The Evolving Creative Campus

 by John M. Eger reposted from the Huffington Post

Van Deerlin Endowed Chair of Communications and Public Policy and Director of the Creative Economy Initiative, San Diego State University

Many colleges and universities are looking to put more arts at the center of campus life and in the process, foster creativity.
The Creative Campus initiative, a program of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, is leading the way.
The idea began early in 2004 at a meeting convened by the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Dana Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, Pfizer and the Altria Group. The idea simply was "to examine the factors that characterize effective partnerships in education and the arts: the projects, proposals, curricula, and creative forces that make such partnerships work."
Later, thanks to $3.5 million from the Doris Duke Charitable Trusts, the "Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program" was created "to seed innovative, interdisciplinary programs that brought together artists with a range of community and campus-based partners in order to stimulate arts-based inquiry and elevate the role of the arts in academic life. "
The grants now helping over 14 Universities establish projects that serve to nurture the entire campus including many "collaborative projects (which involve) intense partnerships that require shared language, trust, and a "restructuring" of knowledge and practice. While Creative Campus projects fell into both (cooperative and collaborative) categories, the truly collaborative projects proved most transformative for both participants and the larger campus."

After six years of study the Association seems pleased that the role of the arts has indeed stimulated academic life, but fully aware that:

"In spite of the incentives for campus-based arts presenters to work across disciplines and to become better integrated into the curricular and co-curricular life of campus, there are significant cultural and structural barriers that make such work difficult. Budgets, facilities, selection processes, and professional norms all work against innovative programming that places other goals (learning, engagement, conversation, community building) above more narrowly conceived notions of curatorial excellence. Furthermore, institutional structures and academic practices, from tenure to course review and scheduling and budgetary silos, also discourage faculty and other campus partners from embracing arts-based interdisciplinary inquiry."

One of the barriers, not surprisingly are the artists themselves. Alan S. Brown and Steven J. Tepper, PhD., who wrote the report and did most of the research, commented that "While a small cohort of artists and university arts programs explore the intersections of art and other disciplines, a large majority of the country's presenters and producers of performing arts programs - opera, classical music, jazz, dance, theatre and multi-disciplinary presenters - remain committed to finely tuned missions and business models that more or less exclude interdisciplinary work - much less work across artistic genres. "
Clearly, they argue, what is needed is a "new breed of artists who are vitally engaged in research and discovery, mindful and articulate about their creative process, open to critical reflection, and who can bridge disciplines and interact with people from different backgrounds."
Importantly, the University can do a lot of things to make the campus experience, as well as the courseware, come alive. Yale University, for example, (while not a recipient of the Creative Campus grant program) has started using their on campus Art Gallery to be a teaching mechanism for the whole university...including courses that help teachers how best to teach K-12 students. Already, last year they hosted over "48 courses from departments other than art history or art" according to The New York Times.
In addition to the art courses, according to the Yale University newspaper, 578 individual class sessions--from "women's, gender and sexuality studies...to a "Photography and Memory" course and an African American studies class on "Re-Visioning Subjectivities'--were held during the last year.
There is a message here for all universities desirous of seeing more interdisciplinary course development, and aspiring to be a creative campus. Ways to get faculty to work more collaboratively must be developed. Providing incentives for such collaborations to encourage art and science marriages is clearly essential. So too is leadership at the highest level to make such collaborations a critical part of the University mission.
The goal must be to forge an undergraduate curriculum that offers truly interdisciplinary courses, and curricula that make the college experience meaningful for life and work in the new global economy, an economy that highly values creativity and innovation.

 

Follow John M. Eger on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeger62

Art and Science Inspirations

This art and science quotes by the great and good are meant to give you some inspiration to pursue your dreams.......or to distract you from them!

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these
aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the
sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards
freedom.
- Albert Einstein
'Moral Decay', Out of My Later Years (1937, 1995), 9.

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this
advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good
conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is
leading the 'higher life.'
- Aldous (Leonard) Huxley
Ends and Means (1937), 320. In Collected Essays (1959), 369

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one
another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its
goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
- Franz Grillparzer
Notebooks and Diaries (1838). In The Columbia World of Quotations (1996)

The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee
them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are
predicted by science.
- Henry Thomas Buckle
'The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge,', a discourse
delivered at the Royal Institution (19 Mar 1858) reprinted from Fraser's
Magazine (Apr 1858) in The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry
Thomas Buckle (1872), Vol. 1, 4. Quoted in James Wood, Dictionary of
Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (1893),
426:46

and from Dolores Kaufman, DAG member:

Carl Sagan said "The creative process is a partnership of the 
unconscious and conscious mind"

 Steven Hawking said, "I follow my nose, one thing leads to 
another and I don't know what I'll find next."




and from Joe Nalven, DAG founder

Georges Braque said, "Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."


 

Airplanes, Algae and Arts Education

We at SDVAN and DNA of Creativity want to wish a fond farewell to Sarah Muir and give all thanks for all she has done for the arts and science communities. 


In their work to uncover new, sustainable biofuels, The Boeing Company relies on the creativity of its workforce. Innovators at Boeing have identified algae as a possible biofuel that could lower carbon emissions for airplanes. That’s one reason why Sarah Murr, a Global Corporate Citizenship Community Investor for Boeing and a Board Member of the California Alliance, travelled to Sacramento to speak to lawmakers about the importance of a creative workforce - not only for companies like Boeing, but for the future of our state in the global economy.
“The challenge is that we have a skills shortage not a labor shortage -- especially with unemployment rates where they are,” says Murr, “We have a shortage of people with the skills for the jobs that are needed in an increasingly dynamic and competitive marketplace.” Murr delivered her message at a hearing before the Joint Committee on the Arts organized by Senator Curren Price and in sit down meetings with key legislators and members of the Governor’s staff arranged by the California Alliance.
According to Murr, “Providing comprehensive arts education programs as early as pre-school will help future generations of creative thinkers and problem solvers who will invent the next life-changing products or services – be it algae for biofuel, new lightweight materials for airplanes or something we can’t yet imagine.”

This week we learned that, after thirty-five years with the Boeing Company, Sarah Murr will be retiring in July. Those who have worked with her on arts education issues will greet this news with a mixture of gratitude, for all she has contributed, and apprehension, for all we are losing. At a time when corporate relationships to the needs of the broader community are evolving, Sarah Murr, with the support of the Boeing Corporation, has blazed a trail of unprecedented involvement and commitment to the well being and education of California's children. I invite you to learn more about the potential of corporate citizenship and the meaning of leadership in the words of Sarah's testimony.

Joe Landon
Executive Director California Alliance for Arts Education

Bob Lynch, American for the Arts on Education

From kindergarten to community college, art education budgets are being slashed to the bone. And we’re all going to pay the price.

Monterey County Weekly (local news periodical)

Published: Thursday, June 2, 2011 | (Link to story)

Excerpt from this article:

“We’re losing more than just art teachers in school. If we continue down this road, killing off arts education, America 20 years from now will be a very dull, ugly place, with fewer painters and musicians. It will also be significantly poorer. We’ll lose our innovative engineers and creative business minds,” says Bob Lynch (no relation to Paulette), president of Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit that lobbies for arts funding at the local and federal levels.


“We don’t in America understand the full value of the arts and what the arts actually bring to our society,” he says. “We take for granted and have kept too much a secret the broad values beyond entertainment and beyond decoration that the arts bring – better communities, better community development, helping people be more creative in their work.”


Not only do we end up losing something that brings beauty and enjoyment and maybe some spiritual uplift – we also face the loss of an economic engine that contributes to the creation of some 750,000 businesses and 5.7 million jobs in America.


“We haven’t paid enough attention to the role the arts have played throughout our history,” Bob Lynch adds.


During the Revolutionary War, George Washington commissioned plays to inspire soldiers before they fought battles. Abraham Lincoln insisted the Capitol dome be finished – and funded – in the middle of the Civil War.


Much more recently, a new study by IBM found creativity is the most important quality for success in business leadership. The largest-known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews included more than 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders in 60 nations and 33 industries. 


Even more important than integrity and global thinking in the business world, according to the CEOs, is creativity.


“American companies are worried about competitors like China and India,” Bob Lynch says. “But because of their sheer size, China and India are going to be able to turn out more of everything, and their people will work for less money. So what is our competitive edge? Creativity. And arts is the thing that brings creativity.


“Businesses say they want it, presidents and generals have employed the arts in their work – and still do today – and yet when it comes time to pay for it, is so easily allowed to slip away.” He adds that part of the price is our businesses will be less creative and our children less employable. “If we lose the arts, and arts education, we have destinations that are not as interesting to visit because arts are great tourist attractions,” he says. “We essentially have a nation that is not able to live up to the potential that it was built upon: its creativity, its innovation, its ability to change on a dime.” 


Submitted by

Dana Smith
Dean, Arts & Letters

Oceanside Campus
1 Barnard Drive
Oceanside, CA 92056
P 760.795.6818
F 760.795.6804
dsmith@miracosta.edu
www.miracosta.edu