Appropos to yesterday’s entry I came across this article in Arts Presenter’s Inside Arts Magazine today. (minor registration of email address required)

Steven Tepper discusses the Creative Campus trend which includes the type of activities my campus has been involved with in the past and was trying to encourage more faculty to become involved with in the future. (While I mentioned that none of the faculty approached me yesterday, I should note that I had already gotten the ball rolling with faculty on 3-4 projects last spring and over the summer.)

University leaders are also beginning to recognize that fostering a lively creative campus is essential to attract and retain the best students and to prepare those students to thrive in an economy increasingly reliant on intellectual property and creative content. Moreover, there is evidence that students are looking for more “creative experiences,” opportunities to explore their own expressive capacities….

“…Today’s students are no longer content to experience education and culture in a top-down, passive way. Instead, growing up with a “do-it-yourself” ethos, students want to create their own culture, whether through blogs, writing and recording songs, amateur films, podcasts and other forms of art, entertainment and media.”

There is actually some money out there in support of these efforts. Arts Presenters with the Doris Duke Foundation is going to be funding a handful of programs with an eye to using the results as a template for other campuses across the country to emulate. My school actually applied for one of the grants. We had already started down the road to expanding past efforts so I was quite pleased to see there was some money in support of these types of things.

As Tepper (and Richard Florida in his books) points out, the creativity does not necessarily equal fine arts.

“It is also entrepreneurship and innovation in science, business and media. Within the arts, it includes the activity of architects, campus radio stations, multi-media designers and filmmakers. A lively artistic scene is critical to creative work in these other domains. But we must pay attention to how the arts connect to other areas of campus and to the broader conditions for stimulating creativity across the curriculum in multiple domains.”

I daresay, there is nothing to say that these efforts can only occur on campuses with fine art programs. Similar programs with local arts organizations, while more difficult to achieve than with on campus departments, can only serve to strengthen the perceived value of both entities in the community.