Introduction
“Congratulations Mr. Cook, we’ll see you in the fall.” The voice was that of a cheery young man at the conclusion of our telephone call. I said my thanks and goodbye and pressed the ‘End Call’ on my telephone screen. I sat and reflected on what I was doing, 6 months from now I would be moving from my hometown, looking for a new job, and continuing my education at a different college than the one I was currently enrolled in. These things were usual for kids just out of high school, or those advancing from their Associate’s Degrees to Undergrad programs or even on to graduate schools. This wasn’t my case however. I was changing course mid-stream out of necessity, and I felt like I was betraying a school I had come to love.
In my hometown of St. George, Utah sits Dixie State College. During the past decade there has been a boom in the city’s population which has helped the college grow. There are hopes that DSC will one day grow into a full blown university. This is the school I had acquired my Associates of Arts and is the school I hoped to get further education as an artist, studying under my mentor and friend Professor Delwin Parson. However, DSC does not offer a Bachelors of Arts Degree, and many students find themselves facing the hard choice of changing schools after their sophomore year, or like myself, trying to get as much training from Professor Parson as possible and then transferring in the middle of their bachelor's for their senior year.
DSC’s band-aid response to this problem was the creation of a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Integrated Studies with an emphasis in Art… whatever that means. That may sound flippant, but while inquiring into graduate programs those are exactly the type of responses I’d receive from academic advisors. None of the admissions or department advisors understood what an Integrated Studies program was, and their responses as I tried to explain it were ripe with suspicion. I knew that if I had a chance to enroll at one of those universities and get my MFA that I would need to transfer from DSC to a school with a degree program that would be respected by such schools.
Dixie State College's inability to offer a Bachelors of Arts degree is not good enough. Not for the college, not for the community and certainly not for its paying students. Why in a town with such a rich art community, and with such respected professors would they not have a Bachelor’s of Arts program? If Dixie really intends to become a university, wouldn’t they need to offer a BFA? Why couldn’t students at DSC have an arts education that could prepare them to be competitive in the job markets out there? How many potential art students were out there attending other schools that could be at our campus? And what sort of enrichment are our school and community missing out on because of this deficiency? To answer these questions we have to go straight to the people most involved in the effort to bring a 4 year program to DSC, most notably Professor Delwin Parson.
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