Date Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2000 9:32 PM

March 25, 2000

Dear Sir;

Hello-- My name is Julia Simon, a Freshman Foundation student currently enrolled at Parsons School of Design. It has come to my understanding that you, Mr. Scaturro, are the acting President of the conglomerate of colleges known as the New School, which Parsons is a part of. I felt that I should write to you and tell you about what Parsons Dean, Randy Swearer, is doing to damage and defer the educational environment under your current jurisdiction.

It seems to me that a scary path is receiving it's first steps with Swearer's decision to close the Printmaking program here at Parsons, rationalizing his arbitrary decision by calling the craft "out of tune with today's technology" and assigning the space the classrooms and storage space are allotted currently to a "lovely" new Starbucks coffee outlet and more cafeteria space. That this is an valid exchange, shocks me and makes me leery of the man whom all decision making at my school of choice finally defers to. Space to recline and eat, and a cafe (which I am sure is a financially beneficial supplement) is sufficiently important to end a whole program instructing a time revered and respected technique, not only by Fine Artists but Designers, Typographers and Textilists alike? Printmaking is one of the most enjoyable image creating techniques, providing a means for reproduction and physical interaction to meld into one, and this melding is the difference between (as Swearer says) the technologies more "in tune with today" and ones (in Swearer's mind) revered and performed in the past, or so-called "out of tune". Manipulating imagery on a computer screen is extremely valuable, essential to design, but a totally different process than one termed "old" or Fine Arts based. The physical interaction with media that is so much of an artist's experience is what influxes the work with emotion, with "humanness", and although the end result's success can't be judged within a monetary value system, value exists nonetheless, perhaps of a "higher" caliber.

Mr. Scaturro, I am afraid of society's economic obsession that is becoming more and more evident every day. To see this infiltrate even as highly revered a school as Parsons disheartens me and frightens me as well. In as broad an area of study as Art is, who gives one man the right to decide for a huge group of people, the (tuition-paying) student body, what information they have a right to access or not? I understand Swearer's concern for keeping in tune with the technology available today. But as a woman interested in combining studies in literature, design, and art (and attempting to represent the many other students interested in the same) taking away one of the features of Parson's curriculum, without consulting ANY of the student body OR faculty is ignorant and (sorry) a little fascist.

Please be aware of this issue, and the future implications it has on the division of the New School that instructs those who will be responsible for tomorrow's visible world. Let the Visual Art division of this university continue to offer as broad an information base as possible for it's students to pull from.