This past January not only marked the start of a new year and decade, but the beginning of a new visioning process for the College as well. Two back-to-back events—an evening panel discussion featuring national thought leaders, and a daylong brainstorming session tackling key issues relating to Art Center’s mission statement—were open to the Art Center community.
On January 13, faculty, staff, students, alumni, trustees and friends packed the Ahmanson Auditorium for the visioning kickoff. The evening session—Twittered and webcast live—featured a distinguished panel of speakers: Andrew Blauvelt, design director and curator at the Walker Art Center; Katherine Hayles, professor and director of graduate studies in literature at Duke University; Steven Oliver, board member of the grant-making organization United States Artists; and David Rice, chairman and founder of The Organization of Black Designers.
Before introducing the panelists, Art Center President Lorne Buchman stressed the imperative of higher education to value driven learning and thinking. “The capacity of our students and graduates to affect change is enormous,” he said. “We need to be educating responsible citizens—the question is how to do that.”
Highlights from the panel:
- Katherine Hayles suggested that the days when a classroom can rely on a single information stream are ending. “Contemporary classrooms, and the classrooms of the future, will rely on multiple information streams … to be responsive to the needs of our students and their inclinations toward hyper attention,” she said.
- David Rice argued that digital technologies are reshaping the creative process. “Powerful and inexpensive software and media tools are shifting power and influence from capital-intensive production functions to intellectually intensive creative functions—and in the process democratizing creativity,” he said.
- Steven Oliver emphasized the importance of assembling the right team. “When a college has great faculty, staff and students, you create a very exciting place to belong to and participate in,” he said. “You begin to have the kind of synergy that makes an institution sing. There is an incredible opportunity to get that right mix of chemistry together.”
- Andrew Blauvelt stressed the need for real-world engagement. “We’re in a paradigm shift in which students no longer want just the classroom context, but world context,” he said. “Students today want to engage, to do the real thing.”
Buchman described the panelists as “provocateurs for a very important moment in the history of this institution,” and their ideas left the audience buzzing well after the event concluded. Do you agree with the panelists? What areas do you think are the most important to explore as Art Center envisions its future? Are there additional issues we should be considering?
