New visual arts head overhauls program

According to the course listings for the spring term, there will be eight new instructors in the program, including Scanlan. Of the seven instructors who will not be teaching in the spring, Emmet Gowin will retire, and installation artist Christian Tomaszewski was a visiting lecturer. Scanlan refused to comment on details regarding new or departing professors.

Scanlan was not officially hired when the program began shaping its spring faculty, but he said he worked closely with interim director Brian Jermusyk in selecting new instructors, noting that he “put the entire faculty together.”

“I don’t think there’s been that much turnover in a long time, and so it seemed important to get to that right away,” Scanlan said. None of the 14 current instructors, including Jermusyk, responded to requests for comment. Several students in the program also did not respond to requests for comment.

Scanlan said he did not believe the changes were “drastic.”

“It’s no more drastic than someone being elected and coming in and changing the positions of those who had responsibility in the government,” he explained. He added that he wanted to have more people in rotation within the visual arts faculty.

Scanlan said his most important goal in reorganizing the department was to create a faculty with more practical experience.

“I was interested in having more working artists, practicing artists, professional artists teaching, so that knowledge and that experience can be part of the coursework as well,” he said. “I wanted to bring out artists who are really out there … contributing to the world of art. So that was my first goal: having people teaching who are really in the midst of contemporary art right now.”

Scanlan came to Princeton from Yale after having served as the assistant director of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, which specializes in “radical, conceptual and installation-based artworks,” according to Scanlan’s biography on the website for the Lewis Center for the Arts.

He added that his secondary goals were “to start to diversify the faculty in terms of age and race and gender,” and to ensure that the faculty included “more diverse points of view.”

Scanlan refused to comment on the specific considerations that went into the decision not to rehire certain faculty members, noting that his “decision-making isn’t newsworthy.”

“It’s quite clear to me why I made the decisions I made,” he later explained, noting the strong resumes of the new instructors. In a follow-up e-mail, he pointed to incoming faculty members Daniel Heyman, who has worked with former inmates of Abu Ghraib over the past five years, and Nathan Carter, who is currently working with NASA on optics.

Overall, Scanlan explained, the number of new faculty is not significant when considering the limited size of the department. “I wouldn’t be shocked about this amount of turnover because we’re talking about lecturers, and it’s not so unusual,” he explained, “given that we … don’t have that many courses to offer.”

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Scanlan added that, though several faculty members will be leaving the University next semester, “it doesn’t mean that they’re never coming back, necessarily.”

“I wouldn’t presume that, because there are new people coming in, that the people they’re replacing are somehow being permanently replaced,” he said. “Just because there are this many changes this term, it doesn’t mean that the people who aren’t coming back are somehow permanently unwelcome.”