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By Betty Jean Craige
As the University of Georgia undergoes change in its efforts to be one of the world’s major  research institutions in the 21st century, we ought to think about the importance to the university and to our emerging global society of greater investment in the humanities and the arts. I believe that without excellent scholarship in the humanities and internationally recognized achievement in the arts, our university will not be one of the world’s major research universities. And it is the attention of the world for which we must now compete.
In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb. 2, 2001), the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, wrote: “The true antidote to the public’s view that colleges are simply ivory towers of intellectual dilettantism is engagement with important public issues--however difficult and thorny those issues may be.”
Globalization has rendered archaic the ivory tower model for learning, since the universities that matter in the 21st century will be those that contribute significantly to the development of a healthier, more peaceful, and more socially just global society. Globalization is transforming all aspects of higher education, including the humanities and the arts. Now there is a new need for research in the humanities and a cross-cultural appreciation for the arts, which will provide opportunities for scholars and artists to engage in “important public issues.”
For example, there is a need for scholars of language, literature, history, religion, philosophy, geography, anthropology and the arts to do research into the many different cultures of our world--and of our own nation--and to share knowledge with colleagues across national borders and with diplomats, politicians and scholars of other disciplines. There is a need for historians, philosophers, and ethicists to apply their wisdom to the social questions raised by biomedical technologies. There is a need for humanists of all kinds to join ecologists and social scientists in search of the cultural causes of environmental pollution and of the earth’s burgeoning human population. There is a need for humanists of all kinds to bring historical and ethical perspectives to our government’s foreign and domestic policies.
What humanities scholars do is to help us understand our world, and the more thoroughly we understand our world’s past and present the better we can plan for our future.
The same revolution that has transformed geopolitics and the humanities has internationalized the audience for the arts. Salmon Rushdie, with the publication of Satanic Verses, made us realize that a writer can no longer determine or even anticipate the audience for his books. Because of rapid translation, the writer now writes for the world and may inspire controversy among readers with different values and beliefs. Visual artists, even those celebrating their own longstanding cultural traditions, are gaining notice from art historians, museum curators and collectors in the international arena who are eager to learn about cultures once unfamiliar to them. Contemporary composers import melodies, rhythms and sounds from the traditional and classical music of people all over the world, and choreographers incorporate into their pieces movements they discover in once-foreign dances.
The arts of the 21st century, themselves affected irreversibly by globalization, have thus become a force for increased appreciation of our global society’s variety of cultures. Artists in all areas of creative expression around the world are listening to each other’s music, reading each other’s books, looking at each other’s sculptures, paintings and dances, and taking what they like from what they find.
Here at the University of Georgia we want our artists and our humanities scholars, as well as our scientists and our social scientists, to command respect in the world for what they do and say. We therefore need to redouble our efforts to hire and retain on our faculty the best scholars and artists we can identify, at all levels, for they will bring the university attention abroad as a locus of creativity. And by enhancing our cultural life here, they will make recruitment easier in all disciplines.
To be one of the world’s major research universities, we must be considered a place where the world’s important thinkers gather and speak out on “important public issues.” We should be regularly sponsoring international conferences in many areas of intellectual inquiry, meetings of international organizations, and visits by scholars and artists from around the world. We should support well the Georgia Review, the University of Georgia Press, and the Georgia Museum of Art, where the world’s important thinkers can interact virtually.
And we must acquire a reputation as an excellent place for the world’s most ambitious students to come to study, which will depend not only on the influence of our research, our publications and our artistic production, but also on the stipends we offer to graduate students.
In conclusion, I would argue that a research university will not be “major” if it excels only in sciences and social sciences. The interaction of outstanding thinkers in different fields stimulates the creation of new ideas, new approaches to problems, and new insights into natural phenomena, social phenomena, texts, and artworks. We want the University of Georgia to have an international reputation for fostering such intellectual synergy. That will require investment in the humanities and the arts.
From the perspective of the other nations of the world, the United States has an extraordinarily good system of higher education. In the 21st century, when the world’s peoples look to Americans for intellectual and moral leadership, let us hope they find it at the University of Georgia.
Betty Jean Craige is director of the Center for Humanities and Arts and University Professor of Comparative Literature. This essay is a condensed version of the talk she gave at the President’s Management Conference on Feb. 22.
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To encourage discussion on issues affecting the university and higher education in general, the Forum section appears periodically in Columns. Faculty, staff, administrators and researchers associated with the university are invited to submit essays and respond to previous essays.
A committee appointed by University Council and Staff Council reviews submissions to determine which are of greatest interest to the university community. Faculty members of the Forum review committee for 2000-2001 are Jonathan Evans, English, and J. Scott Shaw, physics and astronomy. A third faculty member will be appointed soon. The staff representative is Brenda Keen of the Georgia Review.
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