Where Arts Are Forgotten

On July 16, 1992, Phillips Exeter Academy fell from grace, marking the beginning of an era of scorn and neglect for the theater department. Larry Lane Bateman, a tenured teacher at PEA and the head of the theater department, was arrested in his home on campus, charged with possession and distribution of child pornography.According to Newsweek, it took police officers six hours to wheel 650 videos, books and photographs out of the apartment he had been living in since arriving at Exeter in 1980. They discovered a “state-of-the-art” recording studio in the back of his apartment, with five video cameras, a metal box of sex toys, and a case of lubricant. Bateman’s arrest came on the heels of the testimony of an Exeter student, claiming that Bateman had invited to him to the apartment to work on an “extracurricular video project,” gave him marijuana and alcohol, then had sex with him. The illicit relationship continued throughout the student’s career (1981-1985). In college, Bateman mailed the student twenty-two nude photos that he had taken of him when he was sixteen. But there were other student victims as well, most unwilling and unaware. According to the New York Times, Bateman secretly videotaped male students in bathrooms and bedrooms, later splicing them into pornographic films for himself, or for distribution. One example of these films was an altered version of “Dead Poets’ Society,” about a male teacher at an all-boys prep school. Bateman was fired the day after his arrest and was convicted less than a year later. The crimes committed were unspeakable--however, despite our best efforts to move on, we are still being punished for what he did today.Love Gymnasium, the home to beloved Exeter teams, players, and coaches, was built in 1969. Money has been poured into Love, accounting for several complete renovations, and the addition of hockey rinks, pools, tennis courts, etc. Fisher Theater was built around the same time, and has received a fraction of the attention. A dingy 225-person mainstage, and a 100-person black box theater underneath. A maze of dressing rooms, and a healthy layer of asbestos coating the steel-frame ceilings. It is Exeter’s excuse for a “performance hall,” housing everything from student-run DRAMAT, to mainstage productions, to dance concerts. Every couple of years Love gets million-dollar facelifts over the summer, thanks to trustees and a copious school budget. Fisher, on the other hand, doesn’t look a day over 1970. It’s literally falling apart. It just reopened last week after having been shut down due to all-around uncleanliness and disrepair. DRAMAT had to move student shows to the Assembly Hall and Mayer Auditorium. There has always been a conflict between sports and the arts, but at Exeter, the most legendary prep school in America, the balance seems too far off. You know something is up when we must bus the entire music department to Exeter High School to perform the annual Holiday Concert.Efforts to sweep the Bateman scandal under the carpet also took the theater department with it. Since 1992, the community has viewed Fisher Theater as a concrete block tucked behind trees, away from the traffic of trustees and Tan Lane, and since 1992, the Administration has been treating it as such. So I am left with this question: why should some students be deprived of a creative space while others reap the benefits of an infinite budget? Or more specifically, why should said students be punished for an Exeter scandal that happened over twenty years ago?Neither the theater department nor student-run DRAMAT are economically viable, or as viable as they should be for a school of this caliber. For example, a week before The Exonian hosted a $25,000 assembly speaker, DRAMAT asked the Student Council for funds to buy bags of marshmallows for their table at Relay for Life, an on-campus fundraising event that helps communities the fight against cancer. Both organizations are student-run and both are led by passionate and engaged members. One has enough support to redesign websites, host dinners and hire guest speakers. The other can’t afford a bag of marshmallows. For a school with nine-digit endowment, this imbalance should not be happening.The Taft School faced a similar issue in December 2012, when a longtime theater and film teacher was caught exchanging child pornography electronically. The school is left with two choices: over the next few years, they can recover as a community, and once the dust has settled, bring the theater department up higher than it was before, proving that a department is not defined by the actions of one man, or they can let it fall to the side, casting it adrift, without administrative support, for the next twenty-one years.I love the theater department, but I am disappointed. Fisher Theater is frozen in a bygone, ashamed era, while the school and students around it rapidly progress. When are we allowed to move on? When are we allowed to be relieved of a previous generation’s burden? Or is this a just punishment?