The creative economy encompasses a range of professions and
endeavors where competitiveness depends not on linear, analytical
thinking, but rather on right-brained skills such as artistry and
empathy.
This new creative economy faces stiff challenges, however. New
England’s nonprofit arts endowments, museums and local theater
companies are engaged in a constant battle for resources. And with each
big corporate merger, a real or potential patron of the arts is gone
from the landscape. In addition, schools are dropping art classes as
they become increasingly focused on standardized math and language
tests.
Best Practices for a Creative Economy • NEBHE President Evan S. Dobelle
draws lessons about how New England colleges help foster the creative
economy in their communities. Dobelle says it’s time to “focus our
energy on becoming a global cultural capital.”
Artists Only? • In his quarterly Editor’s Memo column, Connection Executive Editor John O. Harney
warns that while New England celebrates the promise of the creative
economy, it could lose its capacity to prepare the future workers
needed to sustain it and the citizen-consumers able to navigate it.
A Vocation of the Imagination • “In an educational system
that prizes high retention and completion rates, what room is there for
eccentricity?” asks Marlboro College President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, who served as deputy assistant to President Clinton and advisor to the first lady. McCulloch-Lovell writes:
“Institutions should not be so consumed with measurements that they do
not allow for the unstructured time necessary for discovery and
experimentation—to link previously unrelated elements, recognize
emerging patterns and take risks—all so essential to creativity.”
The Coming Right-Brain Economy • Connection
interviews bestselling author and former Gore speechwriter Daniel Pink
about what Pink sees as the new right-brained economy. The only way
companies and nations can differentiate goods and services in today’s
overstocked, computerized marketplace, says Pink, is to “make their
offerings transcendent—physically beautiful and emotionally
compelling.” As a result, he contends, logical, linear thinking will no
longer cut it in today’s workplace. The abilities that matter most will
be previously undervalued skills such as artistry, empathy and seeing
the big picture. As a result, adds Pink, “the MFA is the new MBA.”
Art Transforms Education • The quantifiable measures
required by many state and federal education laws are actually driving
out the kind of learning and pedagogy that help develop the very
right-brain thinking that futuristic thinkers are calling for.
Massachusetts College of Art President Katherine Sloan and Boston Arts
Academy Headmaster Linda Nathan explain how a Boston pilot school uses
the critique method to buck that trend and put student learning center
stage.
Arts and the City • More than
one-quarter of Boston public school ninth-graders will never finish
high school. But all the Boston youth working at the nonprofit Artists
For Humanity graduate from high school and continue on to higher
education. Founder and artistic director Susan Rodgerson and Blenda J.
Wilson, president and CEO of the Nellie Mae Foundation, explain how the
initiative is tapping the creative energy of urban youths.
Investing in Futures • For most parents,
the bottom line when researching colleges for their children is how
well the institution will prepare its students for the “real world,”
and many art programs do the same, guiding students into “applied arts”
programs. Connecticut’s Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts is one of
just three institutions nationally that focuses on “fine arts only.”
Lyme President Emeritus Henry E. Putsch explains how this classical
approach enriches the region as it “asserts ‘the hand of the artist’ in
a culture that is becoming electronic and digital.”
Creative Places • Rhode Island School of
Design (RISD) President Roger Mandle explains how a range of institutes
and collaborations have helped RISD help Providence, Rhode Island, to
develop a premier creative economy.
Museum Quality • North Adams, Massachusetts, is experiencing
a renaissance of sorts, marked by an influx of artists, writers,
filmmakers and other “right-brained” individuals. Massachusetts College
of Liberal Arts President Mary Grant explains how a new museum and a
recharged state college have the creative juices flowing in this corner
of Massachusetts.
Just Power? • We teach, too often, that the marketplace is
the arbiter of value, and of values, ignoring the realities of harm and
injustice that markets sling about them on the way to determining
price, according to the Rev. Dr. Thomas Sullivan, director of spiritual
life at Babson College. Sullivan ponders the state of business ethics
and business education.
Called • James Mullen reflects on the path that has led him
from the chancellorship of the University of North Carolina at
Asheville to the presidency of the Catholic Elms College in
Massachusetts. The Catholic tradition, Mullen promises, “offers a wide
intellectual field on which to play.”
Excerpts • More than four in 10 college-bound Connecticut
high school seniors left the state in 2000 (the last year reported),
adding to the state’s much talked about brain drain. But by some
measures, Connecticut has also become a brain gainer. Connection excerpts “Plumbing Connecticut’s Brain Drain,” an article by Steven P. Lanza from the Spring 2005 issue of The Connecticut Economy.
Books • Judith Greiman, president of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, reviews The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College by Harlan Cohen.
BOSTON—New England’s rich base of arts education programs, museums,
symphonies and dance troupes not only enrich the region’s quality of
life and generate significant revenue on their own, but also serve as
midwives to a burgeoning “creative economy,” according to the Summer
2005 issue of Connection: The Journal of the New England Board of Higher Education.
