Crisis on Campus by Mark C. Taylor

Author:Mark C. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307594600
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-10T10:00:00+00:00

This course cut across as many disciplinary boundaries as possible—class discussions probed works of philosophy, literature, art, economics and even biology. While the course as a whole has an integrity, different parts could be connected with courses in other departments. I invited a colleague from the economics department to discuss with the class how new financial instruments like derivatives related to these issues; a biology colleague helped us consider the implications of genetic engineering and cloning vis-à-vis natural organisms.

The course also bridged the divide between the academic and nonacademic worlds with two field trips. We attended an exhibition on the practice of appropriation in postmodern art and photography at the nearby Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Later in the semester we visited the restoration laboratory of the Clark Art Institute, where students learned about the scientific methods used in restoring artworks. The director of the lab, who made his reputation restoring a famous Jackson Pollock drip painting that was badly damaged in a fire, gave a fascinating talk about the legal and ethical issues involved in art restoration. What are the limits of restoration? Who determines those limits? When does the original disappear and the restoration become the work of art? When the restoration is complete, whose name goes on the work? He concluded by admitting that he took great pride in the fact that the most sophisticated computer analysis could detect no difference between his drips and Pollock’s. I knew students understood what I was trying to teach them when a young woman asked, “So is the copy as good as the original and if it is, who is the artist?” I also invited a journalist, who discussed several much-publicized plagiarism cases. He explained how digital technologies and the proliferation of news outlets on cable TV and the Internet complicate questions of authorship and ownership of intellectual property. I arranged a visit by the head of the New York City Waterfront Commission, which is responsible for controlling the traffic in counterfeits and fakes. With suitcases filled with hot loot and a PowerPoint designed to shock, the police officer opened students’ eyes to a vast global underworld network dealing not only in watches and fashion but more dangerously in currencies, pharmaceuticals and automobile and airplane parts.

The final assignment for the course was to create an analytic treatment of the issues we had been studying in multimedia projects that were designed for the Web. Students learned the necessary skills in a weekly media lab that was designed and taught by other students. These projects were not supposed to be merely a visual display of information, but were required to present arguments using words, images, video, sound and, above all, design. Working collaboratively in groups of three or four, students created impressive explorations of advertising and fashion, artificial intelligence, digital biology and hedge funds, as well as massive multiuser online games.

All of these projects required students to work across a range of disciplines as they never before had done. They also learned

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