahams, an executive at The Meteor, a feminist media company, who has been attending Dr. Petrzela’s classes for about 10 years.As she built her career at the New School, publishing papers and essays in academic journals (History of Education Quarterly, The Peabody Journal of Education, Pacific Historical Review) and mainstream publications (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate), she continued teaching intenSati. She also began to consider the role of physical fitness in American history and cultural life.And she dug deeper into podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young, she created a limited podcast series, “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” that told the story of Steve Banerjee, the impresario behind the male dance club Chippendales, and the murder-for-hire charge that preceded his 1994 suicide. Dr. Petrzela was the host.Billed as a Spotify Original, and co-produced by Gimlet Media and Pineapple Street Studios, “Welcome to Your Fantasy” was a seamy, steamy true-crime drama that took place against a backdrop of the sexual, feminist and fitness revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s. Upon its release in 2021, it was a hit with listeners and earned glowing reviews from The Times, The New Yorker and The Financial Times.But Dr. Petrzela was not prepared for the sharp-elbowed culture of show business.Nearly a year before the “Welcome to Your Fantasy” podcast dropped on Spotify, a producer working with Pineapple Street Studios shared early episodes with Hollywood writers and producers to gauge their interest in a screen adaptation. As part of this effort, a producer sent episodes to the actor, screenwriter and stand-up comic Kumail Nanjiani and his wife and frequent writing partner, Emily V. Gordon. Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that she and her husband were not interested in optioning “Welcome to Your Fantasy.”“Kumail and I listened to the podcast and it’s such a fun story, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s the right project for us to write,” Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that Dr. Petrzela shared with The Times. “As much as we love watching crime stories, I don’t know if that’s a strength that we have as a writing duo. It didn’t spark an immediate take in our brains.”Pineapple Street Studios, Dr. Petrzela and the other producers involved with the podcast ended up signing a production deal with Netflix.A few months after the podcast became available, there was a plot twist: Hulu announced that Mr. Nanjiani would play the lead in a dramatic series based on the story of Mr. Banerjee, the Chippendales founder.He would also serve as an executive producer, as would Ms. Gordon. According to the show’s closing credits, it was “inspired by” “Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders,” a 2014 book written by K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick MontesDeOca and published by Kerrera House Press, a small independent publisher in Los Angeles.Netflix canceled its plans for a series based on “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Hulu began streaming its series, called “Welcome to Chippendales,” in November 2022. The show was created by Robert Siegel, a writer and director who headed another Hulu series, “Pam & Tommy.”Dr. Petrzela, Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young said they were struck by the similarities between the Hulu show and their podcast. They also said that the series included details that did not become public knowledge until listeners had heard “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” which included interviews with key players in the saga.“You don’t own history, and the lines of intellectual property can be really blurry,” Dr. Hemmer said. “But it raised big questions about what we do as scholars and what happens when that work becomes part of the entertainment field.”A spokesman for Hulu declined to comment. Mr. Siegel, the show’s creator, also declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Nanjiani and Ms. Gordon said in a statement that, though the two were executive producers for the series, they were not creatively involved in the production. They added that their involvement “was limited to casting consultation, communication with the studio/network, marketing and editing.”Eleanor Kagan, the senior producer of “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” created a spreadsheet that laid out more than a dozen similarities between the podcast and the Hulu show. She and her fellow producers said they suspected that the Hulu series made use of their original reporting and narrative focus. In addition, they said, at least two key characters in the Hulu show were based on people who were interviewed extensively for “Welcome to Your Fantasy” and not mentioned in “Deadly Dance.”One of those people was Candace Mayeron, who once worked as a producer for Chippendales. She appears to provide the basis for “Denise” in the Hulu series, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Ms. Mayeron said that she tried to contact the writers and producers of “Welcome to Chippendales” (as well as representatives of Ms. Lewis) by email and phone to offer her consulting services free of charge, but no one replied to her.“There is no doubt that they relied on the podcast,” Ms. Mayeron said of the Hulu production.Dr. Petrzela’s latest book examines the history of fitness movements in the United States.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHodari Sababu, the first Black Chippendales dancer, seems to be the basis of the character named Otis in the Hulu show, portrayed by Quentin Phair. Over the years Mr. Sababu has given interviews about his Chippendales experience, but said he never went in-depth, as he did when he spoke with Dr. Petrzela for “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Mr. Sababu also does not appear by name in “Deadly Dance.”Among the stories that he shared in the podcast was one in which Mr. Banerjee called a church to warn of the godlessness of Chippendales, resulting in a protest of the club that drew media attention. That incident is portrayed in “Welcome to Chippendales” as well. “I only watched part of the TV show,” Mr. Sababu told The Times, “but I thought, ‘How do they know that?’ The only way that they could know that is if they heard that podcast interview I did.”Dr. Petrzela is now focused on the classroom. This semester, she is teaching a class based on the research that went into her book on fitness, as well as a course called historical sources and methods. But she won’t forget her scrape with Hollywood.“I found myself really flabbergasted by this whole situation,” she said. “But then again, I come from a world of footnotes and source citations.” More