The fluidity of disciplines, part deux

The University of Kansas today announced it would revamp its school of fine arts. The move creates a new school of music as a standalone unit but pushes the remaining departments into a new School of the Arts…..ok, the words ‘shuffle’, ‘deckchair’ and ‘Titanic’ might come to mind but I suspect there is a little more to this than meets the eye. The leadership at UK impresses me from past experience and I doubt this move is just a simple reorganization of units to ease budgetary controls. The push for arts education in more majors, if nothing else, will increase the appreciation of creativity and exploration in problem solving and might help future citizens develop a tolerance lacking in business education, oh, just to pick an example. That said, the press release does remind me of that line from Deep Purple’s Made in Japan (1973!!!!) where Ian Gillan asks the soundman, “Can we have everything louder than everything else?”