New Liberal Arts: Selected Updates
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Video Literacy
“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.” — Werner Herzog Students of the new liberal arts will need to learn to WATCH and LISTEN all over again. Basic literacy—reading and writing text—is no longer enough. Now, all media is transmitted through the window of a glowing screen. Television and web video have…
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Translation
If there’s anything at all that a modern curriculum should make clear to everyone, it’s that there’s no room for the monolingual any more. Because our modern world is so small today—and by small I mean globalized, rather than parochial, which is another kind of smallness; because in this world it is possible to know…
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Reality Engineering
“I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts.”—Andy Warhol Reality engineering is the study of how “The Real” is manufactured. Previous epochs have approached this discipline with frowning condescension (cf. Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky). We will eschew loaded words like inauthentic, spin, and fake. Instead, our coursework approaches the manufacture of reality…
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Play
Even before we learn to speak, we play. It’s how we begin to explore the world. Games exert a primal power over us; after we’re fed, clothed, and sheltered, we must entertain ourselves. Harness that power, and what might we create? Culture in the information age has taken a sharp turn towards play. Corporations seeking…
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Photography
FROM THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS FOR THE COLLEGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Apart from the exact sciences, nothing has transformed the idea of the liberal arts as profoundly as PHOTOGRAPHY—which enables not only the recording of still and moving images, but also their reproduction, transmission, and projection onto a page or screen. The classical liberal arts are arts…
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Negotiation
“Do you know what astonished me most in the world? The inability of force to create anything.”—Napoleon Bonaparte Negotiation is the art of reconciling differences without resorting to political, economic, or physical force. Negotiation is more than getting the other to give you what you want; it means understanding that other, in the full complexity…
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Myth and Magic
From Dionysus to David, Kali to Kerridwen: Since the beginning, people have created stories to explain, explore, and celebrate nature and the human condition. Similar themes and tropes—the Sun God, hair as sacred, cleansing rituals—have emerged in places as far apart as Aboriginal Australia and Aztec South America. Even in today’s age, where science and…
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Micropolitics
You can probably name your head of state, your chief minister of defense, and the main branches of your federal government. But do you know the name of your city manager? The head of your neighborhood association? The neighbor who hasn’t missed a city council meeting since the 1970s? So much of the texture of…
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Marketing
How are ideas sold? The answer to that question is the key to influencing the world. It’s how the popular kids in school sustain their status; how parents, teachers and peer groups affect the behavior of children; how Osama bin Laden draws new recruits into al Qaeda; how Apple launches new products. Ideas succeed not…
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Mapping
“When, for example, I observe an aerial view of the Ile-de-France, I contemplate an unfamiliar agglomeration I’ve never clapped eyes on or set foot on before; and even if the map of Paris is not the same as the urban territory, such cartography is infinitely more precious to me than its view from the air,…