“New Eyes” Redux
A little over seven years ago, when I was inaugurated as Denison’s nineteenth president, I had the opportunity to invoke a few words that many Denisonians may recognize. I took my cue from a short passage written by French novelist Marcel Proust, inscribed on a memorial stone inlaid in the sidewalk halfway up “the Drag” that ascends the hill from the heart of Granville: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
In my eighth year at Denison, I am more convinced than ever that the mission of the college and its liberal arts and science curriculum is to help young men and women look at the world with new eyes and acquire the habit of refreshing their vision throughout life. Having “new eyes” is having the capacity to make beneficial adjustments in careers, relationships, and communities. Being able to look at the world from different and renewed perspectives helps us be fully human. It is what we strive for in a Denison education.
Each discipline and division of the college shares equally in the process of providing our students with the tools to look at the world from a different angle. The social sciences offer ways at looking at the patterns in human relationships–cultural, political, transactional, and economic. The humanities plant us in other people’s shoes through history, literature, and languages and give us ways of processing experience through philosophy and religion. The natural sciences provide insights into the building blocks and organization of matter, life, and energy. And the fine arts offer ways of expressing emotion, sharing meaning, and representing interior and exterior realities. All of these, metaphorically at least, give students new eyes on themselves, their experiences, and their world.
Lately, the visual and performing arts at Denison particularly have held my attention–and, serendipitously, this issue of the college magazine devotes many of its pages to the engagement of Denison and Denisonians with the arts and entertainment. You may be surprised to discover how prominent the arts are in the Denison curriculum and in the academic experience of all of our students. In recent semesters, the department with the largest annual course enrollment is Music. And Art joins Music in the top seven departments in annual enrollments. There are many fine arts majors at Denison, of course, and the number has been growing. In fact, about one of every eight graduates completes a degree in music, art, theatre, cinema, or dance. Some of these will pursue careers in the arts but, as is typical for all major fields of study at a liberal arts college like Denison, many and maybe even most will scatter into careers in education, medicine, government, business, and public service. The college is not a trade school in any of its divisions.
Clearly, if one-eighth of our students are majoring in the fine arts, others must be enrolled in arts courses in order to propel two departments into enrollment leadership. Lots of others! In fact, so many non-majors enroll in fine arts courses that 20 percent of all of the enrollments in Denison courses are in the classes of the division’s five departments. The General Education requirements of the college which affect students in all majors obviously plays a role in this. So convinced is our faculty of the value of the “new eyes” provided by the visual and performing arts that they have retained a long-standing multi-course requirement in the arts for all Denison men and women. But that alone doesn’t explain the pattern of enrollments. Students themselves perceive how the arts can enrich their lives now and beyond college.
At Denison, our performing ensembles in music and dance are full of students pursuing major fields of study throughout the college, and, consequently, we have wider participation in performance than ever before. A violinist in our Denison Orchestra may be a pre-med chemistry major, a singer in the Gospel Choir a major in economics, a performer in contemporary dance a student focusing on communications, or an actor on the Ace Morgan Theatre stage projecting a career in law. Instrumental music alone involves dozens if not hundreds of students in orchestra, string chamber ensemble, Latin jazz percussion ensemble, bluegrass ensemble, jazz ensemble, jazz combo, wind ensemble, and woodwind chamber ensemble. Singers engage in light opera in the Singers’ Theater Workshop or participate in the large concert and gospel choirs and the small, select chamber singers.
So it is in the visual arts as well. I hope you might sometime– perhaps in future pages of this magazine–have the opportunity to see some of the drawings, paintings, sculpture, and film that First Year students submit each summer on the intellectual theme that has been given to the new class to bring focus to its introductory college year. These works demonstrate the artistic talents and interests that so many Denison students bring with them from secondary school and that they frequently seek opportunities to hone in college. For some, a major or even a career in the arts awaits. For the larger number, the opportunity to take a life-enriching interest into adulthood will guide them into classes in drawing and painting, ceramics and sculpture, photography and printmaking, art history, or filmmaking and cinema studies.
Why do we care so much about the visual and performing arts curricula at Denison? It’s all about “new eyes.” It’s all about the purposes of a liberal education.