School of Dramatic Arts students organized a sit-in at 10 a.m. outside Dick Wolf Drama Center Tuesday protesting the hefty budget cuts and recent staff layoffs in the School of Dramatic Arts. They expressed frustration over what they described as the declining quality of their academics.
Students held signs to protest the firing of the school’s faculty and the number of unpaid hours that the design and production students worked to build sets for the fall semester production. The students detailed their concerns on pamphlets they handed out on Saturday afternoon outside Bing Theatre, where the Main Stage production of “Legally Blonde” is currently playing.
In September, SDA cut its scenic support staff, phased out its Bachelor of Fine Arts in Technical Direction program and reduced the student-worker budget for production assistance.
The SDA students requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the school’s administration. They said that the most recent driving force for the demonstrations was the recent layoff of Duncan Mahoney, the former technical director and professor who had been working at USC since 1998, according to his biography on the SDA website.
While the budget cuts were initially made in the fall, the students involved in the sit-in said that they are now taking a stand because their previous efforts to meet with and write letters to the Dean of SDA Emily Roxworthy were unsuccessful.
The SDA students’ demands include hiring multiple full-time staff members, including two carpentry staff members, a scenic painter or an additional part-time scenic painter, a costume shop manager or another costume shop floor manager and a new costume build manager. They also demand that production professors lead the hiring committee, and that the school fund upperclassmen’s attendance at the United States Institute for Theatre Technology conference.
In a statement provided to Annenberg Media, an SDA spokesperson wrote that these budget cuts were part of a university-wide directive to address a $200million deficit. According to the spokesperson, the school has worked to navigate these operations with students’ education as the primary consideration.
“Dean Roxworthy has remained committed to communicating openly regarding these challenging budget decisions — meeting regularly with faculty, staff, student groups, and any individual who requests time with her. We are grateful for the contributions of everyone who is a part of the SDA community,” the spokesperson wrote.
“Many of the staffing and resource concerns raised by students are already being actively addressed, with plans for several of the referenced positions and support areas currently underway,” the statement continued.
Margaret Danenhauer, a sophomore Media Arts and Practice major who attended the sit-in, commented on how SDA overworks their Tech majors without pay. “It’s kind of adding insult to injury to not fully support their actual program and education.”
Danenhauer described the energy at the protest as “non-aggressive.”
“You could almost call it a study-in, just people sitting around, doing work,” she continued, “There were a lot of signs on the walls and pamphlets on the tables but other than that you wouldn’t really be able to tell it wasn’t just a busy building.”
Lukas Garberg, a senior studying theatrical design, said he sent letters expressing his concerns to Roxworthy and the Office of the Provost.
“We have put in so much work to make these shows good, and on top of that, people are going into copious amounts of debt to be here,” Garberg said. “Administration can say budget cuts have to happen, but with everything we have put into it, people are going to be mad.”
Garberg is a scenic designer on the upcoming Main Stage show, “The Gods are not to Blame.” After speculation and back-and-forth over budgeting concerns, Garberg said that he spent weeks producing a singular staircase, a scenario that would not have been problematic two years ago.
“We have great faculty, but we lack sharp resources. Shop morale is pretty awful currently. Everyone’s constantly stressed,” Garberg said. “Over time, if incoming freshmen are asking me, ‘Hey, should I go to USC or UCLA?’ It’s harder to warrant the decision to go to USC when the same benefits don’t exist.”
Shruthi Nadathur and Lizzie Stewart contributed to this story.