By Theresa Reid, Executive Director ArtsEngine

Knight Foundation was instrumental in helping to launch a new national initiative to better integrate art-making and the arts into American universities.  Knight Foundation provided seed funding for an unprecedented conference, a “Michigan Meeting” hosted in Ann Arbor by the University of Michigan’s ArtsEngine initiative May 4 – 6.

The meeting, “The Role of Art-Making and the Arts in the Research University,” was attended by 150 deans, program directors, and faculty, administrative, and graduate student leaders from 43 first-tier research universities nationwide.  The ripples will be felt for a long time to come; indeed, ArtsEngine directors are working with colleagues nationally to ensure that the ripple effect is amplified rather than allowed to fade away.

Why?  Because the arts are not decoration.  Art-making and other engagement with the arts is essential to human thought and development, and America’s universities should robustly support this vital, uniquely human activity.

ArtsEngine is led by the deans of U-M’s schools of visual and performing arts, architecture, and engineering.  Its mission is to enhance creative output at U-M across the board by better integrating art-making into the university as a whole.  More can be learned about ArtsEngine here.

At ArtsEngine’s Michigan Meeting, keynote speeches were delivered by three current or former University presidents, and were extremely well received.  The talk by Don M. Randel, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “What Researchers and Artists Actually Do,” was greeted with a standing ovation and is widely regarded as a landmark talk.  (All three of these talks, as well as closing remarks by Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at U-M, are available on ArtsEngine’s website)

Press coverage was gratifying, especially the three reports published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Press coverage can be read here.

And outcomes are significant:  working groups during the meeting produced preliminary reports on seven different topics pertinent to advancing this work:  advocacy, case-making, curricular and co-curricular programming, funding mechanisms, national network development, and research.  ArtsEngine is editing these reports in-house and will distribute revised copies this summer.

Meantime, ArtsEngine is planning to develop the work begun at the May meeting in the following ways:

• Support ongoing task forces. ArtsEngine is planning to form national task forces to strategize implementation of immediate action steps and to develop ongoing goals around the preliminary reports developed during the meeting.
• Plan a second national meeting. ArtsEngine is planning to host a second national meeting, to be held in June 2012 in Ann Arbor to advance specific goals generated by working groups during the first meeting and thereafter.
• Maintain communications. ArtsEngine is planning to establish a social networking site to allow participants to maintain communications about ongoing work, and will send monthly HTML newsletter updates about progress of working groups and ways to contribute, to include those who aren’t involved in social media.
• Explore developing a national organization. ArtsEngine leaders will be reaching out to colleagues nationally to assess interest in developing an interdisciplinary national organization dedicated to advancing university support for art-making and the arts.

We are very excited about the potential for significant change in American higher education as a result of this meeting and the ongoing work flowing from it. And we’re thankful that KnightArts helped make it happen.  To be added to the mailing list to learn more as the work progresses, visit here.