The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions & of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness. - Marshall McLuhan
Why should art be included in the university? Only recently (relatively speaking) have the visual arts been granted a space in this ecosystem.
A little history…
The first university was a corporation of students in Bologna who hired faculty. As universities evolved, faculty gained power, and in turn hired administrators (this hierarchy would be reversed by the Enlightenment). The curriculum ultimately mirrored the values and needs of the city-states. Students took grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic, & astronomy. The university served civilization by providing a firm foundation for the economic and political development of the city. It did so by providing not so much a practical education, but a general one around the humanities. They were concerned with the whole person, providing knowledge that would liberate (liberal arts) them from a base, mundane existence. While art was becoming a discursive discipline, it was still outside: workshops & guilds.
University 2.0
Then came the Enlightenment. And Immanuel Kant. Kant's idea of the university became the model for the University of Berlin, that became the model for the modern university. By MODERN I mean an historical paradigm characterized in part by belief in ideas such as Universals, Historical Progress, Scientific Method, Rationalism, the primacy of the individual, Purity & Separation of the disciplines. These ideas that reshaped the university also refigured the way people saw and imagined reality. It was believed that the disciplines should be left to their own devices: they should be free & autonomous. The university, like the industry it served was compartmentalized (borders) and specialized*.
Universities increasingly relied upon rigid, centralized bureaucracies to forge efficiency, standardization, specialization, and compartmentalization. The university began to look like an assembly line, where students went through and got the individual parts from specialized laborers (professors). Students were (and are still) assembled into professionals, like any other product.
It is in this context that the discipline of art entered the university. From the workshop to the academy and now the university. Art justified its inclusion because it had become autonomous & discursive. Art was concerned with activity that was unique to the discipline of art that had ramifications beyond itself. Up until this point the university was largely concerned with head knowledge, knowing the world through reason. The visual arts made a case that this was only half the picture. Humans come to know the world through the body, through their senses. Kant’s theoretical framework laid out in the The Critique of Judgement supported this position.
Paradigm #3
And now here we are in the 21st century and Modernism is dying. The Industrial Age is dead. The Knowledge Economy/Information Age has arrive in full force. Companies are being radically restructured, where emphasis on efficiency, specialization, individualism, and rigid centralized bureaucracy has given way to flexibility, collaboration, and decentralized, networked structures.
The workplace values skills to synthesize information from a broad range of disciplines and to use knowledge & skills creatively. The ability to regurgitate facts is an antiquated skill when the worlds knowledge to just a mouse click away. Suddenly, jobs that once were in demand and paid accordingly are now being exported to countries like India and China. By 2010, if current trends continue, more than 90 percent of all scientists and engineers in the world will be living in Asia. The future workforce in this USA needs to be armed with more than technical, specialized training. They will be needed to solve complicated problems that arise in a world that is growing more complex and diverse. And this process is speeding up. New Paradigms will arrive sooner. Workers who aren’t able to navigate in an ever changing world will not be valued.
The question is, are universities responding to the needs and challenges of this new paradigm? How long can old, outmoded structures provide this new economy with valued workers?
Art & Design: Imaging/Imagining the University
Art programs are successfully transitioning out of modernism. They are no longer just concerned with the discipline of art. Students ought not get through a program by just simply demonstrating traditional skills and knowledge from within the corpus of knowledge of art. The have to creatively synthesize large arrays of human knowledge into forms that communicate rationally and experientially. And they do this through a working knowledge of the design process.
“… practicing the arts is crucial to learning to think. An active confrontation with the materials and processes of art can teach students to cope with a changing world better than simply learning to absorb information.” -John Rice
"an arts degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the worlds of business. Corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools ... in search of talent. ... McKinsey says other disciplines are just as valuable in helping new hires perform well at the firm. With other arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the master of fine arts is becoming the new business degree. -Harvard Business Review
"Creativity has come to be valued because new technologies, new industries, new wealth and all other good economic things flow from it." -Richard Florida
“Design based processes [the kind that you would learn in say, 2-D design or drawing class] are at the forefront in innovating not just physical objects, but political systems, economic policy, ways in which medical research is conducted - even complete user experiences. Organizations can no longer count on quality, performance or price alone to sustain leadership in the global marketplace.” -Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management
It may be that the conflict between pragmatic skills/job specific skills and general liberal arts education will disintegrate as learning changes to a content creation/creative endeavor. The relationship between the university and the art department should prove to be a fruitful one as knowledge will not just be the medium of the university, but the product.
* To obtain Truth, each discipline had to be autonomous, free to explore an area of knowledge by its own means. If you were a biologist, you didn’t use the discipline of theology, or even physics, to solve a biological problem. You used knowledge that was unique to biology. Art, which wasn’t yet a part of the university, began to shed history, theology, biology, and other disciplines from its focus. All of the disciplines purified themselves, creating autonomous units (departments).
Check out TEDTalks on iTunes: Ken Robinson 2006
