The Curb Center at Vanderbilt will host a small research conference on “The Creative Campus” to be held at the University from the afternoon of Friday, November 10th through Saturday, November 11^th, 2006.  The conference, which is supported by the Ford and Teagle Foundations, and co-hosted by the University of Texas at Austin and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, will engage forty distinguished scholars, artists, arts administrators and university leaders to examine key questions about the complex relationships between creativity, the arts, and higher education. 

 Investigation of this subject began at the 104^th American Assembly at which professionals in the arts and in higher education explored the topic of  “The Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education.”  Click here to read the  final report from the meeting at the American Assembly.

 In spite of the rich and fertile relationship between the arts and the academy over the past 150 years, the Assembly amply demonstrated that the interconnections between them remain under appreciated, under analyzed, and insufficiently exploited.  Assembly participants noted the acute need for knowledge and information on topics ranging from the creative experiences of students and the creative climate of campuses to the quality of educational offerings in the arts, the role of resident and visiting artists and the connections among the campus-based arts and the economy, the local community and other disciplines on campus.  It is this gap in understanding that the forthcoming Creative Campus Research Conference at Vanderbilt University is intended to address.  

 Five separate working groups of scholars will meet together for a day prior to the arrival of the plenary participants on Friday afternoon.   Titles of the five working groups are Artistic Expression, Social Capital, and Cosmopolitanism;  Cultural Participation, Learning, and Campus Engagement; The Creative Campus Dividend:  The Economic Consequences of Sustaining, Training, and Presenting the Arts; Mapping the Creative Campus:  Understanding Connections and Networks; and Assessing the Creative Campus. Each working group will report its findings and ideas to the full plenary group on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, The plenary participants will be charged with interrogating the ideas generated by the working groups, identify additional areas of concern or interest and refine the questions that will animate the final meeting report. We expect the final report to generate considerable attention and discussion across the higher education and the arts community and to stimulate new resources to pursue the most promising areas of research.