Since last spring I’ve been attending classes in Greenfield Community College’s Music Department in order to complete a certificate in music recording and production. Unfortunately, the school administration has been failing us.
When I joined the department, we would perform at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls once a semester. This performance was a showcase of the work being done in almost every course in the department and was the culmination of a semester of work. It was a huge part of what makes GCC’s Music Department a leader in music education in the state. I have multiple classmates who have passed over going to closer community college music programs due to unique experiences like this.
This performance has been teetering on the administration’s chopping block for the past couple of years, and the one for this fall semester got the ax. I understand budget cuts, but what especially hurts about losing this vital experience is that administrators didn’t even go to it. It is the culmination of our entire semester of work, and no administrators even go to the performance that they are attempting to cut.
The much bigger loss has been that of our recording room. The recording room was a small classroom in the south wing of campus, housing storage for the department and a small recording setup to allow students to work on recording projects outside of class time, and to give us a second, more hands-on learning space. I spent countless hours working in this space, and the experience I gained there has directly translated into job opportunities in sound engineering. This summer, the space was cleared out and is now earmarked for the Department of Public Safety.
While this recording room was a blessing to have, it was also ultimately unideal (lack of space, poor acoustics, etc.) and was only meant to be temporary in the first place. Almost a decade ago, the music department got a grant for equipment to create a full recording studio on campus. All the school had to do was give us sufficient space and complete minimal renovations in order to bring a full recording studio to campus. We currently have all the equipment and furniture still sitting in boxes in the middle of our department’s one classroom, because the school never followed through on their part of the deal.
Yet, even before the recording room was taken away, the music department has been working with a severe shortage of space. While other departments lost space, the space they lost was simply storage, not a classroom, and with bookmarked spaces to move into in the future, the two other departments involved are coming out of this with more space than last semester.
I understand that a community college undervaluing its music department is pretty low on the list of worldwide problems. I love GCC and appreciate all of my professors and teachers who have powered through these difficult circumstances and continued to provide me and my classmates with a top-notch education, but all of us deserve better from a school administration that is supposed to support us. We have been given no indication from the administration’s current words or past actions that would make us think that their promises to find us a space will be fulfilled without the intervention of an outside body like the board of trustees or broad community support for our department.
Our department is not the biggest, nor does it guarantee large salaries for its graduates. But education should not be treated as a cost-benefit analysis weighing our department’s profitability. We pay the same tuition as everyone else, and our needs should be given the same weight as any other department. If the art, theater, or (God forbid) nursing departments were losing what we were losing, then there would be hell to pay, yet we are asked to put up with continual losses. The school is in a period of expansion, with new training labs being built for the workforce development division of the school, yet the music department is losing funding and space at a record pace. The GCC administration has been failing its music students, and something needs to change.
Desmond Eliot lives in Erving.