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June 19, 2008
Master of Arts: Carol Becker
As the daughter of an auctioneer and a hairdresser in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Carol Becker dreamed about a career as a writer and an intellectual. Her parents didn't finish high school and the family lived in a three-room apartment. But anything seemed possible when she wandered the halls of the Brooklyn Museum.
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School of the Arts Dean Carol Becker
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"It was a playground for me, an extension of the street," recalls Becker, the new dean of Columbia's School of the Arts. "I don't remember paying. I don't even remember guards. We'd just run in. It was dark. There were mummies. It was this amazing place of the imagination, and the beginning of my love for art."
Even as she became dean of faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a renowned innovator in arts education, Becker never forgot her roots. "I'm a believer in democracy," says Becker, who studied with the social philosopher Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego. As a grad student, she helped organize for the United Farm Workers, and after earning her Ph.D. in English literature (with a thesis on Poe and Melville), she was one of the original staffers at the progressive news magazine In These Times.
Becker joined the SAIC in 1978 as an English and philosophy teacher. At the time, many art schools were still dominated by the 19th century Romantic notion of the artist as an outsider, living on the margins of society, immune from responsibility to any but his or her own vision. Becker challenged these ideas, encouraging students to work on public projects and advocating for more contemporary critical theory courses. "The school had turned its back on the city," she recalls. "I was saying, 'We live in society, we all do. We don't live in isolation. The world influences us, and we as creative people should be able to talk about it.'"
When Columbia's School of the Arts was looking for a new dean, Becker immediately "popped out," says Nicholas Lemann, dean of the School of Journalism and a member of the search committee. "She has a very forceful, imaginative personality. She dominates the room." The school needed someone powerful, he adds: "There was a sense that it was under-resourced and losing students to other schools that could offer full scholarships."
While Becker was appointed dean last September, she didn't officially start until January, as she was given the fall semester to finish her latest book, a collection of essays, Thinking in Place, to be published in November. She is now ensconced in her Dodge Hall corner office, whose windows overlook Broadway. There's not a scrap of decoration on the walls. "I always take a lot of time before I hang thing," Becker says, adding that the blank, white surroundings are a nice change from her old office in Chicago, which was stuffed floor to ceiling with art given to her over the years.
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