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      Lawsuit Says Faculty at a Top Arts School Preyed on Students for Decades

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      Dozens of people who studied at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts during a period of more than 40 years say they were sexually, emotionally or physically abused there as minors.The breadth of the 236-page complaint is as stunning as its details are disturbing.A total of 56 former arts students say dozens of teachers and administrators participated in, or allowed, their sexual, physical and emotional abuse when they were in school. Overall, the misconduct spanned more than 40 years, beginning in the late 1960s, according to the lawsuit, and included assaults in classrooms, private homes off campus, a motel room off a highway, and a tour bus rumbling through Italy.Respected figures in the dance and performing arts world who worked at the school are said to have participated.The lawsuit, filed late last year, accuses faculty at the prestigious University of North Carolina School of the Arts of a range of abuses including rape. Court papers describe student complaints of being groped, of being fondled through their leotards and of alcohol-fueled dance parties where students as young as 14 were told to completely disrobe and perform ballet moves.“We were children, and we were brave enough to come forward and not one single adult that represented the institution was as brave as we were,” said Melissa Cummings, 42, who described in an interview and court documents being invited to such parties as a student in 1995. She said she reported the abuse to the police and school officials when she was a senior there in 1997, but little changed.“Your teenage years are so formative,” she said. “It destroyed me.”Former students at the arts school, Chris Alloways-Ramsey, left, Melissa Cummings and Frank Holliday, are three of the 56 plaintiffs in the lawsuit.Janet Linup; Chris Cummings; Rafael SalgadoSome of the teachers characterized in the lawsuit as the worst offenders are now dead. Others have yet to respond in court papers; still others declined or did not respond to requests for comment.But the school itself, which is the lead defendant in the case, has expressed concern about the seriousness of the allegations and sought to assure the public that it has changed.“I was personally horrified when I was made aware of the allegations in the complaint,” Brian Cole, the chancellor of the School of the Arts, said in a statement. “I respect the tremendous courage it took for our alumni to come forward and share their experiences, and we are committed to responding with empathy and openness in listening to their stories.” He also noted that “U.N.C.S.A. today has systems in place for students to report abuse of any kind.”The school was the nation’s first public arts conservatory when it opened in the 1960s as the North Carolina School of the Arts in a quiet neighborhood just outside downtown Winston-Salem. According to court papers, the residential high school and college recruited students as young as 12, to study ballet, modern dance, music and other disciplines on a campus that included summer programs. It became part of the University of North Carolina system in 1972.Some former students, teachers and school administrators have said throughout the years that their experience at the institution had been formative and enriching. But the plaintiffs depict a setting of rampant misconduct, and their lawsuit, filed in Forsyth County Superior Court, says it occurred, not for one year or two, but for decades, at one of the country’s most renowned arts schools.The lawsuit seeks damages from 29 individuals named as defendants, eight of whom are accused in court papers of having directly abused students. In addition, the court documents say, 19 former administrators are said to have done nothing to stop a culture of exploitation so widespread that some students invented nicknames for two dance instructors described as the most prolific abusers — Richard Kuch and Richard Gain. They were known as “Crotch” and “Groin,” according to the court papers, which say the teachers often invited their minor students to a rural home, known as “The Farm,” where students said they were abused.Mr. Kuch and Mr. Gain resigned from the arts school in 1995 after the school’s chancellor initiated termination proceedings against them. Mr. Kuch died in 2020, according to public records. Attempts to reach Mr. Gain were unsuccessful.The suit was filed under the terms of a look-back law adopted in North Carolina in 2019 that opened a window for adult victims of child sexual abuse to sue individuals and institutions they hold responsible, even if the statute of limitations on their claims had expired. (The law is currently facing legal challenges.)Similar laws are in place in roughly two dozen states, including California and New York following high-profile cases of sex abuse by authority figures that led lawmakers to rethink the wisdom of legally imposing time limits on the reporting of sex crimes.“Our lawsuit against U.N.C.S.A. is an important example of a national trend,” said Gloria Allred, who is among the lawyers representing the victims in the case. “We are very proud of our clients for speaking truth to power and finding their courage to hold accountable those whom they believe have betrayed them.”Some of the allegations had emerged publicly in a 1995 lawsuit brought by Christopher Soderlund, who is also a plaintiff in the current case. Mr. Soderlund’s lawsuit was eventually dismissed on the grounds that the three-year statute of limitations on his claims had expired.At that time, the U.N.C. Board of Governors formed an independent commission “to review and respond to the concerns vocalized,” and produced a report that found “no widespread sexual misconduct at U.N.C.S.A.,” Chancellor Cole wrote in a letter to the campus community last fall.In the current case, former students say that they endured the abuse in part because their tormentors sat on the juries that had the power to decide who to readmit each year. The court papers say the students were groomed to accept the abuse by teachers who suggested they were worthless, that their chosen professions in the arts would be cruel and that only by doing whatever their elite instructors demanded would they be able to succeed in their careers.“It’s a very hard thing to explain,” said Christopher Alloways-Ramsey, one of the plaintiffs who has accused a ballet teacher, Duncan Noble, and others, of abusing him. (Mr. Noble’s work as an arts instructor was praised in his obituary in The New York Times in 2002.)“You’re 16 years old and you really desperately want a career in ballet. The person you idolize is telling you, ‘I can give you that.’ The underlying subtext is that there will be something in exchange,” Mr. Alloways-Ramsey, 53, added. “But as a young person, you don’t actually understand what that might be.”The court documents say that in the 1980s teachers held mandatory “bikini” days in modern dance class. In later years, teenage drama students were told to “seduce” their professors and were instructed to kiss each other lustfully for extended periods of time. Former students said instructors including Mr. Kuch, Mr. Gain and Melissa Hayden, the now deceased former star of New York City Ballet, often told them they needed to have sex in order to benefit their performance as dancers. Ms. Hayden was described in court papers as a verbally and physically abusive instructor, who, for example, beat a student on the leg with a stick and slapped another on the back so hard it knocked the student off her feet.Some of the most egregious abuse occurred in private settings, according to the complaint, which said a ballet instructor once sat on a toilet in his hotel room and watched a student as she bathed. In another instance reported in the suit, a trombone teacher is said to have led a 16-year-old student into a dark room during an off-campus party, unzipped his pants and assaulted her.The school had been the subject of a similar lawsuit in 1995 but the case was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. The former student who was the plaintiff in that case has joined the new lawsuit. Julia Wall/The News & Observer“It was soul crushing” said Frank Holliday, 64, of Brooklyn, who described the trauma of having to crawl through a dorm-room window after having sex with Mr. Kuch to avoid notice and embarrassment.One former instructor accused in the suit, Stephen Shipps, who taught violin and left in 1989 for the University of Michigan, pleaded guilty in 2021 in federal court to one count of transporting a minor across state lines to engage in sexual activity. Mr. Shipps retired from the University of Michigan in February 2019, according to multiple news reports. His sentencing is set for Feb. 17.In the current lawsuit, Mr. Shipps is accused of having summoned a 17-year-old student to his school office where he engaged in inappropriate sexual relations with her every day of the workweek.Reached by telephone, Mr. Shipps declined to comment.The suit also accuses the so-called defendant administrators of failing to protect the students, asserting they “clearly knew or should have known of the sexual exploitation and abuse of minor and other students that was occurring” and that they “unconscionably allowed this egregious and outrageous conduct to continue.”Ethan Stiefel, a former American Ballet Theater star who later became a dean at the arts school, is one administrator listed as having held a position of responsibility at the time of some of the alleged abuse.Attempts to reach Mr. Stiefel by telephone and email were unsuccessful.When Mr. Soderlund’s lawsuit was filed years ago, and in recent months as the new court case drew attention, some former faculty members and school administrators have said they had no knowledge of the sort of misconduct described in the case.In a telephone interview, Joan Sanders-Seidel, 88, a former faculty member who taught ballet and worked in the dance department for more than 20 years, described the students as among the most talented and industrious in the country, and a joy to teach.“It was very special,” she said of the school, adding that she “loved every minute” of working there.Ms. Sanders-Seidel’s own daughter attended the school and they only recently discussed the allegations of abuse, she said.“I’m surprised about how stupid I was — how unaware,” Ms. Sanders-Seidel said. “I was never a naïve, innocent little dancer myself. So if I suspected anything, I probably just brushed it off.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $24.7 Million in New Grants

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      The awards will support projects including Cherokee language translation, a digital map of jazz and hip-hop in Queens, and a study of the secret language of French butchers.A “living history museum” based on the life of Dred Scott, digitization of books and manuscripts dispersed from the Philippines in the 18th century, a Cherokee translation effort, and an exhibit on the history of jazz and hip-hop in Queens, N.Y., are among 208 projects across the country that are receiving new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.The grants, which total $24.7 million, support individual scholarly projects and collaborative efforts, including initiatives and exhibitions at cultural institutions ranging from local history sites to behemoths like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The awards are part of the agency’s regular cycle of grants. Last year, the agency also distributed more than $140 million of additional grants supported by funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.Some of the new awards are dedicated to infrastructure. One grant, of $500,000, is going to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Institute in San Antonio to support the refurbishment of seven historic buildings to be used as a cultural center focused on the immigrant communities of the city’s Westside neighborhood. A grant of $20,000 will support digital upgrades at the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University, which aims to highlight the history of Great Plains communities at risk of being forgotten.There are also a number of grants to historically Black colleges and universities, including roughly $130,000 to Oakwood University in Huntsville, Ala., to create the living museum dedicated to Dred Scott, the enslaved man whose lawsuit seeking freedom resulted in the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision stating that African Americans could never be citizens.Other awards include nearly $45,000 to the University of Virginia, toward the creation of a database of 18th- and 19th-century North American weather records, including the detailed daily reports made by Thomas Jefferson between July 1776 and the week before his death in July 1826. There is also a $100,000 grant to Northeastern University in Boston, to support the translation of its Digital Archive of American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance, which gathers handwritten materials in the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system created in the early 19th century.In New York City, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens will receive $30,000 to support a digital mapping project exploring the history of jazz and hip-hop in the borough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will receive $350,000, to support biochemical analysis of the chia oil found in Mexican lacquerware and paintings by New Spanish artists in Mexico from the 16th to 19th centuries, to help with conservation and provenance research for works held in museums around the world. (The museum will collaborate with Grupo Artesanal Tecomaque, an Indigenous collective in Mexico that teaches sustainable lacquerware practices.)While most grants are directed toward institutions, there are also several dozen grants to individual scholars, some supporting “who knew?” topics like the history of Louchébem, described by the endowment as “a secret, highly endangered language spoken by Parisian butchers since the 13th century,” which was also used by some members of the French Resistance during World War II.The agency has an annual budget of roughly $167 million. In October, President Biden nominated Shelly C. Lowe, a scholar of higher education and longtime administrator, as its next director. If confirmed by the Senate, Lowe, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, will be the first Native American to lead the agency. More

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      $50 Million Gift to Juilliard Targets Racial Disparities in Music

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      The renowned conservatory will use a grant from a California foundation to expand a training program focused largely on Black and Latino schoolchildren.For three decades, the Juilliard School has sought to bring more diversity to classical music by offering a weekend training program aimed largely at Black and Latino schoolchildren.Now the renowned conservatory is planning a major expansion of the initiative, known as the Music Advancement Program: Juilliard announced on Thursday that it had received a $50 million gift that it would use to increase enrollment in the program by 40 percent and to provide full scholarships to all participants.“This will be transformational,” Damian Woetzel, Juilliard’s president, said in an interview. “It will broaden the pathway to the highest level of classical music education in such a significant way.”The gift is from Crankstart, a foundation in California backed by the venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman, a writer, who are longtime supporters of the program.Heyman, in announcing the gift, pointed to the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in American orchestras, where only about 4 percent of musicians are Black or Hispanic. The Music Advancement Program’s “commitment to recruiting underrepresented minorities will help bring new spirit, as well as superb young musicians, to orchestras, concert halls and theaters everywhere,” Heyman said in a statement.Juilliard aims to expand enrollment to 100 students, up from 70. The initiative will also broaden its reach to include younger students. (It currently serves children ages 8 through 18.) And in addition to full scholarships for all students, the gift will be used to create a fund to help them buy instruments.The program includes ear training, instrument lessons and theory classes for its students, who largely come from New York City public schools. Students can enroll for four years. The program costs $3,400 per year, though many students receive full or partial scholarships, currently funded from a variety of sources.While just seven Music Advancement Program students since 2010 have ended up in Juilliard’s undergraduate program, more have entered other prestigious institutions, including the Manhattan School of Music, Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory. And 61 of the students have gained admission to Juilliard’s prestigious pre-college division.Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet and the artistic director of the program, said the gift would allow Juilliard to reach students who might have been reluctant to apply because of financial considerations.“We needed to make sure there were no barriers to getting more of the students we want into our program,” McGill said in an interview. “We wanted to open the doors, the pathways, to their success.”The program was founded in 1991 as a way of providing rigorous training for promising young musicians at a time when many New York schools were cutting music education classes. The initiative has at times faced financial difficulties. Juilliard almost suspended it in 2009, citing budget cuts and problems raising money. A group of donors, including Moritz and Heyman, eventually came to the rescue. In 2013, the couple stepped up again, giving $5 million.The program’s expansion comes amid a broader push by artists and cultural institutions to address longstanding inequities in classical music. Weston Sprott, who helps oversee the program as dean of Juilliard’s preparatory division, said being a musician of color was too often a lonely experience, and that ensembles should better reflect the diversity of their communities.“Oftentimes, as musicians of color, the reward that we get for our success is isolation,” Sprott, who is Black, said in an interview. “Classical music can’t be the best it can be without these young people that we’re bringing into our programs.” More

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      Slide Hampton, Celebrated Trombonist, Composer and Arranger, Dies at 89

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      He began playing professionally as a child, worked with some of jazz’s biggest names in the late 1950s, and remained a leading figure in the music for the next 60 years.Slide Hampton, a jazz trombonist, composer and arranger who arrived on the scene at the end of the bebop era and remained in demand for decades afterward, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Orange, N.J. He was 89.His grandson Richard Hampton confirmed the death.Mr. Hampton made his name in the late 1950s with bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson and others. He was considered a triple threat — not just a virtuoso trombonist but also the creator of memorable compositions and arrangements.He won Grammy Awards for his arrangements in 1998 and in 2005, the same year the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master.During the 1980s, he led a band called the World of Trombones that consisted of up to nine trombones and a rhythm section. Big, brassy jazz was out of favor at the time, but by then he had become an elder statesman of jazz, and he was able to insist on bringing his full band into clubs more interested in small, intimate groups. Once in the door, he was almost always a hit.He was also a fixture on college campuses, teaching composition and theory to the next generation of jazz musicians and instilling in them a respect for jazz — and the trombone — that went well beyond the music.“Playing a trombone makes you realize that you’re going to have to depend on other people,” Mr. Hampton told The New York Times in 1982. “If you’re going to need help, you can’t abuse other people. That’s why there’s a real sense of fellowship among trombonists.”Mr. Hampton in concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in Manhattan in 2006.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesLocksley Wellington Hampton was born on April 21, 1932, in Jeannette, Pa., about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of 12 children, and his parents, Clarke and Laura (Buford) Hampton, recruited most of them to be in the family band they led — Locksley joined as a singer and dancer when he was just 6.In 1938 the family moved to Indianapolis in search of more work. The city had a thriving jazz scene, and they were soon touring the Midwest.They never lacked for gigs, but they did lack a trombone player, a deficit the elder Mr. Hampton remedied by handing the instrument to his youngest son when he was 12 and teaching him to play it. He took to the instrument — no easy task for a child — and it didn’t take long for him to earn the nickname Slide.He studied at a local conservatory, but most of his musical education came through his family and other musicians. He was particularly taken by J.J. Johnson, the leading trombonist of the sophisticated school of jazz known as bebop, who lived in Indianapolis. Mr. Hampton later recalled that one evening he was standing outside a club with his instrument, too young to enter, when Mr. Johnson walked by. He was supposed to play that night, but he didn’t have his trombone. Mr. Hampton gave him his own.Mr. Hampton later adapted several of Mr. Johnson’s compositions. He kept one of them, “Lament,” in his repertoire for decades.After his father died in 1951, the family band was led by Locksley’s brother Duke. In 1952 the band won a contest to play at Carnegie Hall, opening for Lionel Hampton (no relation).While in New York, Mr. Hampton and one of his brothers went to Birdland, the fabled jazz club, where they saw the bebop pianist Bud Powell play. That experience, he later said, left a much greater impression on him than performing at Carnegie.Mr. Hampton married Althea Gardner in 1948; they divorced in 1997. He is survived by his brother Maceo; his children, Jacquelyn, Lamont and Locksley Jr.; five grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His son Gregory died before him.The Hampton family band later returned to New York to play at the Apollo Theater, and Slide urged them to relocate to the city. When they demurred, he made his own plans.A friend recommended a once-a-week gig in Houston, and Mr. Hampton jumped at the chance. It paid well enough that he could use the rest of the week to study and compose.In 1955 the rhythm-and-blues pianist Buddy Johnson recruited him for his band, and he relocated to New York. A year later he moved to Lionel Hampton’s band, and a year after that he joined Maynard Ferguson’s. He composed some of the Ferguson band’s better-known pieces, including “The Fugue” and “Three Little Foxes.”Mr. Hampton found himself in high demand and struck out on his own in 1962 as the leader of the Slide Hampton Octet. Though that band lasted just a year and he later said he did a poor job as its leader, it greatly increased his visibility.As a leader, Mr. Hampton was humble. He often took a seat in the audience after playing a solo so as not to upstage other band members when their turns came. Once, when a television crew showed up to film the band, he cut his solo short to make sure everyone got a turn on camera.In the early 1960s he bought a brownstone in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, which quickly became a hot spot for jam sessions and a crash pad for some of the country’s top musicians. The saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Eric Dolphy and the guitarist Wes Montgomery all lived there for a time.After his octet broke up, Mr. Hampton worked as a musical director for Motown Records, collaborating on productions for Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and others. There he encountered firsthand the rising popularity of pop and R&B and concluded that jazz was being boxed out of the American music scene. After touring Europe in 1968 with Woody Herman, he settled in Paris, where he found not just a thriving jazz audience, but public subsidies that supported the music.“The conditions and the respect for the artist in Europe were so incredible that I was overwhelmed,” Mr. Hampton told The Times in 1982. “They saw jazz as an art form in Europe long before they did here.”He returned to America in 1977, initially to write arrangements for the saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who himself had recently returned from Europe. By then the place of jazz had changed — major labels were becoming interested, government grants were becoming available and colleges were adding jazz to the curriculum.Mr. Hampton was once more in demand as a musician — and now also as an educator. Over the next decades he taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, DePaul University in Chicago, and elsewhere. And he continued to play at New York venues into the 2010s.When asked what explained his success over such a long career, Mr. Hampton insisted that it wasn’t just talent, but also practice — he practiced four to five hours a day, and would do even more if he had the time.“Everything that’s really of quality requires a lot of work,” he said in a 2007 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts. “Things that come easy don’t have the highest level of quality connected to them.” More

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      A Blackface ‘Othello’ Shocks, and a Professor Steps Back From Class

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      Students objected after the composer Bright Sheng showed the 1965 film of Laurence Olivier’s “Othello” to his class at the University of Michigan.It was supposed to be an opportunity for music students at the University of Michigan to learn about the process of adapting a classic literary text into an opera from one of the music school’s most celebrated professors, the composer Bright Sheng.But at the first class meeting of this fall’s undergraduate composition seminar, when Professor Sheng hit play on the 1965 film of Shakespeare’s “Othello” starring Laurence Olivier, it quickly became a lesson in something else entirely.Students said they sat in stunned silence as Olivier appeared onscreen in thickly painted blackface makeup. Even before class ended 90 minutes later, group chat messages were flying, along with at least one email of complaint to the department reporting that many students were “incredibly offended both by this video and by the lack of explanation as to why this was selected for our class.”Within hours, Professor Sheng had sent a terse email issuing the first of what would be two apologies. Then, after weeks of emails, open letters and canceled classes, it was announced on Oct. 1 that Professor Sheng — a two-time Pulitzer finalist and winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant — was voluntarily stepping back from the class entirely, in order to allow for a “positive learning environment.”The incident might have remained just the latest flash point at a music program that has been roiled in recent years by a series of charges of misconduct by star professors. But a day before Professor Sheng stepped down, a long, scathing Medium post by a student in the class rippled across Twitter before getting picked up in Newsweek, Fox News, The Daily Mail and beyond, entangling one of the nation’s leading music schools in the supercharged national debate over race, academic freedom and free speech.To some observers, it’s a case of campus “cancel culture” run amok, with overzealous students refusing to accept an apology — with the added twist that the Chinese-born Professor Sheng was a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, during which the Red Guards had seized the family piano.To others, the incident is symbolic of an arrogant academic and artistic old guard and of the deeply embedded anti-Black racism in classical music, a field that has been slow to abandon performance traditions featuring blackface and other racialized makeup.The Olivier “Othello,” from 1965, was controversial even when it was new; the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock in The New York Times that the actor “plays Othello in blackface.” Warner BrothersIn an email to The New York Times, Professor Sheng, 66, reiterated his apology. “From the bottom of my heart, I would like to say that I am terribly sorry,” he said.“Of course, facing criticism for my misjudgment as a professor here is nothing like the experience that many Chinese professors faced during the Cultural Revolution,” he wrote. “But it feels uncomfortable that we live in an era where people can attempt to destroy the career and reputation of others with public denunciation. I am not too old to learn, and this mistake has taught me much.”Professor Sheng, who joined the Michigan faculty in 1995 and holds the title Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor, the highest rank on the faculty, was born in 1955 in Shanghai. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, to avoid being sent to a farm to be “re-educated,” he auditioned for an officially sanctioned folk music ensemble, and was sent to Qinghai province, a remote area near the Tibetan border, according to a university biography.After the universities reopened in 1976, he got a degree in composition from Shanghai University, and in 1982, he moved to the United States, eventually earning a doctorate at Columbia University.His work, which includes an acclaimed 2016 opera based on the 18th-century Chinese literary classic “Dream of the Red Chamber,” blends elements of Eastern and Western music. “When someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, ‘100 percent both,’” he said earlier this year.The Olivier film was controversial even when it was new. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock that Olivier “plays Othello in blackface,” noting his “wig of kinky black hair,” his lips “smeared and thickened with a startling raspberry red” and his exaggerated accent, which he described as reminiscent of “Amos ‘n’ Andy.” (To “the sensitive American viewer,” Crowther wrote, Olivier looked like someone in a “minstrel show.”)Professor Sheng, in his emailed response to questions from The Times, said that the purpose of the class had been to show how Verdi had adapted Shakespeare’s play into an opera, and that he had chosen the Olivier film simply because it was “one of the most faithful to Shakespeare.” He also said that he had not seen the makeup as an attempt to mock Black people, but as part of a long tradition — one that has persisted in opera — which he said valued the “music quality of the singers” over physical resemblance.“Of course, times have changed, and I made a mistake in showing this film,” he said. “That was insensitive of me, and I am very sorry.”But to the students — for some, it was their very first class at the university — it was simply a shock. “I was stunned,” Olivia Cook, a freshman, told The Michigan Daily, adding that the classroom was “supposed to be a safe space.”Bright Sheng’s work includes an acclaimed 2016 opera based on the 18th-century Chinese literary classic “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which was performed at the San Francisco Opera in 2016.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA week after the video was shown, Professor Sheng signed on to a letter from six of the composition department’s seven professors, which described the incident as “disappointing and harmful to individual students in many different ways, and destructive to our community.” He also sent another, longer, apology, saying that since the incident, “I did more research and learning on the issue and realized that the depth of racism was, and still is, a dangerous part of American culture.”Professor Sheng also cited discrimination he had faced as an Asian American and listed various Black musicians he had mentored or supported, as well as his daughter’s experience performing with Kanye West. “I hope you can accept my apology and see that I do not discriminate,” he wrote.That apology provoked fresh outrage. In an open letter to the dean, a group of 33 undergraduate and graduate students and nine staff and faculty members (whose names were not made public) called on the school to remove Professor Sheng from the class, calling his apology “inflammatory” and referring to an unspecified “pattern of harmful behavior in the classroom” which had left students feeling “unsafe and uncomfortable.”(“In retrospect,” Professor Sheng wrote in his email to The Times, “I should have apologized for my mistake without qualification.”).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}On Sept. 30, a senior in the class, Sammy Sussman, posted the long Medium essay, outlining what he saw as Professor Sheng’s “disregard for students” (which, he wrote, included walking out in the middle of Mr. Sussman’s audition for the program several years earlier). Mr. Sussman, who in 2018 was the first to report allegations of sexual misconduct against another music faculty member, Stephen Shipps, also linked the case to what he said was a broader failure of the university and the classical music industry to hold prominent figures to account.After Mr. Sussman posted a link to the essay on Twitter, it was retweeted by another composition professor, Kristin Kuster, who cited the need for “conversations about pedagogical racism and pedagogical abuse,” and tagged a number of musicians, as well as the Pulitzer Prize board and the MacArthur Foundation. (Both Mr. Sussman and Professor Kuster declined to comment on the record.)Some accused the students, and the school, of overreacting. In an article in Reason, Robby Soave, an editor at the magazine, argued that Professor Sheng’s apology “ought to have been more than sufficient” and argued that he now deserves an apology himself.“The University of Michigan is a public institution at which students and professors deserve free speech and expression rights,” he wrote. “It is a violation of the university’s cherished principles of academic freedom to punish Sheng for the choices he makes in the classroom. Screening a racially problematic film in an educational setting is neither a racist act nor an endorsement of racism.”A spokesman for the university, Kim Broekhuizen, confirmed that the incident had been referred to the university’s Office of Equity, Civil Rights and Title IX for investigation, but emphasized that Professor Sheng had stepped down from the class voluntarily, was still teaching individual studios, and was scheduled to teach next semester.“We do not shy away from addressing racism or any other difficult topic with our students,” Ms. Broekhuizen said in an email to The Times. But “in this particular instance, the appropriate context or historical perspective was not provided and the professor has acknowledged that.”Some scholars who teach blackface traditions questioned the quickness of some to denounce the students, or to mock their insistence on contextualization as a demand for “trigger warnings.”“Gen Z is unbelievably right on when they say, ‘If you’re not going to give us the context, we shouldn’t have to watch it,’” said Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University who has written extensively on Shakespeare and race.Professor Thompson, the author of the recent book “Blackface” and a trustee of the Royal Shakespeare Company, declined to comment on the details of Professor Sheng’s case. But she said that when it comes to “Othello” and blackface minstrelsy, the connections aren’t incidental, but absolutely fundamental.Contrary to widespread belief, she said, blackface wasn’t an American invention, but sprang from older European performance traditions going back to the Middle Ages. And it was at an 1833 performance of “Othello” featuring a blacked-up actor that T.D. Rice, the white American performer seen as the father of minstrelsy, claimed to have been inspired to get up at intermission and put on blackface to perform “Jump Jim Crow” for the first time.“Whenever you’re teaching Shakespeare, period, the history of performing race should be part of the discussion,” Professor Thompson said. “Everyone has a responsibility to give the full history.” More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Awards Covid Relief Grants

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      The American Rescue Plan Act, with its $87.8 million in funding, will support projects at nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions in the country.The New York Public Library, the USS Constitution Museum in Boston and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Va., are among more than 300 beneficiaries of new Covid relief grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that are being announced on Monday.The grants, which total $87.8 million and are supported by $135 million in funding allocated to the endowment under the American Rescue Plan Act that was signed into law in March, will provide emergency relief to help offset pandemic-related financial losses at museums, libraries, universities and historical sites in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and Northern Marianas. The endowment distributed the first $52.6 million in June.Adam Wolfson, the endowment’s acting chairman, said in a statement that the grants, which can be as much as $500,000 for organizations and $5 million for grant-making programs that distribute funds to organizations, “will save thousands of jobs in the humanities placed at risk by the pandemic and help bring economic recovery to cultural and educational institutions and those they serve.”The cultural and educational institutions will receive a total of $59 million from the endowment, and 13 grant-making organizations will receive $28.8 million to distribute to humanities projects undertaken by organizations or individuals.The funding, designed to allow organizations to retain and rehire staff, as well as rebuild programs and projects disrupted by the pandemic, will enable the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to develop an African-American oral history project at Monticello, the plantation where the former president lived until his death in 1826; allow the New York Public Library to expand its digitized collection of African American, African and African diasporic materials; and support the creation of hands-on experiences and virtual programming about the Navy ship anchored in Boston at the USS Constitution Museum.In New York, 33 of the state’s cultural organizations and three grant-making programs will receive a total of $16.2 million. Funding will support expanded access to materials by historically underrepresented artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s library collections; the hiring of a videographer at the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation to document the theater’s legacy, with a focus on African and African American culture; and planning for the Museum of the City of New York’s centennial year in 2023. Firelight Media, a nonprofit that supports filmmakers of color, will also receive $2 million for a grant program for 36 Black, Indigenous and people of color filmmakers whose work on documentary projects was disrupted by the pandemic.Elsewhere, the grants will allow both Old North Church in Boston and Christ Church in Philadelphia to investigate their ties to the colonial slave trade, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to design an immersive living history experience to introduce visitors to their history and culture, and the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Neb., to develop tours about the writer whose novels explore the lives of early pioneers there.Around 90 colleges and universities received funding to support their humanities programs and departments: Adjunct faculty at Seattle Central College will work with local tribal representatives to revise history and literature courses to incorporate Indigenous perspectives, the University of Oklahoma Press will develop a new Native American imprint in collaboration with the university’s Native Nations Center and East Tennessee State University will retain and rehire staff to support free online access to materials documenting the history of Southern Appalachia. More

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      Following Theater Graduates Who Were Left Without a Stage

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      The Times’s theater reporter tracked drama students who emerged from a well-regarded North Carolina conservatory into a world with performance on pause.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I’m the theater reporter at The New York Times. But for more than a year, there was very little theater.So what have I been doing? Well, at least in part, I’ve been writing about the people whose lives, and livelihoods, have been upended by the pandemic-prompted shutdown.That means actors, of course, and fans, too. But I’ve also been intrigued, almost since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, by what the widespread layoffs and absence of productions would mean for aspiring theater artists,. That’s what led me to report the article that appeared in Sunday’s paper about a group of drama students who graduated last year from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.Over time, I was able to talk to 22 of the 23 drama students in the class of 2020, and they reminded me of so much that I love about journalism, and about artists — they were open and generous and self-aware, and sometimes uncertain about how to think about what this strange and unexpected time would mean for them. And it seems like the article has resonated with readers, for which I am grateful.I started pitching the story to The Times’s culture editors last summer. Then, in January, prompted by the annual what-do-we-want-to-do-this-year meetings, I moved it to the top of my wish list.But how to proceed? I started by reaching out to a number of leading drama programs in New York and around the country, and by talking with educators and students about what was happening with the class of 2020. I was just trying to get my head around what a story might look like.As I gathered reporting, my editors and I resumed a debate we have over and over: breadth versus depth. Was the best way to proceed to write in a sweeping fashion about the most interesting graduates from a variety of programs, or to go deep on a single program that could stand in for the larger universe?Once we decided to focus on one class, it was time to select a school. This is the kind of multiple-choice question for which there is no single right answer. We wanted a well-regarded program, but maybe not one of the schools right in our backyard, and we wanted a group of students with a variety of back stories and a range of pandemic experiences.The University of North Carolina School of the Arts appealed because it met those criteria, and I just had a gut feeling, after talking with the program’s dean, its communications director and a few of the students, that I would find the level of candor that might make a story succeed.As has been true for much of my work over the last year, the reporting was largely by phone — the students have scattered, with one in England, one in Australia and the others all over the United States and often on the move. But I did get to meet some of them.In May, I took my first reporting flight since the pandemic began, to Winston-Salem, to tour the campus and attend the 2021 commencement, which members of the class of 2020 were invited to attend, and two did. (One bonus: I got to see what a Fighting Pickle, the school’s mascot, looks like.)I visited with three members of the class. David Ospina, who is now working as a real estate photographer, met me for cold brew coffee on a very hot North Carolina morning; Lance Smith showed me around his mom’s apartment, where he’s been making music and self-taping auditions during the pandemic; and Sam Sherman joined Mr. Smith and me at a picnic table on campus to debrief the morning after commencement. And over dinner with the dean and several faculty members, I learned more about the school’s programs and how it had weathered the pandemic.It’s been great to start reporting in person again. It just leads to better conversations and richer material, and I’m so grateful to all the students for their thoughtfulness. As I sat with Mr. Smith and Mr. Sherman, one memory prompted another — the student production of “Pass Over” they worked on, the alumni panels they attended, the books they’re reading and the survival jobs they’re taking and the dreams they’re trying to hold on to. “I’m starving to be in a room with people, playing with each other, having fun and goofing off and seeing what works and maybe having a breakthrough one day,” Mr. Sherman said. Mr. Smith agreed. “I miss being in it,” he added. “I miss doing it.” More

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      Juilliard Students Protest Tuition Increase With Marches and Music

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      After occupying parts of the school, some students were barred from entering the building. So they took the demonstration outside.The Juilliard School, one of the world’s leading performing arts conservatories, is better known for recitals than picket lines. But students protesting a planned tuition increase occupied parts of its Lincoln Center campus this week and, when they were later barred from entering a school building, led music- and dance-filled protests on West 65th Street.The protests began Monday when a group of students, objecting to plans to raise tuition to $51,230 a year from $49,260, occupied parts of the school’s Irene Diamond building and posted photos on social media of dozens of sheets of multicolored paper arranged to form the words “TUITION FREEZE.”On Wednesday, students said, they received an email from the administration saying that “school space” could not be used for nonschool events without permission. “Posting signage, posters or fliers, tabling in the lobby, solicitation or distributing print materials also requires advance authorization,” the message added.Students returned to the Diamond building that day, marching through the halls and stopping outside the door of the school’s president, Damian Woetzel. At one point, some said, they knocked on his door, chanting: “We know you’re in there. Will you meet students’ needs and freeze tuition?”Later, protesters said, they were barred from the Diamond building, and the school told them that it was investigating an incident that included reported violations “pertaining to community safety.” On Thursday, about 20 students continued their tuition protest on the sidewalk outside, waving placards and accusing the school of using heavy-handed tactics to quell dissent.“They have made it quite apparent they will not listen to us,” said Carl Hallberg, an 18-year-old drama student.Rosalie Contreras, a spokeswoman for Juilliard, wrote in an email that the school was increasing financial aid and raising the minimum wage for work-study jobs on campus to $15 an hour, and that it had special funding available for students experiencing financial hardship.“Juilliard respects the right of all community members including students to freely express opinions with demonstrations that are conducted in a reasonable time, place and manner,” Ms. Contreras added. “Regrettably the demonstration on Wednesday escalated to the point where public safety was called by an employee.”When some protestors were barred from a school building, pending an investigation, they continued their demonstrations outside.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBoth Mr. Hallberg and another student, Gabe Canepa, said they were part of a campus group called the Socialist Penguins, which had called for the protests. They said that they had not jeopardized anyone’s safety.Mr. Canepa, a 19-year-old dance student, added that students took the tuition increase seriously because it meant they would have less to spend on “rent, groceries, subway fares, supplies we need for school.”An online petition by the group said that “raising the already astronomically high cost of tuition” hurts working class students. It added: “We demand that Juilliard cancel their planned tuition raise.”Students taking part in the protests said that roughly 300 current students, or about 30 percent to a third of those currently enrolled, had signed the petition.The events at Juilliard this week appear to have been less contentious than school occupations that have taken place elsewhere in Manhattan over the years, including at New York University, Cooper Union and the New School, where police officers wearing helmets and carrying plastic shields arrested people who took over part of the school’s Fifth Avenue building in 2009. But the conflict struck a discordant note.Juilliard is also facing pressure on diversity issues. In May, CBS News quoted a Black student there saying she had been disturbed by an acting workshop in which the class members were asked to pretend they were slaves, as audio of whips, rain and racial slurs was played. Juilliard told CBS that the workshop was a “mistake” and that it regretted “that the workshop caused pain for students.”After Wednesday’s protests, several students said that they had received emails from Sabrina Tanbara, the assistant dean of student affairs, letting them know that their access to the Diamond building had been suspended pending an investigation.The next day, Juilliard’s dean of student development sent an email message to all students that provided some details of what the school was looking into. Referring to the protest on Wednesday afternoon outside the president’s office, Barrett Hipes, the dean, wrote: “Yesterday Public Safety received a report regarding confrontational and intimidating student conduct that caused an administrative assistant who was working alone in an office to become concerned for their own safety.”Unable to enter the Diamond building on Thursday, the students held a protest outside and encouraged passing motorists to honk their horns in support.One young man vogued on West 65th Street. Mr. Hallberg strummed a guitar, and another student plucked a standup bass, leading a singalong of the labor standard “Which Side Are You On?”Some students said they felt they had been punished without due process.Sarah Williams, a 19-year-old oboe student, said that she had written to Ms. Tanbara asking what, specifically, she was believed to have done that would justify barring her from the Diamond building. She said she had yet to receive a response.“My resources have been eliminated without any explanation,” she said.Raphael Zimmerman, a 20-year-old clarinet student, said he had received an email from Ms. Tanbara notifying him that he would be contacted to schedule an “investigatory meeting” to obtain his account of activity outside the president’s office late on Wednesday afternoon.“I think saying the several minutes we spent knocking on that door and singing was harassment,” he said, “is essentially rejecting our right to assemble and demonstrate.” More