With the start of the school year, the School of Fine and Performing Arts has become the College of the Arts. Along with the change in status comes a new dean to oversee the transition and push the college to new heights.
Incoming dean Robert Bucker plans on taking a measured approach in terms of outlining his goals.
“You have to be here and see the students experiencing their education to really begin to evaluate that, and so I’m really looking forward to that,” Bucker said before the term began.
Bucker described the change to the College of the Arts as an acknowledgement of the level of programs that already existed.
“Over the last few years the departments have grown significantly, and so it’s about an institution beginning to come of age,” Bucker said. “It’s also about the fact that the four schools in this college have a really fantastic regional reputation as destinations for the study of the arts.”
With more than 2,750 students pursuing majors in arts programs at PSU, the university was already providing pre-professional training in these disciplines.
Reaching out to the wider arts community in Portland is another major part of Bucker’s plan to continue to grow the college.
The Lincoln Hall Glass Tower, a three-story building facing Broadway that will contain gallery space, a dance studio, an acting studio and a black box theater, is central to those plans.
“With the Glass Tower, we’re really creating a fantastic front door for the school right here in the arts corridor of Portland,” Bucker said. “So I want not only our students but our community to feel like Lincoln Hall is a really important destination for the arts.”
Bucker is the product of a search that began last November, when Barbara Sestak announced she would step down as dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts to focus on her responsibilities in the School of Architecture.
The search committee that was assembled to hire the new dean was chaired by Scott Dawson, dean of the School of Business Administration. All four programs that compose the new College of the Arts were represented, with faculty from the Schools of Architecture, Art and Design, Music, and Theater and Film all involved. Several other faculty members, students of the college and individuals representing the Portland arts community rounded out the committee.
Bucker brings in a resume that has taken him around the country. Among posts in higher education, his most recent position was as the dean of Mike Curb College of the Arts, Media and Communication at California State University, Northridge.
Bucker also served as the director of the Education Department for the Metropolitan Opera–Metropolitan Opera Guild in New York City, a job he said he enjoyed.
“I had a great mentor in New York City who was very instrumental in my making the decision to come back to higher education,” Bucker said. “He said, ‘You know, you’re doing a lot of good at the Met, but the place you really have an impact on students and their careers is always going to be in higher education. It’s always going to be where the most excitement is, for identifying young artists and actually launching them.’ And he was right.”