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Chapter 6 sheds light on Schoenberg’s American teaching career: his students at Boston’s Malkin Conservatory, the University of Southern California, and University of California, Los Angeles; and his private students in Boston, New York, Chautauqua, and California, including John Cage, Patricia Carpenter, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Oscar Levant, Dika Newlin, and Leonard Stein. Schoenberg’s teaching personality, philosophy, subjects, and methods are also explored. Schoenberg reached beyond his academic appointments with his textbooks, his advice to academic music educators across the country, and his participation in local and national music education conferences. This chapter challenges the Eurocentric cliché that Schoenberg threw pearls before swine and the Anglocentric supposition that his teaching impeded the free development of American composers.

This chapter explores some of the new media technology currently being used by educational institutions to support student creativity. Two facts regarding technology usage remain clear. First, today's learners may be tech-savvy, but they are also critically naive; and second, students often enter institutions that are unable to keep pace with the technology and the cultural changes currently happening. Institutions, such as the University of Southern California (USC) and the Ross Schools, have engaged with the opportunities and struggles that accompany the proliferation of such new media. The chapter emphasizes the ways in which both the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Ross Schools have integrated technology across all areas of learning, and have made multimedia literacy a cornerstone of their educational missions.

The introduction argues that although the academy has a spoken (the written) commitment to diversity, the same attitudes (the unwritten) that kept faculty of color out of predominately white institutions in the 1940s works against them during personnel reviews. It highlights examples of the current climate where meritocratic language is used as if it’s neutral, discusses how the work of program building that many scholars of color are called upon to do is undervalued, and argues that personal narratives about tenure process are vital to a clearer understanding of the system’s weaknesses. In addition to including quantitative data, the introduction offers a historical and contemporary context for the stories included in the anthology.

This chapter contains new research on an aspect of Anthony Mann’s work never before analyzed or acknowledged – his direction of the now lost film noir short, “Load.” Originally to have been included in the M-G-M anthology, It’s a Big Country (1952), Mann’s segment starring Jean Hersholt and Ann Harding was cut prior to release. Through analysis of the original 1931 Dudley Schnabel short story and its subsequent Luther Davis screen adaptations (preserved at USC), the chapter reconstructs the spirit of the Mann film about a meek Scandinavian immigrant load dispatcher at a Midwest utilities plant who, during a massive power outage in the region, learns that his delinquent son has killed a man during a robbery. The surviving scripts indicate that both Mann and Davis did stellar work in visualizing and verbalizing the emotional intensity of this dramatic story, which may have been the most personal film Mann ever made.

This chapter examines how the classicizing Beaux-Arts architecture at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago inspired Southland communities to fashion civic identities. California civic leaders embraced its model in the design of their public buildings and administrative or civic centers (e.g., Pasadena, Long Beach); in some developments, planners adapted its principles in an idealistic attempt to harmonize public and private, urban and rural by embracing the principles of the City Beautiful Movement (Beverly Hills, Palos Verdes), and on a smaller scale but no less significantly, the region’s colleges and universities incorporated the Movement’s principles into their campus plans (UCLA, USC).