ArtsEngine: Michigan Meeting
ArtsEngine’s Michigan Meeting, “The Role of Art-Making and the Arts in the Research University” was held May 4 — 6, 2011, in Ann Arbor. This Michigan Meeting is one of two annual interdisciplinary meetings of national and international scope on topics of broad interest and contemporary importance to both the public and the academic community, selected and funded by U‑M’s Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. More than 200 provosts, deans, directors, and other faculty and administrative leaders from top-tier research universities across the U.S. were in attendance.
The meeting, organized to recognize and advance research university support for art-making and the arts as a matter of great cultural significance, was planned by ArtsEngine, an integrative initiative led by the deans of U‑M’s five North Campus units: the College of Engineering; the School of Art & Design; the School of Music, Theatre & Dance; Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning; and University Libraries. In a recent interview, ArtsEngine Executive Director Theresa Reid recently spoke about the importance of creativity, and why “art making” should have a higher profile at research universities: “Some 1500 CEOs identified by IBM listed creativity as the #1 trait needed among its business leaders, so we’re looking to help enhance creativity among the undergraduates that attend U of M and across the country.”
The conference included presentations by Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton University, with “Universities in the Service of the Imagination”; Don Michael Randel, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with “What Researchers and Artists Actually Do”; and Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of Syracuse University, with “Inciting Insight: Situating the Arts in Higher Education”. Video of featured presentations is available at the ArtsEngine site.
Before Tilghman’s opening keynote, A&D Dean Bryan Rogers urged participants to make the arts “part of the DNA of the research university.”
[Rogers] decried two common defenses of arts in academe as having, at best, “limited value” – the notion that the arts can deliver tangible and direct return on investment, and the idea that the arts have a salvific effect on the human spirit. He urged academe to shed its fixation on “sacred beaux-arts traditions,” saying that an obsession with matters of artistic canon is a “rearview mirror” perspective out of touch with contemporary culture. And he prodded scholar-artists to collaborate across disciplines, catching up to the non-academic world, and to make the arts “part of the DNA of the research university.”
Read more about the conference in a series of special reports by the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Princeton’s Tilghman Calls U’s Crucial to the Arts
Mellon Foundation President Asserts One Culture, Not 2
Syracuse President Urges Reimagining of Arts’ Role in Colleges