Taking the Measure of the Creative Campus

Four years ago, while still at Princeton University, I started teaching a course on the social conditions of creativity in art, science, and business. Teaching about creativity is a lot like teaching about health and nutrition-it has certain spillover effects outside the classroom. Nutritionists see "bad health" all around themin grocery stores, in restaurants, and in their cupboards. Likewise, I started seeing obstacles to creativity all around me-especially on campus.

During this time, I was asked to help plan an American Assembly public affairs forum focusing on the creative campus. The meeting was intended to highlight the important role that colleges and universities play in the larger arts ecology-as commissioners of new work, as employers, as training institutions, and as presenters of performing arts. Rather than just celebrating and promoting the arts, I felt it was important that the assembly raise questions about whether campuses were truly creative places. And if they were, how would we know? My article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Creative Campus: Who's Number 1?" explored this question-focusing on the arts, but examining the conditions for creativity in other disciplines as well (Tepper 2004). Creativity thrives on those campuses where there is abundant cross-cultural exchange and a great deal of "border" activity between disciplines, where collaborative work is commonplace, risk taking is rewarded, failure is expected, and the creative arts are pervasive and integrated into campus life.

Beyond examining the conditions for creativity, it is important to think about how to explore and assess these conditions. What would a research agenda on the creative campus look like? In the absence of an established research community, what ideas, methodologies, and approaches might be useful in pursuing such an agenda?1

Underlying Social Dynamics of the Creative Campus

Every April, the MacArthur Foundation awards $500,000 "genius" grants to twenty extraordinarily creative people-artists, scientists, and social entrepreneurs. The awards come with "no strings attached," giving individuals the freedom and resources to pursue their talents and ideas. It is a remarkable program. But, from a sociological perspective, it reinforces the dominant myth of the individual creative genius (the scientist alone in her lab or the artist in his garret) and ignores the social structure that underlies creative work. It is important to recognize and support the creative luminaries, but it is equally important to understand the often invisible pathways along which creative work flows.

As it turns out, the methodology that is most in vogue right now in the social sciences-network analysis-is well suited to help figure out the underlying social dynamics of the creative campus. Network analysis is used to map relationships or ties between people, ideas, organizations, products, or just about any other part of social life. Such analysis has been used to understand such diverse phenomena as microbrew pubs, terrorist cells, and the friendship circles of high school teenagers as well as a variety of creative enterprises, from Broadway theatre to astronomy. These efforts to describe the linkages that lead to creative breakthroughs can identify important nodes in a network, such as the creativity brokers who connect artists and scholars who might not otherwise collaborate or even know of one another. Network analysis can also identify the gaps in a network, or the presence of multiple clusters of independent creative groups.

A rigorous network analysis of the creative activity of our campuses would reveal, I am sure, fascinating and unexpected patterns of activity. We would find robust creative work in unforeseen places, and creativity brokers who were not immediately obvious-a new assistant professor working in a nontraditional field or a campus "arts presenter," for example, rather than a seasoned department chair or associate dean. In a well-known essay in the New Yorker, "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," Malcolm Gladwell (1999) demonstrates that the self-effacing seventy-year-old grandmother and former cultural commissioner of Chicago is in the middle of a dense network of creative people as diverse as Dizzy Gillespie, Tony Bennett, Isaac Asimov, William Saroyan, and Lenny Bruce. Lois Weisberg is a creative "connector" who belongs to many different social worlds and, consequently, has been directly or indirectly involved in the development of literally hundreds of creative enterprises and the success of dozens of creative careers. Ultimately; network analysis can not only help identify the Lois Weisbergs on our campuses, it can also help university leaders identify the deep structure of creative activity so that they can better leverage resources to support and foster this work.

Student Engagement We want to understand broader patterns of creative work, but it is also important to understand the individual experiences of our students. Are they engaged in creative pursuits? Do students leave campus having had a meaningful and important artistic experience? And, perhaps most importantly, do they develop a heightened curiosity about the world during their years as undergraduates?