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."

— Richard S. Ziman

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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