David Scobey believes he has the solution for two cultural crises. Speaking last Wednesday at the Memorial Chapel, he discussed the growing movement toward integration of university arts and humanities with community engagement. Scobey emphasized the benefits that such integration would have in solving the respective problems of the university and the community at large.
The universities’ predicament, Scobey explained, is a growing public disillusionment with higher education. Citing budget cuts and a referendum vote against affirmative action in Michigan as evidence, Scobey explained that the public no longer considers the universities’ vast resources and autonomy to be justified. These attitudes, accompanied by rising tuition rates throughout the country, have further entrenched the universities’ reputation as a bastion of elitism, isolated from general society.
According to Scobey, this issue goes hand-in-hand with a larger societal crisis: that of growing distrust in government. While widespread voter apathy presents the most obvious evidence of this skepticism, Scobey maintained it is only a symptom of a larger problem.
Scobey argued that these crises can only be solved together, through community partnerships with university arts and humanities. He advocated the creation of third spaces, where members of diverse groups can come together in collaborative ways to develop both civic culture and intellectual life, with the underlying belief that each group can offer the other something it could not have gleaned on its own. Members of the academic community, Scobey said, can gain a richer understanding of the people they purport to explain.
Scobey emphasized that the university need not lose any of its academic rigor, but rather that professional academics must apply this intellectualism in new ways based on insights they would not otherwise have found. Scobey described the moment when he chose to work toward community engagement.
“It felt like a turn away from the provincialism of academic culture in which I’d boxed myself,” Scobey said.
In an often polarized society, Scobey explained that these community programs can help people to gain understanding of groups with which they would not normally engage. More importantly, these diverse groups can work together, using the arts and humanities, in the process of “meaning making,” and thus regain a stake in their own civic life. Given this dynamic definition of culture, university humanities and the arts must participate in the process of meaning making, or else its work of understanding society becomes a falsity.
Scobey has directed two centers for community partnerships, and he used his experiences to ground otherwise abstract ideas in examples of successful projects. Scobey spoke of a piece of artwork he recently viewed, a collage of different media that included interviews with members of the Arab community in Dearborn, MI and a poem about riding the subway after Sept. 11. The piece came to fruition through the University of Michigan’s Arts of Citizenship program, of which he is former director.
As present director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates College, Scobey is working with a group of students in collaboration with a local museum to create an exhibit honoring the experience of Franco-American mill workers in Bates’ hometown of Lewiston, ME. Scobey stressed the importance of collaboration within both projects.
“We create products and insights that none of us could create separately,” Scobey said.
Before his lecture, Scobey spent the day at both the University and the Green Street Arts Center.
“It’s potentially just the kind of ‘third space,’ co-developed by the University and the community, where transformative work can happen that will enrich both Middletown’s North End community and the Wesleyan education,” Scobey said.
The audience of arts and humanities faculty, community partners, and a few students proved highly receptive to Scobey’s ideas. One woman raised her hand at the end simply to thank Scobey for his inspiring lecture. Most of the questions addressed practical ways in which Scobey’s ideas might be applied.
“It was very nice to hear someone talk about interaction rather than just seeing community involvement as going in and fixing whatever problems we see,” said Emily Sheehan ’10.
The lecture mostly addressed institutional changes, and thus the faculty who might make them possible. Yet the students who did attend were impressed.
“I think this is definitely going to give me some added inspiration to figure out what I owe the Middletown community or what I can learn from the Middletown community, and I hope to begin that process soon,” said Ari Tolman ’10.
Scobey came to the University after meeting Pamela Tatge, director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts, and Rob Rosenthal, director of the University’s Service Learning Center, part of the Center for Community Partnerships, at a consortium of over 70 colleges called Imagining America. Imagining America is committed to work in public scholarships in the arts and humanities.
Tatge and Rosenthal invited Scobey to lecture as part of a series co-sponsored by their respective organizations entitled Scholarship and Action: The Case for Engagement. Nancy Cantor, president of Syracuse University, whom Tatge and Rosenthal also met at Imagining America, gave the series’ keynote address in November. The three subsequent speakers, Scobey being the first, each represent one of the University’s academic divisions. Tom Hayden will speak in March on behalf of the social sciences. The speaker for April, representing math and natural sciences, is yet to be announced.
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