We were putting the “finishing touches” on the Creative Research Center site the other day (and I place those two words in quotes, because on the Web, as my colleague, Cindy Meneghin likes to say, nothing is ever truly finished and everything can always be changed), when a fellow-professor asked me if there would ever be any “real” events sponsored by the CRC (and I put\u00a0that\u00a0word in quotes\u2026well\u2026for obvious reasons).<\/p>\n
To which I replied, of course there will be \u2013 starting with our\u00a0Post-9\/11 World Symposium<\/a> here on campus in the Fall of 2011.<\/p>\n As a matter of fact, the origins of the Creative Research Center were most definitely real.<\/p>\n When the Deans in the College of the Arts — Geoffrey Newman, Ronald Sharps and Linda Davidson \u2013 first came to me and asked if I would like to take on the CRC, I leapt at the chance. Especially when they told me it was meant to be something different for Montclair State University, and that I would have to “think outside the box.” I gently reminded Geoff, Ron and Linda that in order to do so, you still need a box beyond which to think.<\/p>\n Once we recovered from the giddy vertigo generated by that exchange, we realized we all desired a new initiative originating in our College, by and for the Montclair State community and beyond, that would reflect the momentous sea-change taking place in American higher education and the culture at large.<\/p>\n That change is evident in many ways\u2026<\/p>\n \u2026by a multiplicity \u2013 more like a\u00a0deluge\u00a0— of media choices in our daily lives; a plethora of sensory distractions (or entertainments, depending upon your point of view); inconsistent and deficient resources, both natural and commercial — such as environmental purity, jobs and money, to name a few essentials; and rapidly-expanding, redefined marketplaces of ideas and commodities.<\/p>\n The Creative Research Center has been launched as a virtual place to respond to these changes.<\/p>\n You are inside it by virtue of reading this blog.<\/p>\n It has taken more than a year of endless labor, reading, cogitation and conversations, as reflected on the\u00a0Who We Are<\/a> and\u00a0Living Document<\/a> pages; of countless appointments and visits and 5:00 a.m. emails and phone calls and tweaks and Web-rhetoric debates and editorial give-and-take and emotional investment by dozens of caring and committed people, in order to “birth” the Creative Research Center.<\/p>\n Looking back, I see how the CRC sensibility has evolved from those embryonic brainstorming sessions.<\/p>\n We are now in an entrepreneurial and curatorial mode. This has special meaning for me, as vividly described recently by noted critic Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art. He says that a true curator is “somebody who pumps a lot of energy into a situation\u2026who expresses interest in\u00a0other people\u00a0and brings good things out of them\u2026[with] the ability to generate excitement, to focus attention and stir things up in a positive way.”<\/p>\n “We need\u00a0animators,” Storr insists \u2013 and if I could wish more than anything for the future of the new CRC, it would be this quintessential quality.<\/p>\n As exemplified in all three of the words in our title, the\u00a0Creative Research Center\u00a0wants to feature and spotlight the works of others, including our most precious resource, our students; and encourage collaborations across disciplines and schools of thought.<\/p>\n We respect the persistent distinctions between fields \u2013 after all, this\u00a0is\u00a0a University \u2013 while, at the same time, will freely explore the humanistic qualities that unite all of us.<\/p>\n And remember: The extent to which the CRC lives up to its imaginative and intellectual ideals depends upon\u00a0you, our visitors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We were putting the “finishing touches” on the Creative Research Center site the other day (and I place those two words in quotes, because on the Web, as my colleague, Cindy Meneghin likes to say, nothing is ever truly finished and everything can always be changed), when a fellow-professor asked me if there would ever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-director-s-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}