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Goldring Arts Journalism Program
Presentation at Lubin House
6:20 p.m., July 27, 2004
President and Chancellor Cantor's Remarks
There is a two-way street of sustenance between the arts and higher education. Both ask fundamental questions about the human experience and attempt to communicate its complexities.
Universities - with their arts presenting organizations, their faculties in and outside of the arts, and, not to be forgotten, their students - can be and already are nurturers of culture and of the creative process itself.
At the same time, the arts, purposely defined in their most inclusive form as expressive culture, can help higher education create the contexts of exchange between people and ideas necessary to tackle some of our society's most apparently intractable problems.
Journalism enters into just this space-what Barbara White of Princeton has called "experience-oriented imaginative space,"i - working to capture the exchanges that shape society in its most mundane and monumental moments.
We are at the dawn of what might be described as an era of "cultural computing," in which the rapid development and spread of new technologies is effecting a huge growth and change in the domain of the arts, just as new research in understanding different types of intelligence (visual, aural, kinesthetic) is bringing about greater understanding of their value.)
As we construct a creative campus, we seek to engage our students and faculty in imaginative and resilient habits of mind and spirit that will prepare us for anything and sustain us no matter what. In this effort, the arts and journalism (an avenue of cultural expression) should be at the core of our educational mission, the medium as well as the object of exchange.
In this spirit, I want to express my deep gratitude to Lola Goldring, a Syracuse University graduate and the mother and grandmother of graduates, for her visionary gift to the university.
The pacesetting Goldring Arts Journalism Program, which she helped imagine, is a vital new contribution to the arts and to journalism. It is a marriage of disciplines that will expand the audiences for the arts and add to their understandings through perceptive and informed journalism. It will inculcate the kind of empathy of mind and spirit, in both journalists and artists and at their intersection, that promises to nurture a better place for all of us to live. In this way, it will be a gift not only to our students, our faculty, and our campus, but to the larger public that will be the beneficiaries for many years to come. Thank you so very much.
i Barbara White, "Save You're Money [sic], Spend Your Art: Cultivating Imaginative Space on Campus," p. 6, included in "Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining, and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education," the 104th American Assembly, March 11-13, 2004, Arden House, Harriman New York.
