Spring 2005
What's
at Stake
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"We
have a duty to bring our people of California up to the highest
educational caliber possible so that they, in turn, can create
an economy and a research environment … that will give
back to the community and will encourage the community to
grow more."
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—
Richard S. Ziman
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Garrett: I’d
like to broaden the conversation beyond this important nexus between
science and entrepreneurship by asking Ian Krouse to talk about
the importance of UCLA’s enormous footprint in the public
arts, not only to our students and faculty, but also to the community
at large.
Krouse: The arts
can play a major role in the way in which UCLA relates directly
to the community. We have two different faces to the arts within
our university. We have the wonderful UCLA Live performing-arts
apparatus, which is a world-class enterprise and something we can
be proud of. And there is the academic face, the work we do in the
classroom with our faculty and our students. I think this is an
area where we can put more emphasis on creating a public face in
terms of presenting the wonderful things that we are doing in the
arts in the academic realm. I think that we can build bridges to
other viable and substantial institutions in our area — the
Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Opera, for example.
We have done a good job already in building bridges to community
arts organizations. There’s a long history of that at UCLA,
and we can look to build even more substantive relationships in
the future.
I’d like to share a personal example of a project that could
not have existed without UCLA, the premiere of a new opera about
the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It
began some 20 years ago when I was a graduate student doing work
with a small theater in East Los Angeles. Who knew then what this
project would ultimately evolve into? I wasn’t thinking at
that time about building bridges to the community; I was simply
a graduate student trying to launch my career. But the thing grew
and has waited 20 years for the opportunity to finally gel, and
the catalyst for that is UCLA. Our unique positioning in our community,
the quality of the students from many different departments, the
support for the arts that has been funneled into this project —
it’s a wonderful opportunity to showcase the potential for
UCLA to build these kinds of bridges that I spoke of.
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