“Creative academic” - an oxymoron?
As an aspiring academic, I ponder a lot the subject of creativity in academia. When you think about it, and define creativity in simplest terms, as the ability to create, academics appear quite creative. They design research studies, produce papers and conference presentations. Share their findings with the world. Organize events. They can trigger an entire machine of events with a single idea. They also love learning. The last two factors are what I’ve always enjoyed about academic studies.
However, I began to gravitate toward creativity because I felt I wouldn’t be able to fully realize it in academia. That it’s even discouraged, to some extent. Academics are encouraged to do things in a certain, prescribed manner. Even novel ideas are frequently investigated using well-established, familiar methods. Despite the efforts to emphasize the multidisciplinarity of research work, moving beyond our area of expertise is difficult. There is no room for personal opinions or expressions in academic discourse, which is based on cool-headed analysis and conservative recommendations.
Today, I reread a paragraph from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way that appears to capture the problem of a lack of creativity in academics that I couldn't articulate well myself:
“It has been my perilous privilege over the past decade to undertake teaching forays into the groves of academia. It is my experience as a visiting artist that many academics are themselves artistic beings who are deeply frustrated by their inability to create. Skilled in intellectual discourse, distanced by that intellectual skill from their own creative urgings, they often find the creativity of their charges deeply disturbing. Devoted as they are to the scholarly appreciation of art, most academics find the best intimidating when viewed first-hand. Creative-writing programs tend to be regarded with justified suspicion: those people aren’t studying creativity, they’re actually practicing it! Who knows where this could lead?”
“Creativity cannot be comfortably quantified in intellectual terms. By its very nature, creativity eschews such containment. In a university where the intellectual life is built upon the art of criticizing - on deconstructing a creative work - the art of creation itself, the art of creative construction, meets with scanty support, understanding, or approval. To be blunt, most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.”
