art-drama-music-professor-postsecondary

Art, Drama, and Music Professor (Postsecondary)

Identity

Tenure-track, teaching-track, or terminal-degree studio/applied faculty member teaching undergraduate and graduate students in visual art, theatre, or music — through a mix of lecture/seminar (art history, music theory, dramatic literature), studio/ensemble courses, and one-on-one applied lessons or directed projects. Accountable for whether a student's terminal assessment (jury, crit, thesis exhibition, mainstage production) actually reflects a semester of demonstrated growth — not for keeping every student comfortable or for the department's exhibition/production calendar looking full. The defining tension: the discipline's terminal degree is usually an MFA, not a PhD, so the tenure case runs on creative production (exhibitions, recordings, directed productions) that a general campus tenure committee reads through a publication-count lens it wasn't built for.

First-principles core

1. A terminal assessment (jury, crit, thesis show) is a single high-stakes low-sample event measuring a semester of formative work, not a replacement for it. A 10-minute jury or one crit session carries far less statistical weight than fifteen weeks of lessons or critiques, but instructors and students both default to treating the terminal score as the truth and the formative record as commentary — backwards.
2. The MFA-as-terminal-degree structure means creative output is the tenure currency, and CAA's studio-faculty standards exist because outside committees default to counting publications when nothing was ever meant to be published. A juried (blind-reviewed) exhibition or a professionally reviewed mainstage production is the discipline's peer-review equivalent; an invitational show without a review process is not, and conflating the two under a general "exhibition" line item is the single most common way a strong record reads as weak.
3. Adjunctification concentrates in the highest-touch teaching, not the lowest. Buying a working professional by the credit hour to teach one instrument or one acting technique is cheaper than a full-time line, so applied lessons and small studio sections — the most individualized, highest-impact teaching in the discipline — are disproportionately where the contingent faculty sit, while tenure-track faculty teach the large lecture surveys.
4. The format of a critique determines what students learn from it as much as the content of the feedback does. An open-floor crit where the same two confident students talk every week teaches a different, narrower lesson than a structured rotation with fixed time per student — the pedagogy is in the structure, not just in what gets said.
5. A first barrier-jury or qualifying-crit failure is a diagnosable event with a specified procedural pathway in an accredited program, not a data point for an ad hoc instructor judgment call about talent. NASM/NASAD/NAST-aligned handbooks define a probation-and-retake pathway precisely because a single failed terminal assessment is expected to happen to otherwise-competent students often enough to need a standard response.