University of Illinois

President // Speeches and Statements

THE ARTS AS A SPIRE OF EXCELLENCE AT U OF I
B. Joseph White
"Know Your University"
YMCA, Urbana
February 27, 2007


When I joined the University of Illinois in early 2005, I knew that I would find strength in the arts. 

On the day my appointment was announced, Ken Fischer, the accomplished President of the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan stopped by to say, “You’re a lucky guy. You’ll be working with Mike Ross and the Krannert Center … nobody and nothing are better in our business than Ross and Krannert.” 

So I arrived in Champaign-Urbana with high expectations. But they weren’t high enough for what I’ve found in the arts at U of I. 

The first thing I learned was how broadly we define the arts. On the web site of the College of Fine and Applied Arts is a wonderful graphic that says it all: seven academic units (Architecture, Art and Design, Dance, Landscape Architecture, Theatre, Music and Urban and Regional Planning); and six research, outreach and performance centers: (Krannert Center, Krannert Art Museum, Sinfonia da Camera, Japan House, I space, and the East St. Louis Action Research Project). 

No other college of arts in the country has as many accredited programs that are ranked as highly as FAA. Art, music and dance, for example, are ranked in the top ten, theater and architecture in the top twenty. 

We have a very broad definition of the arts at Illinois. And that is as it should be. 

Because if I could make only one point to you today, it is this: Art is not an ornament to hang on the tree of life. Art is life. Just like science, scholarship, education, athletics and all the other things we do so well at the University of Illinois. Art is an equal partner. Or maybe a little better than equal since art in the broadest sense infuses all that we do at U of I. 

To me, art is the free expression of unfettered creativity. That is why art inspires and disturbs. Why it sometimes soothes and sometimes shocks. Why it can be both ordered and chaotic. Art defined as free expression and unfettered creativity reflects much of what we do across the University.  In all fields, we discover, create, innovate and communicate and strive to do so with quality. 

We are all products of our experience, so let me speak personally for a moment. 

My views about the arts were profoundly affected by the six years I spent at Cummins Engine Co. in Columbus, Ind. It never occurred to me when I joined up in 1981 that working for a diesel-engine company would permanently transform the way I saw art and design, work and the world. 

The reason was J. Irwin Miller, Cummins’ founding father, and the Columbus architecture program he created. Irwin had a profound love of the arts. He owned and played a Stradivarius violin. He read Greek. He loved design, especially architecture. Irwin believed deeply in Winston Churchill’s famous observation following the destruction of the House of Commons by German bombs on May 10, 1941: “We shape our buildings,” said Churchill, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.” 

In 1950, Irwin saw the post-World War II building boom coming and wanted Columbus, an ordinary Indiana town of 25,000 with a pretty courthouse, to set the quality standard in the design of new public buildings. So he made a brilliantly simple offer to the city. The Cummins Engine Foundation would pay the architecture fees for any new public building if the city would choose from a list of architects provided by the Cummins Engine Foundation. Irwin had a remarkable eye for up-and-coming architects, so over the next quarter century, Columbus built an I.M. Pei library with a Henry Moore arch, a Cesar Pelli indoor mall, and other buildings designed by Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, Harry Weese and Eero Saarinen.

Irwin taught all of us at Cummins that art in the form of design really mattered — every day. That having a rectangular, square, or round conference table was a consequential choice. That specifying six-point cap screws versus ordinary bolts to secure an engine cover was not only a functional but also an aesthetic decision that connoted something about quality. And so on. 

And this is the attitude I see about art at the University of Illinois. Art is pervasive.

Of course, we excel in the arts in their traditional meaning of creative expression. 

For example, we have been celebrating our colleague Richard Powers’ wonderful achievement in winning the 2006 National Book Award for fiction for The Echo Maker.  Also present at the New York ceremony, by the way, was another U of I colleague, UIC writer Luis Alberto Urrea, a judge in the Award’s non-fiction category. 

I’ve enjoyed learning about Richard Powers and his decision to make his home and do his work here in Champaign-Urbana. Here, he earned his degrees, served as writer-in-residence and now holds the Swanlund Endowed Chair of English. “This place gives me the whole world in a nutshell,” he says. He appreciates the ability “to be at home, both in a simple and easily managed place, and also in a cosmopolitan, intellectual center.” He says, “This combination of simple and complex, of rural pragmatism and international excitement is great for a writer. It keeps me stimulated without being overwhelmed, supported without being sequestered.” 

It’s fun to drive by the Beckman Institute and remember that among the scientists there is Richard Powers, a member of the cognitive neuroscience group, a MacArthur Award winner and the winner of the National Book Award for fiction. Pretty impressive.

Creative expression at Illinois is also on display every day at the Krannert Center, the Krannert Art Museum and in the educational and artistic work of the 470 faculty and staff who serve over 2,500 students in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. 

Among those faculty and staff is Kimiko Gunji, director of Japan House. This is on my mind because my wife, Mary, and I most recently visited Japan House last Saturday evening with friends for a wonderful Kaiseki meal and tea ceremony conducted by Kimiko. I have loved Japanese design and culture since my first visit to Japan in 1983.  What a thrill it was for Mary and me to discover on our very first walk after moving into the President’s House that our immediate neighbor to the south is Japan House, an island of beauty and tranquility on the prairie … and another manifestation of the arts at Illinois. 

Six hundred miles away, in Washington, D.C., is the Phillips Collection. It is one of the world’s great galleries of Impressionist paintings with works by Renoir, van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Cezanne, as well as work by American Impressionists, modernists and mid-century masters. In a renovated carriage house adjacent to the main collection is the University of Illinois Program at the Phillips Center, thanks to the remarkable work of our colleague, the eminent art historian Jonathan Fineberg. The program offers a range of courses taught by U of I faculty, practicing artists and the museum’s professional staff to U of I students and others. What a point of pride for the arts at Illinois. 

The arts at Illinois go far beyond creative expression. A new synergy is developing through partnerships among the arts, the humanities and science and technology on campus. 

For example, digital technology is transforming creative practices in the arts and design. The University is committed to exploring the intersection of art and technology and its impact on culture. 

To cite just a few examples: 

  • In education, we are discovering how digital media technology can reach disaffected teenagers and re-engage them in the education process. (Parenthetically, I have been fascinated by the addictive power of computer games and often wonder why we don’t harness it more effectively to bring education to young people who really need it.)
  • In aging, we think it is likely that new media products in interactive education and entertainment can be used to maintain mental agility in the elderly or people with memory loss. (I have a special interest in that application.)
  • The NCSA-based Experimental Technologies Group is pioneering interactive CAVE technologies. The result is high-resolution visualization of massive data sets that artistically render the imaging of such phenomena as colliding galaxies and complex global weather patterns. This work has been featured on NOVA, the Discovery Channel and at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. 
  • Also using CAVE technology, a new operatic experience has been developed in which there is a conductor but no live orchestra musicians and in which there are both live and virtual singer-actors performing within an environment of both physical and virtual reality. This setting enables psychologists to study the cognitive and perceptional responses of both performers and audience members. 

I think it goes without saying that no university is better positioned than U of I to forge a creative alliance between digital technology and the arts. We have been doing it for years and, I believe, the best is yet to come. 

Now I have a problem. I’ve run out of time before I’ve run out of material. I haven’t, for example, even mentioned the cinematic arts and distinguished graduates like Roger Ebert and Ang Lee. Or our own architectural legacy, including Max Abramowitz and Cesar Pelli. Or our greatness in music as evidenced by people like Ollie Watts Davis whose 25th anniversary at U of I we just celebrated, and Ian Hobson and, of course, the wonderful Dan Perrino. There’s so much more, like Ninth Letter, an award-winning literary journal produced jointly by the English department and our art and design faculty. And 40 North, our wonderful community arts organization. 

But I’m out of time.

So let me end my remarks about the arts at Illinois by looking ahead a bit. I’ve found one of the best ways to do that is to listen to Mike Ross. And he is saying some extraordinarily interesting things these days. 

For example, Mike says that one of the newest and most innovative developments in the arts at UIUC is the cross-campus “seedbed initiative for trans-domain creativity,” an initiative of Chancellor Richard Herman and Provost Linda Katehi. Its point of departure is the emergent, fast-moving intersection of art and technology. Our “big technology” triad of the Beckman Institute, NCSA and the Siebel Center are working collaboratively with our arts and culture assets to create a nationally unique network of arts-and-technology hub-sites dedicated to creating new pathways of human experience. Mike notes that this campus is connected at the DNA level to the world of the Internet, the iPod, MySpace and YouTube and that we are fast becoming the most robust environment in the world for creative thinking in the arts, humanities, science, engineering and technology. 

And let me share one other Mike Ross observation that I love. Foregoing the usual categories of “high brow” and “low brow” in the arts, Mike takes note of the Krannert Center’s experiments in what he calls “no brow” aesthetic programming like last year’s great wall-to-wall guitar festival that also happened to be the first Apple iTunes university-based podcast. Anyone who has seen the Krannert lobby packed with people from every part of this community will understand that we — and Mike in particular — have figured out how to bring the arts alive for everyone. 

Mary and I happened to be at Mike and Taya’s home last night. I learned that the guitar festival will likely be coming back. And when it does, there will be something new. Mike says that in the Krannert lobby, you’ll have a chance to try your own hand at guitar playing, assisted by an amazing video-game-with-electronic-guitar that 12-year-old Miles Ross demonstrated to me last night. Miles and I had a little electronic guitar competition, and if my memory serves me, the final score was Miles 12,000, yours truly, “Player Failed.” But that’s OK. It’s like the arts. Always enjoyable. And always challenging. Especially at U of I. 

Thank you.