"On the Importance of the Arts" By Tom Cronin Poets, artists, playwrights, and composers are often sources of truth, order, harmony, and meaning. Artists can unlock our imagination and stir us to pause, think, and reflect. The critically important role of the arts in the academy, as in life, is to enable us to see the world and the human condition differently, and in seeing the world through a particular work of art, to see a truth we might not have understood before. Artists raise questions and compel us to think. The best of poets, for example, have a certain power of observation that can be a remarkable force for good -- and at the very least can jolt us out of complacency. Shelley once suggested that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." This is perhaps why artists and writers have been revered and reviled; they often disturb the peace, they stir passions, they force us to see things differently and they sometimes expose or emphasize nonnegotiable truths at times when we may have lost our way. Composing a sonata, writing a play, painting a painting, or writing a poem forces us to think in alternative ways, to hold different assumptions and to entertain different and often more instructive ways of making connections and ways of looking at things. Imagination and a sense of discovery are often as important as knowledge. Rousseau once said that the world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Creating is a form of play. It is a sensing of the possibilities, it is a free speculation, a learning to be ourselves. "Painting," said Picasso, "is just another way of keeping a diary." Being able to think in different ways and to sense the possibilities may inspire the economist, physicist, and political scientist to see interconnections and hypothesize about variables in ways they may not have considered. The arts can free us to think and dream and sense, and this often proves invaluable. This is why all of us at Whitman encourage students to take courses that will unlock their intuitive and creative impulses. We are fortunate in having dozens of excellent courses and inspired faculty dedicated to this purpose. Whitman also sponsors hundreds of concerts, plays, art showings, film series, workshops and master classes. We are home to the Walla Walla Symphony, the Walla Walla Choral Society, the Columbine Players, and the Walla Walla Jazz Society. Whitman's Harper Joy Theatre and our theatre department carry on the wonderful tradition Rod Alexander and Jack Freimann established. Ours is clearly one of the best liberal arts theatre programs in the West and our students take full advantage of it. Whitman is blessed, too, with an uncommonly able group of musicians -- most of whom are scholar/performers -- and they have handsomely built on Whitman's Music Conservatory heritage. Our small studio art faculty group is noted for pushing their students to distinctive achievements. Sheehan Art Gallery is a jewel at Whitman and provides splendid showings several times a year. We have a one-act play (writing and performance) competition, and countless one-act plays are performed by our Drama Club members throughout the year. We often have as many as 20 musical groups ranging from madrigal singers and student orchestras to informal chamber, jazz, and rock groups put together and led by students. One of our obligations at Whitman, we believe, is to awaken and heighten the aesthetic curiosity in every student -- and to push students not only to appreciate music, art, poetry, theatre and dance but also to try their hand at one or more of the creative arts. In doing this they will doubtless become more free, more natural and they will sense truths and meanings that can be grasped in no other way. The creative arts we practice are of course in many ways merely an apprenticeship -- the larger creative art is how we lead our lives. Back to the President's Homepage