People | George
Davis
Provost's Comments at A Symposium on Creativity
Sponsored by
The Arizona Senior Academy and The Academy Village
Tucson, Arizona
January 11, 2002
This conference is about the mind and the imagination, and the convergence
of the two in creativity. Can creativity, whatever its source in
individual human beings, be stimulated to greater collective height
and impact within individual human organizations, universities in
particular? If so, what are the conditions that favor this objective?
First, universities must recruit and retain faculty who are
absolutely passionate about, and care deeply about, their intellectual
pursuits. For creative breakthroughs stem in part from constantly
turning over things in your mind.
Teenagers say (to their parents), "Don't obsess!" Creative
individuals must obsess. Take Mozart as an extreme example. In a letter
written by Mozart and included in Marcia Davenport's important biography,
Mozart, Mozart describes how Don Giovanni took shape in one of the
most perfect of "pleasing, lively dreams."
"Whence and how [my ideas] come, I know
not; nor can I force them. These ideas that please me I retain
in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them
to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how
I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good
dish of it...All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed,
my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and
in the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished
in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture, or a
beautiful statue, at a glance...I hear in my imagination the parts...as
it were, gleich alles zusammen, all at once...Still the actual
hearing...is after all the best. What has thus been produced, I
do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have
my Divine Maker to thank for."
Second, universities determined to achieve heightened expressions
of creativity must shape an environment where people feel supported
as they take risks.
Arthur Miller describes risks in his autobiography,
Timebends. Without understanding why, he knew that Death of a Salesman
had to be written in a single sitting, in a night or a day. All he
had was the first two lines. The lines were "Willy!" and "It's all right.
I came back." He dared not venture further. He knew he was about
to begin a "risky expedition into [him]self." Instead of
working up materials and writing more lines, he prepared a place to
write, a little plywood shack.
"And all the while afraid I would never
be able to penetrate past those two first lines...I started one
morning...I wrote all day until dark, and then I had dinner and
went back and wrote until some hour in the darkness between midnight
and four...By new morning I had done the first half...the first
act of two. [It did not have to be changed.] When I lay down to
sleep I realized I had been weeping -- my eyes still burned and
my throat was sore from talking it all out and shouting and laughing...I
would be stiff when I woke, aching as if I had played four hours
of football...and now had to face the start of another game."
Arthur Miller's testimony to the risks involved in a creative discovery
brings us directly to one of Robert Grudin's major emphases in his
book, The Grace of Great Things. Grudin contends that creative achievement
requires heroic strengths that cannot be described without using moral
language, like integrity, endurance, and courage. To quote Grudin,
"These virtues...become essential when
one's challenges involve self-discovery, spirited inquiry, and
individual expression. They are necessary because of the extreme
difficulty of original thinking which must be developed over long
periods of time, quite often without adequate societal support."
Grudin compares innovative thinking to a voyage, and its territory
to a frontier.
Third, environments in which creativity is apt to flourish
require the gift of time, time to reflect.
Administrators within institutions of higher learning have an obligation
and responsibility to interpret to political and community leaders,
to alumni to their own faculty and staff, and to students and their
parents, the essential importance of preserving time in faculty life.
For the scholarly reflections and accomplishments that issue from time
is the stuff out of which the classroom, seminar, workshop, and studio
becomes vibrant. It takes time and reflection to discover connections
between things not obviously connected.
Again, Grudin's words,
"No matter where we live, we inhabit
the continent of time, a continent less studied and charted than
any other. Creative people move purposefully across this continent,
truly explore it. The rest of us shack up in little patches and
clearings of time, always harried, always distracted, slave to
the next knock on the office door or phone all. Our professional
lives show an alarmingly high percentage of 'response activities'
-- meeting deadlines, obeying directives, dealing with emergencies
-- as opposed to activities developing independent initiatives...The
protected and usually large, physical spaces that creative individuals
demand for their work -- studios, libraries, laboratories -- are
matched by the protected expanses of time that they stake out,
day after day, across their careers. These regularly repeated periods,
often whole mornings or afternoons, are so massive that they become
quasi-physical presences whose substance can be sculpted into regular
achievement. I call these expanses of time 'chronocosms' (time
worlds)...People unacquainted with such time worlds have little
chance to experience creative insight."
Fourth, universities must oppose the tendency to slide to
overly bureaucratic, overly administrative approaches that block
faculty and students from doing their best work. Keep the big picture
alive.
Peter Coney, a distinguished University of Arizona professor, now
deceased, understood what was required of a university to nurture growth
and discovery. He articulated it persuasively,
"I have always felt as I pass from the
turmoil of urban streets through the gates and onto the campus
of an institution of higher learning, anywhere in the world, a
sense of relief and comfort, solemnity and freedom. The feeling
is not unlike that when one enters a national park, for this is
what colleges and universities are -- they are sanctuaries, preserves
-- of civilization. They are the only institution in the course
of human endeavor whose sole purpose and mission is to know the
course, content, and directions of civilization, to understand,
preserve protect, and transmit these findings, and to seek further
advances and new insights into the truth of ourselves and the world...[The]
environment should...assure exposure to all the necessary skills
and the best ideas and conceptual frameworks of the time, and provide
stimulation from an active, well-read thoughtful, positive, innovative,
and open faculty, all in an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance.
Like libraries that have to have all the books to make sure they
have the one somebody needs, we have to have the freedom at universities
to tolerate and encourage all sorts of individual diversity, both
in faculty and students, so that we can be sure that the best mind
gets the exposure to the best cognitive resource which might enable
that one in a million new idea that can change the course of a discipline,
or civilization."
Fifth, universities must promote and reward interdisciplinary
activities. This is an arena where The University of Arizona excels.
We could talk and talk about this.
An example of the ethos was communicated to me by Bill Dickinson,
professor emeritus and member of the National Academy of Sciences.
He describes in specific terms the path to creative discovery about
who we are as a human race, especially in relation to our environment.
"Our very ability to forecast the environmental
future with any accuracy depends upon the blending of insights
from diverse intellectual wellsprings. 1) From humanism, History,
which bases insights principally on the written record but without
even the most rudimentary facts about Pleistocene climates and
landscapes. 2) From social sciences, Archaeology, with a primary
focus on strictly human prehistory prior to the advent of comprehensive
written records. 3) From the physical sciences, Quaternary geology,
but almost entirely divorced from considerations of human behavior.
4) From the life sciences, Ecology and Biogeography, but with minimal
attention to prehistoric antecedents. Each of these disparate approaches
led to only partial understanding of the full tapestry of the Holocene
past, i.e. the last 10,000 years. Casting off discipline-oriented
blinders has permitted us to achieve a more integrated vision of
Holocene history by working from the premise that environmental
and human history are parallel tracks along the same road map across
an every-changing Holocene landscape."
Sixth, universities wishing to enhance
their institutional creative potential should look for and measure
and "own" the
attributes that nourish creativity at the individual human level.
For Grudin, the attributes of the creative mind, and thus the creative
institution, are inspiration, discovery analysis, imagination, and
sense of beauty. The ethics of creativity for an individual and an
institution require integrity, pain, courage, self-knowledge, and freedom.
And there must be a sense of expectation.
According to Grudin,
"Nothing stifles the spirit of discovery
more effectively than the assumption that miracles have ceased.
In other words, most people do not make discoveries because they
do not expect to. Discovery has in it not only exacting precision
but absurd aspiration; it weighs hairs and expects miracles."
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