The artist Nick Crowe once made a book based on the memorial and obituary sites that started appearing on the internet, soon after it became widely accessible. Now that Dartington has been definitively merged with University College Falmouth (see AM315 and www.savedartingtoncollege.org), the campaign website is becoming one of those sites, with the difference that the history it now archives remains relevant to what is happening elsewhere in higher education.
So here, albeit from the grave of a significant independent establishment, is some news: Andrew Brewerton, the principal of the college involved in seeing through the merger, resigned after it had gone through. He is still South West Regional Chair of Arts Council England, a glassmaker and a poet. Sam Richards, who was the longest-serving member of the teaching staff before he was sacked by Brewerton in the last months of the campaign on the grounds of gross misconduct - he had suggested himself as principal - has announced that he is planning to write the history of the college with Peter Kiddle, to document fully why it aroused so much passion and to include a full account of how its independence was traded in.
Richards, who is a jazz musician and author of books on John Cage and on music and democracy, believes in the liberating effect of telling the truth, even when you have lost, and wants to ensure that this history is not written by the victors. 'The most symbolic moment in the whole campaign came in the summer of 2007. We had taken our case higher and higher up the political hierarchy until we wrote to Tony Blair who was then prime minister - a kind of Peasants' Revolt of the 21st century. Blair's reply read as if it could have been written by Andrew Brewerton, then principal of Dartington College and a key figure in the Falmouth plan. The phrases in Blair's letter were familiar. The arguments were the same old tired ones we'd heard like a cursed mantra. When, at that same meeting, it was announced that Brewerton was vice-chair of the prime minister's Initiative Higher Education Advisory Group a deep sigh went round the room. A single thought was in everyone's heads. Could it be that Blair had run our letter of protest past Brewerton who had told him what to say in reply? Of course, there was no way we could prove this, and an outsider might smell a conspiracy theory. For my part I smelt a rat.' Richards has also explained that he doesn't 'really have it in for the Falmouth people. They're in business (it used to be called university education) and they saw a good opportunity and took it.' But he is nevertheless still angry: 'The small, experimental, innovative, world famous arts college set up in 1961 is now on the way out. It shouldn't be, but it is. A merger with University College Falmouth took place on April 6. UCF is a very new, very sexy, funding friendly metropolitan style campus in Cornwall, an Objective One area for European funding. I'm not keen on the clinical architecture of the new campus but, who knows, it may be OK as a place. What I do know, along with thousands of other people, is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Dartington College of Arts.
Everyone knows that the Dartington courses - music, theatre, writing and so on - will either be significantly altered or scrapped, as, indeed, has already started to happen.'
Richards and Kiddle will be gathering information and recollections for their history of Dartington, and Richards may be contacted at sam@tuxdeluxe.org.
From the artnotes section, Art Monthly, June 2008.Go back to the debate about art education
