absolutely nothing about. Then, too, there is the cancellation of the Miami Workshop. Do I have to be in a position where I must guess at what is going on? Polly had thought we would be involved with policy rather than paperwork. What control do we have, if any? Several people have told me they were horrified to learn that ARS Workshops were in fact ARS workshops in name only, that they were not run by the ARS. [It seems clear] that the workshops have gotten farther and farther away from the ARS.
Unfortunately, there was considerable internal strife among members of the committee, with suspicion on all sides. It seemed to some of us that the committee was operating mainly for the benefit of some workshops over others. In 1983 we had begun requesting, then insisting, that directors send their workshop evaluations or copies of them to the workshop committee to see. We had started demanding the individual workshop evaluation forms, or copies of them, first of the education program, then those written by the students concerning their classes. This last evaluation, originally conceived as a way of judging the teachers at the workshops, became in time a way for the committee to evaluate the workshops themselves. The request was not welcome. Not only was it a nuisance for the workshop heads, but some of them felt, perhaps rightly, that it was unreasonable for the workshop committee to take so much interest in what was in fact their internal business. The evaluations were tedious reading, but they became a cause célèbre. They were perceived to be more important as directors of some of the larger workshops dragged their feet about producing them. This made some of the committee members more suspicious. At a meeting of the committee during the Thanksgiving weekend in 1985, there was a terrible blow-up between two members of the workshop committee. I was of course caught in the middle—as I so often am— and at the end of it a member of the committee left my apartment in tears and a friendship was destroyed forever.
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