Investment in the Humanities and the Arts
by Betty Jean Craige
As the University of Georgia undergoes change in its efforts
to be one of the world’s major research institutions in the twenty-first
century, we ought to think about the importance to the University and to our
emerging global society of greater investment in the humanities and the arts.
I believe that without excellent scholarship in the humanities and
internationally recognized achievement in the arts, our university will not be
one of the world’s major research universities. And it is the attention
of the world for which we must now compete.
In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2
February 2001), the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of the
University of Notre Dame, wrote: “The true antidote to the public’s view that
colleges are simply ivory towers of intellectual dilettantism is engagement
with important public issues–however difficult and thorny those issues may be.”
Globalization has rendered archaic the ivory tower model for
learning, since the universities that matter in the twenty-first century will
be those that contribute significantly to the development of a healthier, more
peaceful, and more socially just global society. Globalization is
transforming all aspects of higher education, including the humanities and the
arts. Now there is a new need for research in the humanities and a
cross-cultural appreciation for the arts, which will provide opportunities for
scholars and artists to engage in “important public issues.”
For example, there is a need for scholars of language,
literature, history, religion, philosophy, geography, anthropology, and the
arts to do research into the many different cultures of our world–and of our
own nation–and to share knowledge with colleagues across national borders and
with diplomats, politicians, and scholars of other disciplines. There is
a need for historians, philosophers, and ethicists to apply their wisdom to the
social questions raised by biomedical technologies. There is a need for
humanists of all kinds to join ecologists and social scientists in search of
the cultural causes of environmental pollution and of the earth’s burgeoning
human population. There is a need for humanists of all kinds to bring
historical and ethical perspectives to our government’s foreign and domestic
policies.
What humanities scholars do is to help us understand our
world, and the more thoroughly we understand our world’s past and present the
better we can plan for our future.
The same revolution that has transformed geopolitics and the
humanities has internationalized the audience for the arts. Salmon
Rushdie, with the publication of Satanic Verses, made us realize that a writer
can no longer determine or even anticipate the audience for his books.
Because of rapid translation, the writer now writes for the world and may
inspire controversy among readers with different values and beliefs.
Visual artists, even those celebrating their own longstanding cultural
traditions, are gaining notice from art historians, museum curators, and
collectors in the international arena who are eager to learn about cultures
once unfamiliar to them. Contemporary composers import melodies, rhythms,
and sounds from the traditional and classical music of people all over the
world, and choreographers incorporate into their pieces movements they discover
in once foreign dances.
The arts of the twenty-first century, themselves affected
irreversibly by globalization, have thus become a force for increased
appreciation of our global society’s variety of cultures. Artists in all
areas of creative expression around the world are listening to each other’s
music, reading each other’s books, looking at each other’s sculptures,
paintings, and dances, and taking what they like from what they find.
Here at the University of Georgia we want our artists and
our humanities scholars, as well as our scientists and our social scientists,
to command respect in the world for what they do and say. We therefore
need to redouble our efforts to hire and retain on our faculty the best scholars
and artists we can identify, at all levels, for they will bring the University
attention abroad as a locus of creativity. And by enhancing our cultural
life here, they will make recruitment easier in all disciplines.
To be one of the world’s major research universities, we
must be considered a place where the world’s important thinkers gather and
speak out on “important public issues.” We should be regularly sponsoring
international conferences in many areas of intellectual inquiry, meetings of international
organizations, and visits by scholars and artists from around the world.
We should support well the Georgia Review, the University of Georgia Press, and
the Georgia Museum of Art, where the world’s important thinkers can interact
virtually.
And we must acquire a reputation as an excellent place for
the world’s most ambitious students to come to study, which will depend not
only on the influence of our research, our publication, and our artistic
production, but also on the stipends we offer to graduate students.
In conclusion, I would argue that a research university will
not be “major” if it excels only in sciences and social sciences. The
interaction of outstanding thinkers in different fields stimulates the creation
of new ideas, new approaches to problems, and new insights into natural
phenomena, social phenomena, texts, and artworks. We want the University
of Georgia to have an international reputation for fostering such intellectual
synergy. That will require investment in the humanities and the arts.
From the perspective of the other nations of the world, the
United States has an extraordinarily good system of higher education. In
the twenty-first century, when the world’s peoples look to Americans for
intellectual and moral leadership, let us hope they find it at the University
of Georgia.
[Betty Jean Craige is Director of the Center for Humanities and Arts and
University Professor of Comparative Literature. This essay is a condensed
version of the talk she gave at the President’s Management Conference on
February 22, 2001, and was published in the University of Georgia Columns
as "The Key to the Future," April 9, 2001.]
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