April 2012 – Arts and Minds

Over the course of a year, I typically attend a few meetings of Deans from various universities – each with its own geographical “catchment” and each related to a different decanal portfolio. For example, in March, I went to Salt Lake City to attend a conference of the Deans of Arts and Sciences in the Pac 12 + 3 (the Pac 12 “football” conference universities plus UBC, Hawai’i and Alaska-Fairbanks). And recently in April, I attended the meeting of the Canadian Deans of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CDAHSS) in Victoria. These are great opportunities to discuss the issues confronting deans these days (diversity, general education requirements, distance education, budget challenges, interdisciplinarity, and so on) but I also find it particularly encouraging to encounter people struggling with the same kinds of issues.

At the latter meeting, I participated on a panel called “Strategies for promoting and advocating for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences”. The following are my remarks followed by a brief note about the presentation by my co-panelist and the discussion amongst the deans. (full disclosure: For anyone who has read my previous posts, they will likely encounter a few repeated themes!)

THE PROBLEM. Imagine that we’re the Oldsmobile Company in the late 1980s. The world is changing and our brand is tired and in decline. I’d be up here saying that, sure we have a branding problem, and I have a great new idea for a campaign slogan. Here it is: “This is NOT your father’s Oldsmobile”. Clever, huh? But we have another problem – the car still looks and feels like your father’s Oldsmoble. So we have to change the advertising, sure, but first we have to start changing the design of car.

We’re in a similar situation with postsecondary Liberal Arts education in North America. It still looks a lot like your father’s Liberal Arts education. In the early 20^th century, Liberal Arts was the alternative to professional training – it was the gentleman’s education, and it aspired to the enoblement of character and of mind. But we have no more “gentleman” in the old sense, and yet we’re left a residual version of this distinction. How often does a professor say something to a student akin to: “Hey, it’s NOT practical – don’t worry about getting a job, don’t decide soon, explore the curriculum, become a critical thinker.” Do we really think that this appeal has a heartfelt resonance for the bulk of today’s students or their families? Too often we sound cartoonishly academic.

The audience for postsecondary education in North America (and this is perhaps even more true in nations with emerging economies) has become much more instrumental in their interests in education, especially as postsecondary education becomes more expensive, exacerbating the tension over value for investment. When I face thousands of new students at our Imagine Day Meet the Dean event – on the first day of school – I’ve asked “Now how many of you have had your parents say something to the effect of ‘An arts degree – what are you going do with that?’” and laughter ensues and hands go up all around the room. The parents and their children are full of anxieties about the future and they want security – most want recruiters standing at the door at career day. And they are seeing the Arts degree as not particularly well calibrated to the needs of the market. So my first suggestion today is to recognize and not dismiss that anxiety. It is played out in the steady decrease in the proportion of Arts majors in universities from the 1970s to today. Students and their parents are voting with their feet and their pocketbook.

I know this is a panel intended to promote and advocate for Arts education, not on reforming it, but my second point is this: that we can’t change the brand unless we change the product. There is a persistent and intergenerational concern about the value of an Arts education and for the value of Arts research, and although out-of-date and exaggerated, some of it is based in fact.

What are the concerns of critics of Liberal Arts education, however mis (or partially)-informed?

They see an education delivered almost exclusively in bricks-and-mortar environments and using an outmoded delivery system (the lecture), failing to capture and apply advances in technology and the understanding of learning. This is a university-wide problem, but it sticks to the Social Sciences and the Humanities in the public imagination.
They see some faculty and departments being dismissive of students going on to professions and careers, focusing primarily on the minority who will attend graduate school. They’ll point to a lack of career preparation that leaves students wondering what to do with their lives in the months or even years following graduation.
They view our research as narrow, too-specialized, and not productive of social and economic value, and they become especially worried if they think that these narrow specializations are being translated into curriculum to produce a host of boutique courses that aren’t well-integrated into an intentional curriculum.
They see a lack of focus on teaching, and a system oriented to doing less of it and producing buy-outs and releases for the best research faculty members.
There are of course a myriad of criticisms about Arts education out there in sectors of the public consciousness, but most will cluster around the notion that what we do is trivial and useless. Instead, the public views the STEM disciplines and business education as the engines of value and innovation – what we need more of if we are to grow GNP and become a world-leading economy.

Of course my Faculty — and I assume almost all of yours — is working hard to address the problems that do help to encourage these views, and in fact much of what I’ve just enumerated is at best a minor echo from the past. But there’s still work to do.

We’ve all seen the cataclysmic changes roll through the music industry and then the publishing industry in the wake of the digital revolution. This level of change is coming to postsecondary education. We have, I would argue, a small window within which to both change the product and change the brand. We are still viewed as conferring enormous advantage to our graduates as a globally respected postsecondary system. We’ve also been lucky to have provincial governments that still see themselves involved in the provision of postsecondary education, so the proportion of government funding is still often around 40% as opposed to, say, the 5% it has become at some American so-called-public universities. Will this last forever? One cannot be sure, but it will be sure to decline or to decline more quickly if we’re not seen as delivering high-quality and relevant liberal arts education in a reasonably efficient manner.

In my Faculty, we’re refocusing on undergraduate education, enhancing the method of delivery, incorporating educational outcomes and renewing the curriculum on an ongoing basis. UBC stresses Enhanced Educational Experiences, which include global travel for research and education, small-class and one-on-one research experiences from the first-year on, community learning initiatives, co-op, internships, and career training, all of which, when applied to an ever-changing Arts education, can help to produce students ready to engage with the world on graduation, more quickly able to navigate a global, competitive environment, or, as I often put it, “life ready.”

THE MESSAGE. As we renovate the education we provide, we need to develop a much more focused message about what it is we do. Of course one of the benefits of an Arts education is that it is an education in thinking that is not tied to specific career or profession. With the global economic landscape and the “ideascape” changing so rapidly, narrow training becomes obsolete. So we’re caught in a paradox that, just as we need more than ever a flexible education geared to critical thinking, problem solving, and communicating, this kind of education should receive such a bad rap.

My spiel is simple, and this is my third point – it’s that an Arts degree is the degree for the 21^st century. There was a pretty good distillation in Globe and Mail op-ed from October 2011, an article critical of contemporary university education, and it encouraged universities to “spell out what an undergraduate education is good for. Here’s one definition: It ought to produce critical thinkers, scientifically and culturally literate people who can assess evidence, connect the dots and communicate with clarity – the key skills that, in a fast-changing economy, prepare people for the jobs that haven’t been invented yet.” Not bad, but I think we would add that the same training should help to produce people who will be curious throughout their lives and for whom learning doesn’t stop at graduation.

If you think of it one way, we’re training lifelong children – people whose brains are stimulated for lifelong neuroplasticity – people who wonder, explore, play, create and innovate. Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of consumer products said last year “We’re going through a period of unbelievable growth and will be hiring about 6,000 people this year – and probably 4000-5000 from the Humanities or liberal arts.” Why? Because Google is looking for “people who are smart and get things done.” As another article recently pointed out, it was no accident that the founders of Google, Amazon.com, and other innovative engines of technological and economic growth were trained in Montessori schools where play and creativity and the arts were emphasized.

It is more likely that the chief contributors to social, cultural, economic and even technological innovation will come from those with a powerful Arts education than it will from those with a limited, technical, and careerist education. This is a great message and one that resonates with Canada’s focus on innovation. In Business schools around the country and in the US and Europe, programs are emerging to put commerce and business students together with philosophers and visual artists and historians, videographers, and geographers to help stimulate creativity and innovative thinking amongst the business students and to ground the creative thinkers in the means of applying their work, being entrepreneurial, and in developing (dare we say it?) business plans.

These are powerful messages about arts education, but how to get them out – how do we tell the story?

STORYTELLING. It is certainly a useful strategy to attempt to capture the economic impact on the economy and on regional economies from the creative industries, but it is immensely difficult to quantify all of the activity of social science, humanities and creative arts graduates, and it is certainly not enough to use this kind of rather reductionist approach. We need to show productive, successful arts graduates in their careers. If you were going to promote one image, my recommendation would be that this be that image: graduates of Arts programs serving as leaders changing the world and living rich, full lives. And everywhere we communicate, we can tell this story: in discussions with students and their parents, on the web in your deans’ messages, in your blogs and in op-ed pieces, and in encounters with government ministries. Find your own way to express the power of an arts degree for the 21^st century and for its capacity to stimulate creativity, change, citizenship, and innovation.

Presentation from the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciencs. My fellow-panelist, Jean-Marc Magnin of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences, noted that while Government is interested in jobs and innovations, most faculty are allergic to the terms. But the facts work for us. He pointed out that 50% of Fortune 500 employees have Arts degrees and that 60% of influential people identified in a survey in the UK also had Arts degrees. Studies have also shown that after five years from graduation, the income of Arts grads is equivalent to those with professional degrees (there is a differential in the years in between, however).

Mr. Magnin also noted that all of the major issues before the public that require public policy and decision-making as a society, are informed by Arts scholarship.

Most of the deans who spoke up saw that updating and enhancing Arts education goes hand-in-hand with the need to aggressively promote the enduring value of a Liberal Arts education. It’s encouraging to note that there are lots of great ideas out there in the front trenches of Liberal Arts on how to do both. I look forward to a day when proponents of the Arts no longer have to argue defensively but instead can simply point to the myriad ways in which the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences influence, transform, and improve lives and society.

Last summer I was contacted by someone working on a website about what people at UBC were reading over the break, and so I shared my then-current reading list. Someone asked me recently what I read, and then she followed up with, “Well, if you have time to read.” But I do. And so here is my winter-spring reading, an update on last summer’s list. I have to admit that I don’t read a lot that has obvious relevance to my job as Dean, in part because reading provides me with a chance to exercise other mental muscles. And I’ll preface this list by noting that I’m notoriously undisciplined in my reading, picking up books at airports or in Indigo just because something speaks to me.

I’m just wrapping up an extraordinarily good book, historian Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010, W.W. Norton & Co.). Although Foner has written extensively about the period, this is his first solo-authored book to focus on Lincoln (although he edited a book recently on Lincoln and his world). Of course Lincoln is one of the most written-about figures in history, but Foner takes as his core narrative a single issue: how Lincoln thought about and responded to the issue of slavery. A cautious constitutionalist, a compromiser by nature, and with a political history devoted primarily to extending free markets, Lincoln made a most reticent revolutionary. But Foner’s great gift is to show the steady growth in Lincoln’s political thinking as he grappled with what became the dominant issue of the day. In the end, both Foner and his readers are struck by the remarkable capacity for political and philosophical growth on the part of Lincoln, a Lincoln much more pleasingly complex and elusive than the one handed down through history as the Great Emancipator.

Last summer, I savored Keith Richards’ Life, and followed it up in late Fall with Bob Dylan’s 2004 autobiography entitled Chronicles: Volume One (2004, Simon & Schuster). This was a lavishly praised book when it appeared, and indeed it has some lovely accounts of Dylan’s early years in New York City. His recounting of his recovery from his motorcycle accident leading to the recording sessions in New Orleans with producer Daniel Lanois is detailed and intimate. Still, his chapter on his battle with fame, fan expectations and the music industry comes off a bit juvenile. Throughout the book, there are startling scenes and revelatory moments, but even in his memoirs, Dylan has a capacity to evade. Sometimes infuriating, sometimes charming and humble, Dylan can still somehow slip right out of focus, and for this reason found the book a bit unsatisfying in the end.

Continuing in the music vein (and after all, occasionally I still delude myself that I’m a music scholar), I picked up Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap Stories. I’m a huge fan of Randy’s radio program on the CBC where he sits with his guitar and spins both records and stories about rock musicians and the industry. Drawing on his experiences with the Guess Who and the Bachman Turner Overdrive, Randy has a brilliant ability to bring the listener into a recording gig at the end of the ‘60s or into the variations on a bass pattern played by a range of artists, or even his favourite “mondegreens” (mis-heard song lyrics). This book is a set of expanded stories from the show, woven with some autobiography and descriptive-historical portraits of musicians and events. It’s not great literature, but it’s a good read if you love rock ‘n’ roll.

My winter fiction reading started out with Jennifer Egan’s a visit from the goon squad, a complex novel that moves around in time exploring a network of relationships that are tied in various fashions to the music industry. It’s a book about aging (the goon squad in the title), loss, memory, and the silences in recordings but also in relationships. There’s a great commitment to the power and the freedom of music that drifts through this book. Egan’s characters make terrible choices and show their wounds in distasteful ways, but one understands their motivations and occasionally, and often by accident, they create wonderful things. The chapter made up of Powerpoint slides is unlike anything I’ve encountered in a novel before. Perhaps if Melville lived in a Powerpoint era, he would have done something like this about whale anatomy. This is a book that had me wondering throughout if I was reading a cleverly crafted bit of pop fiction or an unassuming great novel. I’m still not sure where I land on this question.

Then I picked up (in an airport) Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which, surprisingly, is over 10 years old now (2001, now published by Vintage Canada). As anyone who has heard anything of this book knows, it follows an extraordinary young boy from Pondicherry, India, named Pi (Piscine) whose family owns a zoo. The bulk of the story takes place after they leave for Canada, only to be shipwrecked. Pi’s subsequent life adrift in a lifeboat at sea with various zoo animals (including a tiger) appears like a work of magical realism until the story fractures in two under the clumsy interrogation of two Japanese insurance investigators in the final chapter and the reader is left with a terrible choice of interpretation. This is a rich thrilling book about the imagination and about storytelling, and about God, humans, and animals, fate and choice.

I have now waded a few chapters into Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 (2011 translation, The Bond Street Books), at least enough to encounter the characters whose stories will, or so I am led to believe, intersect and intertwine throughout the book. I haven’t read Murakami’s previous novels, which have been celebrated in recent years, and so decided to start with the most recent and work backwards in time if inspired by this one.

I also read through some free historical fiction on my iPhone as I drift off to sleep. Having read a few of Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, some of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries, and re-read Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels in this fashion, I’m now plowing through Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. And before I put my daughter to sleep (age 9), I read her novels as well. We’re currently on Book 3 (This Isn’t What It Looks Like) of The Secret Series by the nom-de-plume’d Pseudonymous Bosch. Although they’re basically children’s mysteries, I love this series for its extraordinary use of complex vocabulary, its clever footnotes, and that each book is devoted to a different medium of sensory perception (in order; smell, hearing, taste, sight, and touch). On her own, my daughter is deeply into the second series by Rick Riordan about Percy Jackson and the Olympic gods. And I suppose I shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that I’m also reading through Scott Tipton’s Star Trek Vault: 40 Years from the Archives, a present from my wife to this lifelong Star Trek enthusiast.

This is what I read when I’m not reading the reports and dossiers that I consume for my day job. Feel free to send me suggestions for books!