IN GOOD COMPANY

AS THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL KICKS OFF ITS PLAN TO GO TUITION-FREE, VF GATHERED SOME AUGUST ALUMNI TO TALK ABOUT MEMORIES AND DREAMS

- CHRIS MURPHY

FOR CHRISTINE BARANSKI, the most evocative space at the Juilliard School isn't a black box theater or a rehearsal room where she cut her teeth as an actor. “I get really emotional when I set foot in the elevator,” she says with a sigh. She remembers its “new car smell” when she rode it in the early 1970s, as part of the third class to ever study in the drama school.

And she remembers, just as viscerally, the people she rode in it with. “I was in the elevator once with Leonard Bernstein, with Martha Graham, George Balanchine,” she says. “I was in the elevator once with Maria Callas.”

If you know anything about Juilliard, it’s probably that it is where some of our greatest artists learned to be great. The school, established in 1905 as the Institute of Musical Art in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, has long given students world-class training in their chosen discipline: dance, drama, or music.

Last September the drama department’s MFA program went tuition-free, as the Yale School of Drama had a few years before. Now—and this is why we gathered some celebrated alumni for a portrait backstage at the school’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater—Juilliard has announced that it intends to go entirely tuition-free. For every student. The great work has already begun. Starting this fall, 40 percent of Juilliard students will attend the institution at no cost.

Reaching the school’s ultimate goal will take serious fund-raising, but other elite educational institutions are increasingly thinking along the same lines. (Harvard College, for instance, announced that it will be tuition-free for families with incomes of under $200,000.) Since he became Juilliard’s president in 2018, Damian Woetzel, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, has worked to make the school accessible to all students, not only increasing financial aid but also designating several programs tuition-free already.