The chief academic officer of the country's largest independent college of art and design, Cyphers admits that his persona doesn't always fit the art school ethos. And at first glance, neither does his background. The walls of his 23rd Street office, flanked by art studios and design labs, bear a Hampden-Sydney sheepskin, a master's from Wesleyan, and a Ph.D. in American history from SUNY Albany. His recently published book on Progressive Era politics hides on his shelf among Foucault, Marx, and de Tocqueville, and his CV details a career in institutional research.

At first glance, Cyphers' vision for SVA may seem equally out-of-place. "My goal as provost," he explains, "is to pull the liberal arts in from the margins of the curriculum and establish them at the center." But for all of its ostensible incongruity, that goal is very much in accordance with changing expectations about art and the way it is taught.

Cyphers first came to SVA-a trade school born of the GI Bill and fueled by the post-war demand for commercial artists-to serve as director of institutional research in order to help gauge these changing expectations. Cyphers first move was to quantify the radical changes in SVA's student population that had been occurring over the last twenty years. Using that data to get at more qualitative differences-an exercise not unlike those he performs as a historian-he found that today's would-be artists aspired to cultural participation and even entrepreneurship and even entrepreneurship much more than their pre-1970 counterparts. They also desire a degree that is seen as more educationally legitimate in the eyes of society (and specifically the eyes of the parents who pay for it).

These expectations are best met through a more academically oriented curriculum. But integrating liberal arts with fine arts, Cyphers explains, is about more than making a degree more marketable, it's about making art itself more important. "Art doesn't come from an empty head," he says. "They can learn technical skills and make something that looks good, but if artists lack an awareness of the world around them their work will never be powerful."

SVA featured strong humanities departments, but chaotic and ad hoc organization and a lack of communications between the studio disciplines and the academic disciplines prevented any meaningful melding of the two. The position of provost was created in 2001 so that Cyphers could bridge this gap.

Chris Cyphers '88 is helping to integrate the liberal arts into an art school curriculum.

"I force people to play together and make nice," he says. And while he notes that telling established professionals to change their well-seasoned ways required healthy doses of diplomacy, his efforts were met with surprisingly little resistance. "A lot of people wanted to be involved in a single community," he says, "they just did not know how to break the mold."

One of his first moves as provost was to bring together previously incommunicado department heads and charge them with developing a program of integrated study. The result of that collaboration is the forthcoming honors program, a three-year course of study set to begin this fall.

The plan calls for a two-year sequence of history classes that establish the program's broader context, while literature, philosophy, and foundation studio art classes cover related material. The third year features a pair of linked colloquia-one in art history and the other a visual science seminar-followed by a study-abroad trip.

Cyphers himself teaches a class in the politics of American culture and one on American working class history, a subject central to his book, The National Civic Federation and the Making of a New Liberalism, 1910-1915. He also has a new book in the works, which explores the bizarre social history and quirky characters of a New England town near where he grew up.

Cyphers says he wishes he could teach more, but he is also excited by his administrative role in liberalizing art education, an initiative he feels is becoming increasingly important. Picking up the Hampden-Sydney President's Report from a stack of papers on his desk, he opens it to a marked quotation by H-SC provost Earl Fleck on the need for broad-based education in the technology revolution. "This is a mantra of mine as well," he says. "Our state-of-the-art equipment here will allow incoming freshmen to produce things unthinkable ten years ago, but by the time they graduate that technology will be obsolete. What they should get from their experience here, in addition to the fundamentals of making art, is the ability to educate themselves. That may or may not come from sculpting or photography or painting, but it most certainly will come if they are able to think critically, understand context, and defend their position in writing and speech."

The linguistic component, Cyphers says, is especially significant. It is also especially deficient. "There's a lack of public discourse about art. Whenever it does get discussed in public it is in a bad way," he says, citing an incident in which then-Mayor Giuliani threatened to suspend funding to a museum unless they removed a controversial exhibit by an SVA alumnus. "There was no discus-sion about the art or what she was trying to communicate. There was a critical response, but it was purely ad hominem."

To counter this "chronic need," Cyphers is spearheading the development of an MFA program in Art Criticism. "The goal is to train a cohort of public intellectuals who can speak in plain English to an interested lay population about artistic practices and looking at art," he says.

The program would mark their first truly academic degree, but the aim is consistent with Cyphers' broader educational goal, which is to help art gain a stronger foothold within our social discourse and cultural conscience. And while SVA students must first and foremost learn the technical skills of their trade, Cyphers feels that developing conceptual skills is a necessary step in achieving this goal. "I want students to leave here putting as much effort and energy into their intellectual pursuits as their creative pursuits," he says. "I don't know how one could ever separate those two things. The practice of making art and the practice of thinking about it, writing about it, and talking about it have always been seen as two separate processes, as mutually exclusive. I contend that they're mutually reinforcing. But it's a large, unanswered question. I just want to get the artists and academics talking about it."