H. Martin Lancaster, President
North Carolina Community College System
Conference on Community Colleges and the Creative Economy
Asheville, North Carolina
November 4, 2004
Thank you. I am delighted to have the honor of welcoming you to this conference and to this beautiful city. While I am a native of the flat fields of North Carolina’s coastal plain, I had the good fortune to marry a mountain girl. I can honestly say I welcome any chance to spend time in Asheville!
Surely this must be the most appropriate place in our state to consider the notion of the creative economy. North Carolina has many towns and cities full of artists and actors and musicians and potters, yet there’s something about Asheville that just breathes creativity.
Perhaps it’s the inspiration from the natural splendor that surrounds us. Perhaps it’s the powerful storytelling genes that run through every segment of the population here. Whatever it is, it has created a downtown with one of our state’s most distinctive skylines and liveliest street scenes; an extraordinary collection of artists and craftspeople who set the standard for excellence and variety; a literary heritage you can experience yourself with a stroll through the Thomas Wolfe Historic Site; and blue grass music everywhere!
According to Americans for the Arts, Asheville ranks in the top 30 among American cities in the percentage of people in its population who make their living in the arts. Next to Asheville on that list is Wilmington, with its big movie industry and 200-hundred plus years of old money and culture; and just above are Atlanta – and New York City! No other North Carolina cities are even close. Pretty good company, I’d say.
And that survey only counts the people in the arts, proper. It doesn’t capture the creative souls at work coming up with distinctive cuisine in the kitchens of world-class resorts, or the scientists puzzling out the next genetic breakthrough in a bio-tech start-up company housed at AB Tech’s new incubator, or otherwise following the demand to "Make It New."
` "MAKE IT NEW." That’s the famous challenge that American poet Ezra Pound gave to his fellow poets several decades ago. He could just have easily been challenging executives or engineers.
- Make It new.
- Think outside the box.
- Build a better mousetrap.
Those are all ways of reminding ourselves of the power of IDEAS…and the absolute necessity of cultivating the habit of originality as we look for ways to move our society and our economy forward.
Our task this week is to marry that mandate to the mission of community colleges so the energy of creativity can help fuel the engine of our economy.
In North Carolina, our community colleges are about the economy. I like to say that the short version of our mission is that we are about JOBS – attracting good jobs with great futures; growing new jobs in new businesses and teaching people the skills they need to get and keep those jobs. That’s why we were founded more than forty years ago, and that’s why we’re in business today.
Fortunately, however, North Carolina’s definition of education for economic growth has always included more than one-dimensional courses in narrow skills. Dallas Herring, our spiritual "godfather," wrote all those years ago that, "The only valid philosophy for North Carolina is the philosophy of total education."
Our system’s focus on the whole person is and always has been a great strength. It is particularly so now, with the tremendous need for job training and re-training occurring at a time when the study of the arts and humanities is often ignored in our pursuit of the dollar. However, there has always been a continuing, creative tension between what we are -- and what we should be.
How easy it would have been to decide 40 years ago that this was an either-or question...either we were technical institutes providing only skills training, or we were junior colleges devoted solely to academics.
How fortunate that the founders of our community college system instead championed the Jeffersonian idea that the most important role of education in a democracy is the creation of citizens who are productive and responsible--capable of earning a living, making informed decisions and stepping into leadership.
Our community college students do indeed acquire the skills they need to land good jobs in today’s high-tech working world. However, they also acquire the fundamental education that underlies good decision-making, flexibility and the desire to keep learning - the surest path to a life that combines a richness of spirit with prosperity and material wealth.
If that philosophy made sense 40 years ago, surely it has the ring of truth today, when all our assumptions about work, security and success have shifted so dramatically.
How much does creativity count in that effort? Today, it counts more than it ever has, because we have learned to our peril that we simply cannot offer the same skills, in the same jobs, in the same industries as we did 40 years ago. The jobs we bought with the promise of low-cost labor for low-paid work are gone to places where desperate people will work for even less. The day of competing with old ideas is over.
We must cultivate the spark of creativity that everyone has and turn it into the habit of originality. A few years ago, I attended a meeting of the Southern Growth Policies Board during which a speaker noted some unusual concerns with current education policy in the US. . He said that US educators are focused …perhaps too focused…now on boosting math and science scores. He cautioned that we should realize that our great competitive advantages in the world marketplace are the unequaled creativity of our workforce and the worldwide admiration of our culture. He said it's easier to boost math scores than to nurture creativity and called for increased attention to the humanities and arts disciplines that help do that.
In community colleges, we must also commit to recognizing that the exercise of creativity is in itself a legitimate way to make a living. It’s indisputable that so much of what makes a place – including our place – a great place to live, work and visit is its distinctive culture, and what is that except the product of creativity?
In our community colleges, we must support artists and thinkers in their work. We must teach the arts across our curriculum. We must sponsor exhibits, performances, festivals, contests and other events founded on creativity as part of our role as "conveners of public life" as envisioned by the Carnegie Commission. And we must make sure that all our students have the opportunity to learn, participate and enjoy.
In North Carolina, we have done some of these things very well. In the System Office in Raleigh, we are gathering submissions for our 8th annual community college art exhibition. I started it right after I returned to North Carolina in 1997, with two goals in mind: first, to provide an engaging, creative workplace for the employees who oversee the colleges; and second, to provide a showcase for the great talent at work in our system. This year, we have more than 120 pieces on display – I can’t imagine what our employees and visitors would think if we ever discontinued it!
One of our outstanding successes in past years was the Visiting Artist Program, a partnership with the North Carolina Arts Council that placed professional artists on our community colleges campuses to practice their arts. I knew that program well as a member of the General Assembly and as chair of the State Arts Council. From the 1970s until funding cuts shut down the program in 1995, hundreds of men and women came to our campuses as Visiting Artists.
To our great benefit, many of them stayed with community colleges, creating fine arts programs where we had none before. A very short list includes singers Philip Evancho at Craven Community Colleges and Kay Crouch at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute; and photographer Cathy Crowell at Carteret Community College.
Others built lasting art institutions in their communities. Here in Asheville, Tim Morrissey continues his work as an innovative theatre director. And we are very proud to claim earth quilter and Handmade in America mainstay Norma Bradley as an alumna!
Still others were already here, carving wood, telling stories, playing music and more. As Visiting Artists, they had a chance to make a living with their creativity and extend their artistry to new audiences.
The Visiting Artist program was a great success. Its loss was a blow. We are working now to try to find a way to restore it, at least in part.
We are also working to boost the skills of artists as entrepreneurs. A creative idea becomes an economic opportunity when it turns into a product that somebody wants to buy. Our colleges approach this from various directions, including their Small Business Centers and the R. E. A. L. program.
One of my favorite success stories is the pottery program at Montgomery Community College. Of course, pottery is a time-honored tradition in Montgomery and neighboring Randolph and Moore Counties. This is the Seagrove area, where the Busbees helped turn Jugtown into a destination for aficionados. In 1982, maybe 15 potteries were operating in that part of the state, almost all of them related to the old pottery families. According to newspaper reports, five years later, there were fifty. Today, there are more than 100 potteries and more than 300 people making their living in those potteries. Montgomery Community College’s exceptional pottery program is one of the most important reasons that Seagrove pottery has grown from a hidden treasure into an economic force. Mike Ferree heads that program, and he makes sure his students learn the craft of fashioning a sturdy, functional pot; the art of making it beautiful and distinctive; and the business of selling it.
Among his alumni are Mark and Meredith Heywood, who founded Whynot Pottery more than 20 years ago. Here's what Meredith says about pottery as a livelihood: "We have to try really hard to name a country where there isn't at least one pot from Whynot Pottery. The incredible thing about that is that every piece went home with someone from that country who came to the Seagrove area to buy pottery. It amazes me that we can sit here in little ol' Whynot, North Carolina, and meet people from all over the world and the reason they are here is that they are interested in pottery."
During the next two days, you will hear plenty of success stories like this from plenty of places. You will wonder, perhaps, why we even have to ask whether support for the creative economy should be a priority in community colleges. The statistics are so obvious. Creative endeavors drive tourism, attract prosperous travelers who spend lots of money, keep residents happy and directly employ many people. Among our colleges, Wilkes Community College does an exceptional job every year in documenting the economic importance of its extraordinary Merlefest. Yet if we’re honest, we’ll admit that we do have to find more ways to convince a significant number of people – including those who decide how to spend tax money – that jobs built on creativity are real jobs that people do when they grow up!
This attitude is certainly not limited to community colleges. It seems to be built into us as Americans. The Presbyterian in me wonders whether it came over on the boat with the followers of John Knox. We have something in our culture that says creativity is fun – and thus it can’t be real work. Work is serious. Fun is frivolous. Creativity is something that a few people do for money, and the rest of us enjoy as spectators and hobbyists.
In this day when our economic survival depends upon our ability to apply "making it new" to our industries, that negative attitude toward creative endeavors makes no sense. The creative spirit is all about finding new ideas; asking new questions; solving puzzles and problems. It’s difficult for me to imagine a more important task for our community colleges than helping creativity thrive.
Earlier I mentioned that I served as Chair of the State Arts Council. Let me close today with a phrase I heard from the lovely lady who was North Carolina’s Secretary of Cultural Resources during my tenure on the Arts Council. She was Sara Hodgkins from Southern Pines, a musician by training. During her tenure, Sara had the occasion to meet composer Gian-Carlo Menotti, founder of the Spoleto Arts Festivals in Italy and in Charleston, South Carolina. Late one night, Menotti was holding forth about what he considered to be gaps in American understanding of the importance of the arts.
Sara remembered that he said: "The trouble with Americans is that you think the arts are an after-dinner-mint! No, no, no! The arts, they are the bread of life!"
Indeed they are, as so many of our communities seek to follow Charleston’s example and turn their distinctive cultures into lasting prosperity.
I thank all of you for your commitment to the nurturing of the creative economy, and I hope that your time here is both productive – and fun!
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