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George Eastman, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"It's true that you can generalize from African drumming to Indian drumming or to Irish bodhran drumming. But liberal arts courses teach generalizable skills that can be applied in every area of the student's life. There are skills of reasoning, problem-solving, learning how to write and express oneself, and generally how to understand the human drama a little more deeply."
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"We live in a world that, within specific disciplines, demands a complex set of skills. Musicians need a skill set that is broad to perform at the highest level in a complex world. Having a broad view with a 'lens' that understands the connections between the liberal arts, music, writing, art, theater, and dance is important. The more connections one can make to 'the muses,' the more informed one's own particular chosen art will be, in my opinion. Studying the liberal arts makes artists better artists."
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"Liberal arts means that there's a lot of freedom to study a lot of different things that are relevant and that matter and that are a part of a whole. And the whole is your life. So liberal arts gives you the opportunity to study things that are of interest and that can inform your life and that can sometimes spark something in you that you had no idea was there. Liberal arts is there to help people think more effectively, to problem solve more effectively. It's there to help people appreciate relationships, to appreciate the different things that are involved just in being alive. If you're interested in getting a lot more tools to use for the rest of your life, that's what liberal arts is for."
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"My role as teacher is to be a facilitator. I don't lecture; I don't like it, and I can't imagine my students would like it, either. My role is also to create a safe environment for my students to take risks, open up, share their ideas, and believe that what they have to say is worthy. To start a discussion I'll show them something as a catalyst, maybe lead them off with a word or two, then say, 'Here you go; wrestle with it,' and sit back and watch. And that's really how it should be."
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Peter Gardner, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I try to foster a sense of honesty, tolerance, passion, and social responsibility in my students. Stressing the development of critical and creative thinking skills, I encourage clarity, precision, and originality of thought in writing and speech; the ability to ask relevant questions and solve problems; an openness to new ideas and experiences; and a flexibility of mind that allows one to view topics from multiple perspectives and see connections. I continually emphasize a respect for individual and cultural diversity and encourage students from different countries to interact with, and learn from, each other. I try to help my students view the world with compassion, fight injustice whenever possible, and heed the words of the great writer and social activist James Baldwin: 'Artists are here to disturb the peace.'"
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- M.A., Dance and Cultural Studies, UCLA
- B.F.A., Theater Studies, Boston University
- Vocalist
- Performances with Alicia Keys, Mos Def, John Legend, Reggie Gibson, Joshua Bennett, and Donna De Lory
- Recordings include HBO's Def Poetry season 5 and Ever Widening Circles
- Published in the Legendary, Numinous Magazine, and the Charles River Review
- Participant in Slam Team San Jose 2004 and Boston Cantab Slam Team 2005
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DJ Hatfield, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"What it means to be a good musician is more than technical proficiency. One of the things I think we can really offer is time to reflect and work through what it might mean to be a musician in contemporary society. Not all of us talk about music in our classes, and that's because a lot of what it means to be a good musician goes beyond music: it has to do with what it means to be a thinking person. I'd like to think of what we do not as a supplement, but as something that can really add to the ability of our students to think about where they can go as musicians."
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Michael Heyman, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"In addition to poetry and literature from around the world, I teach nonsense literature. This might sound strange. It's not something students would see in a typical college lit. class, but I suppose mine are not typical college lit. classes. Behind the fun and craziness of literary nonsense is a rigorous sense of aesthetics and a bedrock of intelligent and constructive rebellion—a way of questioning the status quo and an outlet for individual, creative thought. What better education for a Berklee student, or anyone for that matter?"
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Sheila Katz, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I'm always teaching history in a way that plugs in with questions people need to ask themselves as human beings. It could be issues of heart and mind, how you live between passions and hatreds, and how emotion and rationality fit together. Whether we're reading something from the Hindu Vedas or a narrative of an African slave, the issues they deal with still are relevant. People will quite regularly give me a CD of a song they've created and say they've written it as a direct result of things that we learned in class."
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"To musicians who are writers, the kind of practices that we do in the classroom—writing philosophical essays and short stories—emphasize the importance of literacy in writing, and this directly relates itself to musicians, particularly those who write music. And so the students themselves become literate writers. They appreciate literature, they understand it, they can analyze it, can take positions against it and on its behalf, and they, more importantly, may want to write about their own music for newspapers, magazines, websites, and many other venues."
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