Creativity: The Open Dance at Dartmouth

An extraordinary combination of diverse individuals and circumstances has made Dartmouth College, an institution steeped in tradition, amenable to change. This is its history and destiny, to preserve the old and place it at the service of the new . . .

In the last stanza of his famous poem, "Among School Children," William Butler Yeats combines three images: a tree, stationary but blossoming; a body in movement; and a disembodied glance. The stanza begins, as stanzas often do, with an apostrophe, the poetic device which allows a person to address a tree: O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Dance and tree, each familiar and ordinary, but each radically different from the other, combine to create a vision of unity so perfect that it is impossible to separate trunk from root or blossom, dancer from dance, or words from music and meaning. Language, imagery, and vision have merged indissolubly in the stanza, while the stanza has blended into the poem, now complete and inseparable from its language and form. In "Among School Children" Yeats has achieved the perfect unity which haunted him as a human ideal.

Acclaimed one of the great poets of this century, Yeats possessed the power to make out of words, ordinary words accessible to anyone, consummate works of art. Like the dancer in his poem, he is to be gazed at and wondered over; and he too raises questions. The most searching questions, those which would penetrate the mysteries of human creativity, may be unanswerable. Still they must be asked, especially in a college of liberal arts where the accumulated products of human creativity pass from one generation to the next as a cultural heritage. Where do they come from, works of art as original and different as Yeats's poem, Dvorak's "New World Symphony," Georgia O'Keeffe's "Black Iris," or scientific concepts as fundamental as Einstein's relativity, and centuries earlier, Copernicus's heliocentricism? What social conditions nurture creativity such as this and of such diverse kind? Is the creative process in science different from that in the arts, as the scientist Thomas Kuhn claimed; or, as others believe, are the same steps necessary to achieve Madame Curie's discoveries and Sappho's plangent love songs?

These questions came to mind as Dartmouth College celebrated the successful conclusion of its five-year Campaign. Having been asked during this celebration to consider how academic life can foster creativity, I offer only general guidelines, some open-ended principles. No one should give categorical prescriptions, since no one knows how formal education and creative work are related. Yeats suggested in "Among School Children" that they may be incompatible, for when the poet visits a classroom, the center of an institution of learning, he poses fundamental questions by his incongruity. Here where children learn "to be neat in everything," what place is there for the "disorder born of chance" a surprisingly desirable disorder which makes possible the "unexpected combinations" of a creative work? Yeats's poem, with its unique and surprising juxtapositions, abounds in such combinations. The mathematician Henri Poincare (whom I have just quoted) said that he discovered his theorem on the Fuchian functions through two antithetical modes of creative activity; one was orderly, conscious, controlled at will; and the other, beyond control, unconscious, and disorderly. Each was necessary, though together they seemed incompatible. The question posed by the poet in the classroom focuses upon this incompatibility: how can a college, which must meet the needs of institutional life, provide a milieu that will foster creativity?

Institutions require "neatness." Their life is run by rules and routine. They are prejudiced against exception. They support and are supported by tradition. Insofar as creativity originates something new, it disrupts an established order, and the more daring, in- novative, and unexpected the creative act, the greater its pressure against the traditions it may finally subvert. Galileo subverted a way of seeing the world. At the most, creative genius produces a new vision of life, while classroom teachers re-produce and pass on visions received from the past. How can an educational institution cope with this tension between stability and change, neatness and disorder, (re)production of the past and creativity for the future?

The question might lead naturally to an examination of teaching methods, academic programs, admissions policy, to particulars dealt with here only indirectly. What can be said about them is implicit in statements about the underlying values and pervasive atmosphere of an institution which would foster creativity as a way of life. This does not mean arts and crafts at Dartmouth. Nor does it, at an opposite extreme, imply a manipulation of means that will end in the graduation of future Einsteins or of (some will say, heaven forbid!) future Gertrude Steins. Geniuses are few, needless to say, but a human potential for creativity is universal. This potential may be thwarted or stifled, though as "a physiological need," it may not be extinguished. The anthropologist I. Bronowski claimed that creation is "a natural, human, living act" and that the potential for creation is inexhaustible. The question is how to realize this potential to its fullest as a matter of principle, of policy, and of practice.

Human beings cannot create something out of nothing. Unlike God, we need material and methods for molding it into an object or performance. Tangible materials are the easiest for students to receive: books in the library; vials and chemicals in the laboratory; paints and brushes in the studio. Hopkins Center is a visible hub of creativity, its work-rooms, seen through large windows, crowded with canvases, tools, scaffolds, sewing machines, soldering irons, variegated cloth for costumes, musical instruments and more. Here the excitement of creativity is palpable and the inspiration alive, personified by instructors who demonstrate their commitment to the making of something new by applying the arts they teach. One actually sees the processes and products of creativity at Hopkins Center. Such display, we must realize, is vital, since exhibition is a form of institutional endorsement. That is why the College needs buildings like the Hop and the new Hood Museum, the sculptures on its campus, those controversial iron swings and grassy pyramids, and its famous Orozco murals.

Unseen by the human eye, but nonetheless on exhibit, are the intellectual propositions that circulate in the classroom. Here creativity is displayed with dazzling variety in the shaping of ideas about the physical world, scientific ideas; about realms beyond the physical, or philosophy; about abstract mathematical relationships, human interactions, and ultimate things, or religion. All the knowledge that the humanities and sciences have accumulated over centuries has become an intellectual legacy handed down from one generation to the next in the classroom. This transmission of received knowledge is the traditional function of a college as an institution of higher learning. In sociology, the term institution means well-established, structured, and integral to a culture. Obviously, institutions maintain stability; oddly enough, they also support the creative act. For every new concept comes into being as a response to received tradition. It seems tautological to say that the new resists it modifies or subverts the old. Inversely, the old provides a groundwork for creativity. Freud had to know traditional medicine before he could dream of psychoanalysis; Einstein had to learn Newtonian physics in order to conceive of relativity; and the iconoclastic artists of the Impressionist movement received training in the classic traditions they shattered.

Educating for creativity means, then, cultivating a certain kind of mind: one that accepts facts but doubts their ultimate truth by recognizing their factitiousness; that respects the traditions from which it may depart; that admires the past but sees a necessarily discontinuous future. Discontinuity, disruption, and doubt are elements intrinsic to creativity, if by that we mean bringing into being something hitherto unknown and unimagined. Doubt was essential to Einstein's creativity. Apparently he had trouble with the obvious; he could not take for granted what everyone knew to be true. When knowledge becomes utterly familiar, it probably needs refashioning. Even the oldest and most traditional building on campus has submitted to new times and renovation. The ideas exchanged in 105 Dartmouth Hall should be as up-to-date as its new gloriously red upholstery.

"My mind works in idleness," Virginia Woolf once remarked: "To do nothing is often my most profitable way." Profit has seldom been attribut- Ed to idleness, arid certainly not by the leaders of industry. Industry values organized and consistent work, as do educational institutions. Students and faculty at Dartmouth are expected to be industrious, but if they are sometime to be inventive or original, they must be allowed the requisites for creativity, which differ radically from those for production. At the root of one is inefficiency; of the other, apparent waste. Isaac Newton seemed to be wasting time as he lay fatefully under an apple tree. Efficiency experts would have called him back to work. They would have done the same with Walt Whitman when he announced, "I loafe and invite my soul." Efficiency matters most to those who produce or more accurately, reproduce the same thing. As the educator George Stoddard said in a speech on creativity and education, "We should not forget that the wonderful efficiency of the oyster succeeds only in producing more oysters." Obviously, we like the sameness of oysters when we are eating them, but we look for a pearl in the non-conformist. Time unstructured time allows for the creative work that Einstein called "combinatory play," a wonderfully apt phrase which suggests reasons for a periodic concern with the Dartmouth calendar. We tinker with time-schedules so that students will have idle moments to play not only with each other (in games for which the College is well known), but also with ideas. The best of Dartmouth plans would oscillate work with short lapses into idleness which we can properly call study-periods.

These would be periods also for dreaming, when the unconscious, a primal source of creative turmoil, can carry on its unpredictable work. Unpredictability may be another term for inspiration, that epiphanic moment of insight which comes unexpectedly and reveals something in a profoundly new light. Such creative moments seem to occur with the randomness inherent in life itself. If Darwin is correct, our destiny as a race has been decided by myriad random encounters, the "accidental variations" of quixotic human genes. Unpredictable variations would be minimized or, ideally, eliminated in the most efficient and economical of systems. But creative minds and creative products are unique and therefore misfits in a mass economy. The more economical, efficient, and controlled a system, the less amendable to creative happenstance. In a totally efficient laboratory, penicillin would never have been discovered. "Chance and the prepared mind": Louis Pasteur's formula for the creative moment combines conscious work with unconscious play. Leopold Stokowski phrased the formula in different terms when he combined "talent" as his unpredictable variable with "study, study, study." An educational institution has no trouble scheduling time for study, but it must also allow latitude for the play of talent without which the inspired creative moment cannot occur. Such moments would be discouraged in a college that has tightened its controls by demanding conformity (in the name of economy), rote performance (or reproduction), and binary decisions (answers that are right or wrong). Ambiguous or murky areas of knowledge are the most intellectually exciting, though the most risky to travel. They offer the greatest possibilities for the chance encounters which a prepared mind may turn into discovery.

As a movement into the unknown, research is a form of discovery in which the College can invest with an easy mind, knowing it will yield profits beyond the intrinsic value of seeking and finding. When the College supports the research of its faculty, it enhances their prestige and its own reputation, as well as its power to attract those it desires. It also provides its students with open-ended benefits. They may be the first to gain from the results of their professors' work by acquiring new concepts and techniques. They may also gain a new understanding of courage. Dartmouth students know that courage is required on the football field; they can learn that it is needed in the laboratory or studio where one comes face to face with uncertainty. To attempt something new means living precariously. Isadora Duncan described herself in a "state of complete suspense" as she worked uncertainly toward and waited for cre- ative fulfillment. Until this fulfillment comes, one engages in explorative activity without knowing where it will lead. Some love this involvement with the unknown. They find it adventurous. Picasso set out for untraveled territories with the zest of a conquistador: "The world is open before us [he said], everything is still to be done, and not to be done over again." His friend Gertrude Stein was delightfully matter-offact in pointing to the unknown in writing: "If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation." Robert Frost agreed, saying "Every poem is a voyage of discovery." Research at its most creative, as it took place in Curie's laboratory or Picasso's studio, requires adventurous daring as well as discipline, both forms of courage which can en-courage the young.

Wy do I get my best ideas while shaving in the morning?" Einstein is purported to have asked. One fathomable reason may be that he was alone. Creative people must be alone; and often when they seem eccentric or withdrawn, they are merely trying to protect the solitude they need for their work. Much as the College values community, it must also encourage students not to denigrate solitude or fear it as a loss of popularity. Rather, solitude may be the necessary condition for the development of a creative self a self which must be differentiated from others.

Differentiation and the diversity it produces are absolute prerequisites for creativity of any kind. To create means to choose and to combine, actions which can be carried out only in the presence of elements diverse enough to make choice possible and combination significant and new. Not even Beethoven could have composed a song on a piano with eighty-eight identical keys. Nor could Shakespeare allowing for anachronism have created a sonnet on a typewriter with all forty-five letters the same capital I. Every I requires a They, the dialectics of difference having been structured into human society. As a social setting, the classroom requires diversity. A room full of clones would represent the last entropic stages of an educational institution running down, dying of uni- formity. Intellectual power, like physical energy, is generated by differences. This is not to deny the attraction of like for its own kind. Mix and match, an appropriate motto for any college, describes the double need for difference and conformity. Each achieves definition only in the presence of the other. On the campus Green, the cluster of white buildings about Dartmouth Hall forms an architectural and aesthetic unit by contrast with Rollins Chapel, Baker Library, and across the way, Hopkins Center. Simply put, the College must have a student body and a faculty as diversified as its buildings, its academic programs, its athletics. A football field populated only with linesmen or quarterbacks would be unimaginable as would the stands if they were filled, like oyster buckets, with replicated figures.

Yesterday, Dean Rusk spoke in Spaulding Auditorium; today, an English actor, Anthony Quayle. Different as each is from the other, both are examples of "the creative, innovative thinkers" brought to the Dartmouth campus through the Montgomery Endowment. Like other imaginative gifts by alumni, this Endowment has enormously enriched the College routine by introducing the unexpected in the form of a lively and variegated parade of distinguished visitors. The list of Montgomery Fellows is dazzling, including Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer and diplomat; Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel-prizewinning biologist; Arnold Jiang, Chinese scholar; Toni Morrison, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut; and, among others, a medieval scholar, a labor historian, a journalist, and a former American president, Gerald Ford. Meanwhile, the Class of 1930, sponsoring its own lecture series, played host to Judge Sandra O'Connor. Other imaginative gifts have diversified and enriched campus life in other ways. The Geisel Third Century Professorship has fostered pedagogical innovations, having been designed to encourage research in new ways of teaching and in new kinds of courses. As a res ult, students have the benefit of spec ial services (such as those provided by the Resource Center for Writing), while faculty members have profited through a mix and match of disciplines within a variety of University Seminars. Interdisciplinary exchange among professors helps promote the interdisciplinary programs which introduce students to new and creative ways of viewing complex issues. Another evidence of a commitment to diversity is concrete; the pun insinuates itself as one looks at Collis Center and the Faculty Club, or the Hood Museum and the Rockefeller Center new buildi ngs as different in purpose and design as Kiewit, the Hop, and Leverone Field House.

Most visitors to Dartmouth College take away with them a picture of harmony. I began with harmony as an ideal that was both desired and realized in Yeats's poem "Among School Children." I should add that the poem did not achieve this ideal easily. It struggled through disorder and discord before it could reconcile poet and classroom in a final image of unity. I conclude with this image because it suggests a way of summarizing these necessarily inchoate thoughts about creativity at Dartmouth.

Dance a metaphor for unity in Yeats's poem combines structure and freedom, both essential, I have argued, to creative activity. Dance expresses joy in movement even while, and probably because, it places the body in precarious balance. Dance is beautiful. It may seem surprising that Poincare declared an "esthetic sensibility" crucial to creative work in mathematics: "all real mathematicians," he said, respond to "the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and form, of geometric elegance." Beauty, emotional intensity, concentrated study, training, and knowledge of tradition, improvisation and responsiveness to chance, the precariousness and delight of discovery the list makes dance an extraordinarily suggestive metaphor for creativity. I shall stop short, however, by noting only one other relevant aspect openness to multiplicity. Out of different movements and diverse figures, often opposed to each other, dance makes a unity so integral that it seems, like the poem's great chestnut-tree, a work of nature rather than of art. Usually, the art which creates a harmonious campus life goes unnoted. It should be celebrated now as Dartmouth marks the end of a long Campaign which required for its success contributions of many different kinds by many diverse people. This diversity represents the College's strength and beauty, and its potential for fostering creativity within an institutional structure. All who are part of this structure students, alumni, faculty, administrators, staff, trustees must keep in step with each other in order to create an essential unity. The basic steps may be set to traditional tunes but we are not lockstepped. We have the freedom to improvise new movements, to effect change. An extraordinary combination of diverse individuals and circumstances has made Dartmouth College, an institution steeped in tradition, amenable to change. This is its history and destiny, to preserve the old and place it at the service of the new new ideas, new works of art, new technological inventions, perhaps even a new vision of life. If its future is to create such possibilities, the "dance" at Dartmouth must be open. We are choreographing not only for the classroom, but for the wide world beyond. For as Erich Fromm concluded, after he pondered like Yeats the problems of the classroom, "Education for creativity is nothing short of education for living."

Hopkins Center isa visible hub of creativity, its workrooms crowdedwith canvases,tools, scaffolds,arid more.

Discontinuity, disruption, and doubtare elements intrinsic to creativity. . . .When knowledgebecomes utterly familiar, if probablyneeds refashioning.

An educational institution has no trouble schedulingtime for study, butit must also allowlatitude for the playof talent withoutwhich the inspiredcreative momentscannot occur.

Creative peoplemust be alone; andoften when theyseem eccentric orwithdrawn, theyare merely trying toprotect the solitudethey need for theirwork.

Blanche Gelfant, who received herPh.D. at the University of Wisconsin, isthe Robert E. Maxwell '23 Professor inthe Arts and Sciences at the College.Prof. Gelfant's remarks were originallymade in April 1983 in a seminar oncreativity celebrating the successfulcompletion of the Campaign forDartmouth.