CAPRA Meeting Minutes
May 10, 2013

Attending: Paul Bingham, Darren Chase, Jackie Collier, Dale Deutsch, Deb Dwyer, Shmuel Einav, Bill Godfrey, Norm Goodman, Gene Katz, Meg Schedel

Guest: Nick Mangano

The sole topic of this meeting was to be a discussion of the various academic programs at the Southampton campus, and the resources that are involved in supporting them. At the last minute, Bob Reeves, Associate Provost for the Southampton campus, had a scheduling conflict and was unable to attend. He asked Nick Mangano, Director, MFA in Theatre/International Theatre Workshops, to come in his place and to discuss the Arts programs at Southampton.

Mangano indicated that since being moved from the Stony Brook to the Southampton campus, the MFA in Theatre has expanded to four tracks: Playwriting, Directing, and Film, which have been added to the original program in Dramaturgy. Next year, the program will enroll 12 or 13 students, distributed evenly across the tracks. The newly SED-approved Acting track is expected to attract about 12 students a year, expanding the total number of graduate students in the Southampton Arts programs from 140 students currently to nearly 200. The undergraduate program has enrolled fewer than 10 students this year and its status for next year is unclear. While the programs have clearly been growing, and following or exceeding their existing strategic plan (which Mangano will send to Deb Dwyer and Jackie Collier, chairs of the two relevant subcommittees), further development may be hampered by the uneasy and unresolved relationship between the Theatre program at Southampton and the Department of Theatre Arts at the Stony Brook campus.

According to Mangano, the MFA in Theatre has served to revitalize the Southampton campus, and supports the plan of the university to view Southampton as a Graduate Arts Campus. He pointed out that the MFA is considered the terminal degree for theatre, with the exception of the relatively few Ph. D. programs in theatre history and criticism. He provided the committee with a flyer of the International Theater Workshops 2013 summer program and described the top practitioners in the field of theatre that it attracts.