Mason Gross Marks 50 Years as a Pioneer in the Arts for New Jersey
Uniting different programs at Rutgers made it possible to build a school with a global reputation
Ben Bettenbender recalls an air of possibility on campus as part of the first class of 80 students at Mason Gross School of the Arts.
“We were giddy,” he says. “It was so much fun. So. Much. Fun. There were times when you’d get up at six in the morning and you wouldn’t get back until after midnight and you were basically in rehearsal or in class all day.”
“It was one of those periods,” he went on, “where it was just so exciting and so creative and you felt this energy and you barely slept and felt like you didn’t need it.”
In the Beginning
Half a century ago, Mason Gross School of the Arts emerged as a laboratory and a playground for aspiring artists, an experimental place at an experimental time for Rutgers. Before the founding of Mason Gross in 1976, arts education at Rutgers operated under the auspices of the individual colleges.
“There was no really good professional arts training in the entire state of New Jersey,” says Patricia Mayer, who joined the Rutgers faculty in 1971 and later served as head of the Dance and Visual Arts departments, as well as interim Dean. “The State Board of Higher Education, which no longer exists, decided to do something about it.”
Rutgers was chosen as the site for this new school.
The consolidation, unification, and reimagining of the existing arts departments proved challenging. As Mayer recalls, “They were squashed together screaming and kicking.”
William Berz, Professor Emeritus of Music, who joined the faculty of Rutgers College in 1980, concurs. “Quite a bit of tension at first,” Berz says of faculty interaction. “They weren’t rivals, but they did feel those loyalties to their colleges.” In addition to the jockeying and interdepartmental squabbling, there was the actual move to contend with, which was a lengthy process.
“The transition was much longer than many people remember,” Berz says. “There was a lot of equipment to move.” As a newbie on campus, Berz found himself assigned to piano duty, and he remembers a chaotic journey for two grand pianos that were moved from College Avenue to the Douglass campus. Workers for the moving company, he says, “took the lids off the pianos and moved the lids separately, and each piano had been designated for a certain faculty member in their private studio, and they put the lids in the right place, but not the pianos.”
What followed, he says, was a significant amount of lugging, in a building without an elevator.
Putting It Together
Ben Bettenbender has a unique perspective on the messy, exhilarating process, because his father, Jack Bettenbender, was the first dean of Mason Gross, serving until his death in 1988, and one of the key forces behind its creation. The other was Edward J. Bloustein, president of Rutgers from 1971 until his death in 1989, who also oversaw Rutgers’ emergence as a renowned research university and as a contender in big-time collegiate sports.
Ben Bettenbender remembers discussions around the family dinner table in Ohio, as his dad contemplated leaving Oberlin College to head the Theatre Arts Department at Rutgers in 1970.
“I must give Ed Bloustein the credit for reaching out to my father,” Bettenbender says. “I know within a year of his arrival there, they were talking about something university-wide: We want to be a national center of excellence in arts education. They were two brilliant people who strongly believed that the arts were a critical complement to education. They weren’t a nice add-on; they rounded out a curriculum; they rounded out a university and what it was teaching and what it was bringing to the world. Probably around ‘73, that idea began to take shape.”
The resulting School for the Creative and Performing Arts was re-named in 1977 for Mason Welch Gross, a champion of the arts who served as president of Rutgers from 1959 to 1971. “He used to walk the campus and talk to students, so I chatted with him on a couple occasions,” says former Associate Dean Dennis Benson, who came to Rutgers as an undergraduate in 1966 and retired from his post at Mason Gross in 2012. “He was very laid back. He was a very decent guy.” Gross was known for his diplomatic handling of student protests of the Vietnam War as well as for the development of the Livingston campus and other large-scale projects. In 1959, he spoke bluntly about the need for community cultural centers in New Jersey, telling the state’s Constitutional Convention Association that New Jersey was “educationally impoverished” and “culturally almost bankrupt.”
The existence of Mason Gross School of the Arts helped to address those concerns. “By pooling all the students together,” Ben Bettenbender says, “you can now develop and design programs that support a much larger population of students, and in doing so, you are now able to go into the professional world and start to attract some of the very best teachers possible.”
A Global Reputation
The Theater Department, for example, could attract Bill Esper, the New York-based, preeminent first-generation teacher of the Meisner Technique, in which actors focus on the behavior of another cast member, rather than simply anticipating their next lines, in order to generate a natural response. “It’s a virtuous cycle,” says Bettenbender, who has described the school’s founding as a “noble experiment.” “The better the students, the better teachers you can get; the better teachers you get, the better students you can get.”
This was crucial for smaller programs, such as Design, says Vickie Esposito, who retired from the Theater Department in 2016, after 43 years. Esposito says it would not have been possible to partner with the Globe Theatre in London for a study abroad program in 2003 without the clout of the Mason Gross School. “We couldn’t have been as popular with the Globe if we didn’t have the school of the arts established.”
Sometimes, the benefits of consolidation were even more basic. “Rutgers College never had a flute professor,” Berz says, “but Douglass did, so when we joined, we had a flute professor, and he was awesome. It was so unified, and you could think about common purposes.”
When he thinks back to the Music Department as it was in 1980, compared to now, Berz says, “the growth is absolutely beyond imagination, in terms of the capability of students, the enrollment, the scope, its influence in the state.
“Now, the professional music education organizations look to Rutgers for leadership,” Berz says. “The ensembles play in major venues in New York City, and the Rutgers Glee Club has performed all over the world.”
Creating a Scene
New Brunswick itself has benefited from the presence of Mason Gross, and vice versa, says Chris Paladino, president of the New Brunswick Development Corporation (DEVCO). The arts were a key factor in the city’s revitalization efforts, which began in the early 1980s, culminating with the establishment in 2019 of the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, of which Rutgers is a partner company.
But long before then, Paladino noticed an increased liveliness downtown as Mason Gross students attended classes there. “It set a new standard for the tempo of the streets,” Paladino says. “You started to see Mason Gross students coming and going at all hours of the day. I would come in at 7:30 in the morning, and you would see someone leaving the school who’d obviously been working there all night with their portfolio. Just looking at who was walking on the streets and who might go into a pizza restaurant, you knew they were art students, which was important to the changing culture."
Carol Thompson, who retired from the Theater Department in 2016 after 36 years on staff, says: “The thing that energized me all the way throughout was the student body, and later on, the alumni.” Mason Gross, she says, prepared students for careers in the arts and beyond. Theater, for example, is “an art form that’s based on a literary form, and each play offers a slice of the world, and, in order to do that play, you have to dive deep into the history, sociology, religious practice, etc., of that world…and you’re communicating physically and vocally, in ways that other people can’t do.” Future employers, she adds, benefit because “they have a really intelligent, collaborative, lively, mature, well-spoken, smart person. So, I believe that theater is a really fine major. It’s the definition of the liberal arts.”
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Rutgers was a hub of the Fluxus scene, a multi-media, performance-fueled art movement that emphasized the democratization of art and the creative process over the finished piece. “A key thing is that it’s interdisciplinary, challenging the divisions between music, poetry, and art,” says Gerry Beegan, professor and director of the MFA in Design, who joined Mason Gross faculty in 2000. “Disciplines can work together and enrich each other.”
Beegan sees a direct line between Fluxus and the outreach and interdisciplinary programs launched in the past five years under former dean Jason Geary (now Rutgers–New Brunswick's provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs), such as a minor in Creative Expression and the Environment, the Arts in Health Research Lab, and the wellness initiative Scarlet Arts Rx.
“We connect more with programs in high schools, and we’re engaged more with the local community, and we take that seriously,” Beegan says. “We’re back to Fluxus, because the point of Fluxus was that anyone can experience the art experience. It’s just about engaging with the world in a different way. There’s poetry in everyday life.”
Browse a timeline of the school’s history, and check out upcoming events celebrating MGSA’s golden anniversary at masongross.rutgers.edu/mgsa-50
