In his monthly op-ed for the Daily Cal, Chancellor Dirk highlights exposure to the arts as central to the undergraduate experience.
Academic study and practice in arts and design fields can have an incredible impact on our work…as well as in our lives. These disciplines encourage creativity and imagination, expose people to new ideas, bring different cultures and viewpoints into dialogue, provide opportunities for performance and self-expression and much more.
They are also important — and this, in my view, is of greatest significance — because they let us tap into and explore what it means to be human. The arts express and examine the joys and the sorrows, the beauty and yet, also the tragedies that are part of the world in which we live and the role we humans play within it. Where would our society be without the aesthetic dimension of life centering on form, image, language, movement, narrative and expression? Without art, we would cease to be human.