Syracuse President Urges Reimagining of Arts’ Role in Colleges

By Alexander C. Kafka

ANN ARBOR, MICH.

Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor Friday urged universities to foster a “blending and interplay between” traditional arts paradigms, and to approach inevitable administrative tensions over the arts in a more inclusive, less judgmental manner.

Cantor, who served previously as Michigan provost and chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, made the remarks on the final morning of the three-day ArtsEngine conference at the University of Michigan. (Arts & Academe reported on the conference Wednesday and Thursday too.)

Cantor said universities mix three paradigms: stand-alone arts programs like schools of music or dance; interdisciplinary collaborations like film students working with counterparts in schools of public affairs on social-issue documentaries; and public collections and productions like museums and theaters.

She urged a more imaginative, vigorous approach to imbuing academic life with artistic vision. For instance, in architectural projects, students in various disciplines can counter-weight lofty visionary impulses with practical, structural, entrepreneurial, disability, environmental, and other considerations.

Or, Cantor said, the arts can be wrapped into a thematic exploration across campus, with theater directors and other university presenters working with scholars to interweave artistic offerings with academic focuses. “Cry for Peace: Voices From the Congo,” for example, stemmed from ethnographic research on immigrants into a Syracuse theater project, and resonated with a human-rights film festival, she said.

Junctions between curricular and co-curricular projects can also be powerful, Cantor said, citing Syracuse’s “Canary Project,” which has produced various artwork and media on global warming.

And the arts provide universities with excellent ways of connecting with and bettering their communities, she said, pointing to university-sponsored public art, youth outreach through photography, a Black History Preservation Project, and other activities in Syracuse.

For all that, though, Cantor said universities should expect arts to sometimes have a disruptive impact on academe, and to cause tensions along the boundaries between disciplines, and between curricular and extracurricular demands and offerings. How should students and faculty working amid or between disciplines be judged, and by whom? How much should core disciplinary skills be emphasized in work that combines more than one of them? How immersed in a particular art form should the arts journalist be, for instance; and how technologically savvy should the performing artist be?

To reduce those tensions, said Cantor, requires “a certain generosity on the part of domain experts,” “a strongly democratic, inclusive form of engagement,” and “a suspension of judgment.” Academe is not always characterized, she said, by such generosity, inclusiveness, and suspended judgment.

In measuring the value of artistic pursuits in higher education, Cantor recommends considering their “scale, impact, and longevity,” the aesthetic equivalent of civil infrastructure. She urged educators to create an environment mixing “top-down seeding” and “bottom-up contagion” of a university’s artistic imagination. The result, she said, will be artistic efforts that are simultaneously “disruptive” in prompting a questioning of assumptions, and calming in galvanizing a campus to embrace change and possibility.

In other words, the university will feel art’s power, Cantor said, quoting a phrase Susan Sontag used about the camera, as “the ideal arm of consciousness.”