Ink Studies, refinement of

OK, after hitting the books on this all weekend, things look a little different. The front rank, the schools that appear to have both a strong liberal arts college nature and a very strong (for a liberal arts school) art department (or functional equivalent), are Brown, Hampshire, Sarah Lawrence, and Bard. Macalester and Wesleyan appear to be equally strong as liberal arts colleges but do not quite appear to be in the same class in respect of their art departments. Carleton appears to trail those two by a little bit, again only in the art department. There seems to be a noticeable gap between it and Reed, Grinnell, and Vassar in that category, which I am afraid are definitely in the third rank on that basis.

More disturbingly, it appears that there is no way to get a BFA without being a somewhat-accomplished artist at college-application time, and that the BFA level is where one obtains a real design education (see RISD, Parsons, etc). This is a great injustice, if not a violation of my human rights. I think this will have to be resolved by calling up people in the art department at these schools and asking "how do I become a graphic designer or some such thing if I go to your school?"

Brown has a misnamed Resumed Undergraduate Education program, which applies even to old fogies like myself who are not resuming any undergraduate education but beginning it, just a little later than everybody else. It sounds perfect and wonderful, except that it sends its admission notifications approximately May 1. What happens on May 1? Let's see. It is International Worker's Day for one thing. Anything else? Oh yeah, it's the day when all of the other schools require you to tell them whether you are accepting their admission offers. Does a college application plan consisting of "stake everything on Brown" strike anyone else as, um, brave?

P.S. In the spring of 2005, Bard offered a Foundations: Constructivism class. That is just unspeakably cool.