{"id":87,"date":"2012-04-24T06:16:24","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T14:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/artsandminds\/?p=87"},"modified":"2014-03-25T09:40:15","modified_gmt":"2014-03-25T17:40:15","slug":"is-this-not-your-fathers-oldsmobile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/artsandminds\/2012\/04\/24\/is-this-not-your-fathers-oldsmobile\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this not your Father&#8217;s Oldsmobile?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Over the course of a year, I typically attend a few meetings of Deans from various universities \u2013 each with its own geographical \u201ccatchment\u201d 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 \u201cfootball\u201d conference universities plus UBC, Hawai\u2019i and Alaska-Fairbanks).\u00a0 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>At the latter meeting, I participated on a panel called \u201cStrategies for promoting and advocating for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences\u201d.\u00a0 The following are my remarks followed by a brief note about the presentation by my co-panelist and the discussion amongst the deans. \u00a0(full disclosure: For anyone who has read my previous posts, they will likely encounter a few repeated themes!)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>THE PROBLEM<\/strong>.\u00a0 Imagine that we\u2019re the Oldsmobile Company in the late 1980s.\u00a0 The world is changing and our brand is tired and in decline. \u00a0I\u2019d be up here saying that, sure we have a branding problem, and I have a great new idea for a campaign slogan.\u00a0 Here it is: \u201cThis is NOT your father\u2019s Oldsmobile\u201d.\u00a0 Clever, huh?\u00a0 But we have another problem \u2013 the car still looks and feels like your father\u2019s Oldsmoble.\u00a0 So we have to change the advertising, sure, but first we have to start changing the design of car.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re in a similar situation with postsecondary Liberal Arts education in North America.\u00a0 It still looks a lot like your father\u2019s Liberal Arts education.\u00a0 In the early 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, Liberal Arts was the alternative to professional training \u2013 it was the gentleman\u2019s education, and it aspired to the enoblement of character and of mind.\u00a0 But we have no more \u201cgentleman\u201d in the old sense, and yet we\u2019re left a residual version of this distinction.\u00a0 How often does a professor say something to a student akin to: \u201cHey, it\u2019s NOT practical \u2013 don\u2019t worry about getting a job, don\u2019t decide soon, explore the curriculum, become a critical thinker.\u201d\u00a0 Do we really think that this appeal has a heartfelt resonance for the bulk of today\u2019s students or their families?\u00a0 Too often we sound cartoonishly academic.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 When I face thousands of new students at our Imagine Day Meet the Dean event \u2013 on the first day of school \u2013 I\u2019ve asked \u201cNow how many of you have had your parents say something to the effect of \u2018An arts degree \u2013 what are you going do with that?\u2019\u201d and laughter ensues and hands go up all around the room.\u00a0 The parents and their children are full of anxieties about the future and they want security \u2013 most want recruiters standing at the door at career day.\u00a0 And they are seeing the Arts degree as not particularly well calibrated to the needs of the market. \u00a0So my first suggestion today is to recognize and not dismiss that anxiety.\u00a0 It is played out in the <em>steady decrease<\/em> in the proportion of Arts majors in universities from the 1970s to today.\u00a0 Students and their parents are voting with their feet and their pocketbook.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t change the brand unless we change the product.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>What are the concerns of critics of Liberal Arts education, however mis (or partially)-informed?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.\u00a0 This is a university-wide problem, but it sticks to the Social Sciences and the Humanities in the public imagination.<\/li>\n<li>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.\u00a0 They\u2019ll 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.<\/li>\n<li>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\u2019t well-integrated into an intentional curriculum.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>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.\u00a0 Instead, the public views the STEM disciplines and business education as the engines of value and innovation \u2013 what we need more of if we are to grow GNP and become a world-leading economy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course my Faculty &#8212; and I assume almost all of yours &#8212; is working hard to address the problems that do help to encourage these views, and in fact much of what I\u2019ve just enumerated is at best a minor echo from the past.\u00a0 But there\u2019s still work to do.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve all seen the cataclysmic changes roll through the music industry and then the publishing industry in the wake of the digital revolution.\u00a0 This level of change is coming to postsecondary education.\u00a0 We have, I would argue, a small window within which to both change the product and change the brand.\u00a0 We are still viewed as conferring enormous advantage to our graduates as a globally respected postsecondary system. \u00a0We\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 Will this last forever?\u00a0 One cannot be sure, but it will be sure to decline or to decline more quickly if we\u2019re not seen as delivering high-quality and relevant liberal arts education in a reasonably efficient manner.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In my Faculty, we\u2019re refocusing on undergraduate education, enhancing the method of delivery, incorporating educational outcomes and renewing the curriculum on an ongoing basis.\u00a0 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, \u201clife ready.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>THE MESSAGE.\u00a0 <\/strong>As we renovate the education we provide, we need to develop a much more focused message about what it is we do.\u00a0 Of course one of the benefits of an Arts education is that it is an education in thinking that is <em>not<\/em> tied to specific career or profession.\u00a0 With the global economic landscape and the \u201cideascape\u201d changing so rapidly, narrow training becomes obsolete.\u00a0 So we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>My spiel is simple, and this is my third point \u2013 it\u2019s that an Arts degree is <em>the <\/em>degree for the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century.\u00a0 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 \u201cspell out what an undergraduate education is good for.\u00a0 Here\u2019s one definition:\u00a0 It ought to produce critical thinkers, scientifically and culturally literate people who can assess evidence, connect the dots and communicate with clarity \u2013 the key skills that, in a fast-changing economy, prepare people for the jobs that haven\u2019t been invented yet.\u201d\u00a0 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\u2019t stop at graduation.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>If you think of it one way, we\u2019re training lifelong children \u2013 people whose brains are stimulated for lifelong neuroplasticity \u2013 people who wonder, explore, play, create and innovate.\u00a0 Marissa Mayer, Google\u2019s VP of consumer products said last year \u201cWe\u2019re going through a period of unbelievable growth and will be hiring about 6,000 people this year \u2013 and probably 4000-5000 from the Humanities or liberal arts.\u201d\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because Google is looking for \u201cpeople who are smart and get things done.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 This is a great message and one that resonates with Canada\u2019s focus on innovation.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These are powerful messages about arts education, but how to get them out \u2013 how do we tell the story?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>STORYTELLING.<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 We need to show productive, successful arts graduates in their careers.\u00a0 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. \u00a0And everywhere we communicate, we can tell this story:\u00a0\u00a0in discussions with students and their parents, on the web in your deans\u2019 messages, in your blogs and in op-ed pieces, and in encounters with government ministries. \u00a0Find your own way to express the power of an arts degree for the 21<sup>st<\/sup> century and for its capacity to stimulate creativity, change, citizenship, and innovation.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Presentation from the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciencs.\u00a0 <\/strong>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.\u00a0 But the facts work for us.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Magnin also noted that all of the major issues before the public \u00a0that require public policy and decision-making as a society, are informed by Arts scholarship.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 It\u2019s encouraging to note that there are lots of great ideas out there in the front trenches of Liberal Arts on how to do both.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the course of a year, I typically attend a few meetings of Deans from various universities \u2013 each with its own geographical 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