Kansas University senior Ramone Addington, of Polacca, Ariz., works on a wood sculpture during a class in July in the Fine Arts Building.

At first glance, painting and chemistry might not seem to have much to do with each other.

For decades at Kansas University, painting and other fine arts were taught in their own school, under the assumption that the arts were indeed very different from other university subjects.

That changed five years ago. After the search for a new fine arts dean in 2008 failed to yield a new candidate, the university dissolved the School of Fine Arts altogether.

After doing away with the school, KU created the School of the Arts as a sort of school within a school under the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Now in its fifth year, the school has a new leader and is still feeling out its way in the world and at KU.

In July, Henry Bial, a KU associate professor of theater, became the new associate dean of the School of the Arts, which had 530 undergraduates enrolled during the previous school year. He succeeded Elizabeth Kowalchuk, who served in the position for the school’s first five years.

Under the umbrella of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the faculty and administrators in and around the School of the Arts have had to think about the arts’ role in higher education.

“It challenges us to think about what it means to do art in the context of a research university,” Bial said. “Art making really is a form of research, a form of generating new knowledge. That, I don’t think, was as well understood around the college as it is now.”

Shaking up the arts

The reorganization brought about several major changes, at least on paper, which were felt differently among the various arts and departments.

When the School of Fine Arts disbanded, it left only music as a standalone school. Dance, which had been joined with music as a fine arts department, became its own department in the School of the Arts.

Theater and film, which had shared a single department in the college, also became independent departments in the newly formed school. Some design faculty joined the visual arts division of the new arts school while others went to the architecture school, now renamed as the School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

Dance found new independence as its own department, with control over its resources and future and a larger voice in the university.

“Organizational structures have big impact,” said Michelle Hayes, a professor and chair of the dance department. “When you’re not at the table, you’re not part of the conversation,” she said, referring to the days when a single department chair spoke to the university on behalf of both dance and music. Music, which was the much larger department, tended to produce department heads.

Since becoming its own department, dance’s administrative workload has grown, but so has its annual budget, which has tripled. Even its endowment funds have grown, which Hayes attributes to the stronger position and national visibility of the department.

Other departments saw far less in the way of day-to-day changes. Jeanne Klein, an associate professor of theater and undergraduate coordinator for the department, said that for theater, the changes from splitting with film and joining the new school were “in name only.”

“We had already been in our separate spheres all along,” she said. The creation of the school didn’t make it any easier, harder or more likely for faculty to collaborate on projects or classes, Klein said.

Students also saw few surface changes, with degree requirements and tuition untouched through the transition.

Building a reputation

Collaboration is one of the big selling points of the school, one of its reasons for existing. Hayes said she has collaborated with faculty both outside the school in the new School of Music as well with a psychology professor.

Bial said he hopes to see ever more collaboration among the arts and the many disciplines in the college going forward. He also wants to see the arts in the school work together to champion their importance more broadly, including at the state level, where arts funding has seen cuts in recent years.

“The first five years of the School of the Arts were largely about developing an identity for the arts within the college, on campus and within the community around us,” Bial said. “The next step is to figure out how to build that reputation and sense of mission on an even broader scale so that people say around the region and the country, ‘Oh, you’re interested in the arts? KU is a great school for that.”