By JEANETTE FANG

Liberal Arts chair Mitchell Aboulafia.

People underestimate the importance of a good laugh. Sincerity is measured by hearty guffaws, big hyperventilating gusts that cannot possibly be faked. Mitchell Aboulafia has such a laugh, which fits perfectly with his enthusiastic amiability. It's one factor that makes his classes warm discussions instead of sterile lectures. Usually teachers have a problem getting kids to wake up. In an Aboulafia classroom, it would be a problem to stop kids from participating.

Professor Aboulafia is the newly appointed head of Juilliard's Liberal Arts Department. Originally a New Yorker, he returns to the city with his wife, Cathy Kemp, after serving as a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University from 2003-06 and as head of that department from 2003-04. Prior to that, he served as professor and chair of the philosophy department at the University of Colorado at Denver for eight years, from 1995-2003. He is the author of The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy (Illinois); The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination (Yale); The Self-Winding Circle: A Study of Hegel's System (W.H. Green); and has edited works in social theory and philosophy.

Recently, fourth-year piano student Jeanette Fang sat down with Aboulafia to discuss the role of liberal arts in a conservatory setting and his plans for expanding his department's scope in the coming years.



Jeanette Fang: How has your leadership at Juilliard differed from your duties at previous institutions?

Mitchell Aboulafia: Well, the first thing is just the size of Juilliard; the faculty and the student body are 1,100 instead of thousands. You get to know people relatively quickly, and it's really nice to be at an institution where, even after only six or nine months, so many faces are familiar.

JF: What sort of hopes do you have for the department?

MA: I'd like the liberal arts to be seen as something that really supports the mission of Juilliard, something through which students can deepen their experience as artists by learning more about cultures and world civilizations and political matters.

People may end up doing different things than they thought they'd be doing when they first came to Juilliard—perhaps mixing careers as performers and educators, for example. It's very important to be able to speak well, write well, and have arguments and cultural references at your fingertips. So I think we have an obligation to give students not only a general education, but the tools to make them more competitive on the job market, and on different kinds of job markets.

Juilliard and other schools have a real responsibility to use their resources to help educate the wider population. That's another reason for the liberal arts. I think that students coming out of here should view themselves as missionaries for the arts, and they'll be a lot better as missionaries if they can articulate things in speech and writing.

JF: Do you think this obligation is fully recognized by the administration?

MA: They have been extremely supportive of the things that I came here to accomplish. I spoke with the administration extensively before I came, and my feeling is that they're really standing solidly behind the Liberal Arts Department.

JF: Do you think the students are starting to see the need for the liberal arts in their futures?

MA: I have been really pleased with the number of students who have taken an interest in the liberal arts—in philosophy in particular. And I think that the more electives we add, the more responsive students will become. We're hoping to have seminars as well. I'm actually having an informal one this semester, mixing students from Juilliard and the New School. We're also thinking about bringing in important figures to talk with students, such as politicians, poets, artists.

JF: Any idea who?

MA: I don't have a specific list at this point. But [faculty member] Ron [Price] has a couple of poets we're going to try to bring in this spring. We're going to be asking students and faculty members who they'd like to see visit.

JF: So these are all ways of bringing new experiences to satisfy the variety of students at Juilliard?

MA: Yes. What I have found is that a significant number of students made a decision to come here when they could have gone to some very good colleges or universities, and while they're committed to their art, there's also a sense that they're missing something that they would have gotten had they gone to a college. I'd like the department to provide more of that experience to Juilliard students. We're also trying to get people who might not be geared towards the liberal arts, who have been on the performing-arts track all their lives, to be excited about the program.

JF: Are you taking a lot of your experiences from larger institutions and bringing them to Juilliard?

MA: Yes, but I'm trying to be sensitive to the unique character of Juilliard, because stuff won't work if you think you can just use a template from universities. But a lot more might work than has been tried in the past. So we'll experiment.

JF: Do you find that one of the biggest problems at Juilliard is that there are a lot of cultural barriers and people who can't be bothered with anything outside their practice rooms?

MA: I've heard that this is a major issue. I'm waiting to see it, though. What I've experienced so far are people who have very filled schedules. But I've worked with busy students in the past. I was director of interdisciplinary graduate programs at University of Colorado, and a lot of our students had come back after having families or careers, so they had a lot of pressures, yet we managed to put together some very good classes. While Juilliard students need to be highly disciplined and spend a tremendous number of hours on their art, they're not as different from university students as they might think. While they're different from typical liberal arts students who have time to experiment, their schedules aren't as different from students who are specializing in, say, engineering or pre-med.

JF: I've noticed that students do like to get their voices out there. For some, it's almost like the first time they get to speak up in a class.

MA: I have been very pleased in all the classes I have taught so far with how receptive they have been. A very high number of students participate, often comparable to the honors classes I have taught at Penn State.

JF: It does seem like whatever class of yours I've been in, you get to know people's personalities really well. Does the small class size foster open-mindedness, because you can solve dilemmas on a more individual basis?

MA: There's no question about it. It really allows you to have a sense of students' strengths. It's a great way to teach, in part because you can talk to people of different disciplines, see where they're at, and see how you can work things out.

JF: Do you feel scheduling creates many conflicts?

MA: Scheduling is a serious issue; it's something I have to get a better feel for. Part of it is going to be solved when the renovations are done, because some of it is just about space.

JF: So what will liberal arts courses look like next year?

MA: The core is undergoing some changes. The first class is called "Heritage of the Ancient World" instead of "Myth and Meaning." The "Arts and Aesthetics" part of the core will be a menu of different classes, more like electives instead of one class, so people can take poetry, visual arts, writing, and other possibilities. This will open up more slots for different kinds of electives. I think the building renovations are going to be very good for the liberal arts, with the new Writing and Speech Center. We also have a new absence policy now, but with a certain amount of flexibility.

JF: What drew you to Juilliard?

MA: I think it was the right time, with the new construction and planned facilities, to make a push for increasing the presence of liberal arts at Juilliard. Adding 20 to 25 electives in the matter of a year is a lot of work for the Registrar's Office and Academic Affairs Office, and they all really pitched in.

Left to right: Mitchell Aboulafia with his daughters, Sara and Lauren.

JF: You've mentioned in class that your daughter is an actor. Did this also influence you to teach at a conservatory?

MA: Yes, my older daughter is an actor, out in L.A. She also sings. So, from a parent's standpoint, I know what it's like to try to make it in the performing arts world, and I appreciate some of the differences a performing arts kid has from other kids. My younger daughter, who's at Smith right now, is studying guitar in western Massachusetts at this center founded by a woman who started the first female rock group. She enjoys writing and is into philosophy and literature.

JF: I see that you've published numerous books and articles. How do you find the time to juggle all of your activities?

MA: Not in the last few months! [laughter] Writing philosophy is a very important part of my life, so I have to find some way of carving out time to do it. You develop a sort of rhythm, as a teacher, as a chair, and you start building in more time. I do a lot of interdisciplinary work, but philosophy has been very important to me. That's another connection that I'm not sure people appreciate: that many of the faculty are writers, which is also an art. You have the experience of polishing things, working things over and over to make sure you get them right. I think I have some sense of what it's like to be driven by a passion, which I feel for philosophy—it hooked me ever since I was a freshman at college.

JF: That's very interesting. Most people see how philosophy is important, but hardly anyone goes forward at it and makes it an actual livelihood. How did you have the guts?

MA: The philosopher Hegel said, "No great things are accomplished without passion." It sounds corny, but in a way, philosophy just became who and what I was, and I couldn't imagine living my life without pursuing it. And it wasn't just a specific academic specialty; it spread out into the rest of my life. One of the things that's really interesting about art is the way it makes you see things in ways you've never seen them before. And with philosophy, you study certain things and see and understand the world in ways you never had previously.

JF: Philosophy also seems to give you a much more articulate sense of how it benefits you, in discovering the tiers and complexity of humanity.

MA: Well it clearly allows you to appreciate the world and human beings in ways you would not if you didn't study these things. And I think it also has the possibility of making us better people. That's the moral dimension there; it doesn't always work. [laughter] While a great part of it is extraordinarily abstract, some aspects of philosophy are incredibly concrete, because they deal with basic things that are very important, such as, "What does it mean to live a good life? What do I want out of life? What does it mean to live an ethical life?"

JF: And what artist hasn't asked himself what his purpose in life is?

MA: Exactly. And philosophers ask questions about the nature of art. "What does it do for us? How do we understand it? Why does some art seem to be better than other art?" These are questions that allow us to really develop our sensitivities to what it is that we're engaged in.

JF: You're a prime example of someone who's made it in a highly impractical field. What sort of advice would you give students who worry about making it in the real world?

MA: Well, I can tell you what I've told my daughters: You've got to go with it and try it, but you've also got to be prepared for the fact that things often don't work for reasons that may not have to do with talent. Which is why you should explore other interests besides the one you came to Juilliard for. You'll be in a better position to give it your best shot, because you know that it's not going to be the end of the world if it doesn't happen for you. If there's something else behind you, it will make you less vulnerable. And I think you will actually perform better, because the pressure is not the same. Many Juilliard graduates have gone on to all sorts of things, and are very happy with what's happened with their lives.

JF: What is your next project?

MA: I'm thinking of writing a book on the limitations of classical American philosophy dealing with questions of justice. I'm very interested in cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural diversity, and the failings of some classical American philosophers to deal with these themes. One of my interests is the reconciliation of a kind of universalistic sensibility with one that deals more with cultural and ethnic differences. Very often, they seem to be opposites. Obviously, if you go too far on the diversity side, you can end up with people being really cut off and parochial, even to the insanity of ethnic cleansing. If you go too far with the universalistic side, you can get very hollow statements about humanity as a whole, without actually addressing concrete human beings in the way they live their lives and how they really do differ in their own personal and cultural experiences. My interest in Juilliard lies in its diversity. There's diversity, but there's also an internationalism. A performing artist will travel and experience other cultures; the arts transcend borders, and people aren't so narrow and parochial.

JF: As a student in your class, I am struck by how much you seem to like teaching. I guess it's surprising to see someone so enthusiastic and happy in the position that they're in.

MA: For me there's a performance aspect to teaching. You put your heart into it, because you want to make sure that the people sitting there are getting the most that they possibly can. Performing artists want to give their performance their all, because they want the audience to really get what they're doing. And I feel that way when I walk into a classroom. I want people to walk out of that class and say, "Hey, I learned something. I see something differently."