Rudenstine Emphasizes Importance Of Arts, Humanities in Education

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

At a time when the arts and humanities serve increasingly as targets for critics and polemicists, President Neil L. Rudenstine affirmed their value as cornerstones of higher education in a talk Monday at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.

Rudenstine spoke at a forum sponsored by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a federal group charged by President Clinton with investigating the present state of the arts and humanities in America and making recommendations for strengthening their support.

Rudenstine observed that it is impossible to study the arts and humanities without coming to some understanding of the social sciences and natural sciences as well, because one field inevitably touches on the other.

"I believe that we should not draw too firm a line between the humanities and other academic fields of learning," Rudenstine said, mentioning by way of example how a reading of Plato or Aristotle would involve students in exploring subjects such as political theory, law, economics, physics, metaphysics, or even zoology.

"Great humanistic texts, in other words, lead us very quickly outside the realm of the humanities if we want to understand their full significance," he said.

The arts and humanities are essential to a liberal arts education because of their direct connection to human experience, Rudenstine remarked.

"They are in their different ways more directly connected to the actual texture and pattern and flux of human experience," he said. "They are less abstract in certain respects than the sciences, as well as most social sciences. They deal more immediately with the visible, audible, and palpable -- with representations of life as we know it, or as it might be, or as it might at least be imagined."

In conclusion, Rudenstine quoted two short passages, one from Henry James, the other from T.S. Eliot, both concerned in their own way with the effort to enlarge and deepen one's understanding of oneself and the world.

Rudenstine praised the "clarity, honesty, and simplicity" of both writers, their "willingness to peer deeply into experience and the self, offering us ways of questioning and therefore renewing ourselves, knowing our limits but also our capacities. This is especially valuable at a time when many people in the humanities and arts may well be feeling discouraged," he said.

The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities was convened in September 1994 to stimulate private sector support and public-private partnerships for the arts and the humanities and to raise public awareness of the benefits of culture to society. The Committee released its report Creative America in February 1997.

Copies of the report are available free of charge by writing to the President's Committee, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Suite 526, Washington, D.C., 20506. The text of the report is also available on the Internet at http://h-net2.msu.edu/arts.html.

According to Malcolm Richardson, the Committee's staff deputy director, the meeting at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was the latest in a series of public forums to revisit some of the issues discussed in the report and to build pressure for the implementation of the Committee's recommendations.

"The response we're getting on the whole is very good," Richardson said.

One of the Committee's accomplishments, he said, has been the establishment of the White House Millennium Program to mark the beginning of the new millennium with cultural, scholarly, and scientific programs. Bernard Bailyn, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Emeritus, delivered the first lecture in this series when he spoke at the White House on Feb. 11.

In addition to Rudenstine, others who spoke at the forum event on Monday included Daniel Tosteson, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; John Brademas, chairman of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities; John D'Arms, president of the American Council of Learned Societies; William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Harriet Fulbright, executive director of the President's Council on the Arts and the Humanities; Anne-Marie Soullière, director of Fidelity Non-Profit Management Foundation; and Leslie Berlowitz, executive officer of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.