Barbara Sellers-Young’s “The Value of Arts in Higher Education” belongs to a moment when arts advocacy in the university was becoming newly anxious and newly strategic. By 2009, the familiar humanistic defense of the arts as civilizational inheritance or personal enrichment no longer seemed sufficient within institutions increasingly pressed to justify themselves in managerial, economic, and instrumental terms. Yet Sellers-Young does not simply lament that condition, nor does she capitulate to it. What makes the essay intellectually distinctive is the way it takes up that institutional pressure as a conceptual problem: how might one defend the arts in language broad enough to register contemporary demands for innovation and interdisciplinarity, without reducing artistic practice to market utility? The essay answers by placing two unlike figures—John Dewey and Richard Florida—into a deliberately tense relation, then using that relation to reimagine the arts as a mode of knowledge-making proper to the university.
At first glance, Dewey and Florida seem to offer incompatible rhetorics. Dewey, writing in Art as Experience, insists on the continuity of art and life, on the aesthetic as a mode of inquiry, and on the transformative force of experience for both maker and audience. Florida, in contrast, writes from the landscape of the postindustrial “creative class,” where creativity is recoded as a broad social and economic capacity, one indispensable to “complex problem solving” and innovation. Sellers-Young refuses the easy choice between them. She does not collapse Dewey into Florida’s entrepreneurial vocabulary, nor does she preserve Dewey by treating Florida as a merely regrettable sign of neoliberal times. Instead she asks what becomes visible if one reads them together, carefully preserving their difference. The result is a defense of the arts that is neither purely intrinsic nor merely instrumental. The arts matter because they cultivate a form of thinking able to join “specificity with complexity,” that is, close, situated attention with the capacity to work across systems, disciplines, and scales.
This formulation is characteristic of Sellers-Young’s larger body of work. Across dance studies, performance theory, and somatics, she repeatedly argues that technique is not a neutral skill but a way of organizing perception; that embodied practice teaches relations, not just forms; and that cultural literacy deepens when one confronts the limits of one’s own assumptions. In this essay those commitments are translated into the language of higher education. The university arts are not defended as decorative additions to the “real” work of knowledge, but as disciplines that train kinds of attentiveness and reflexivity other fields need, even when they do not fully name them.
Dewey, reactivated
The essay begins from Dewey because Dewey supplies a philosophical ground richer than the pieties of arts appreciation. Sellers-Young draws from him the proposition that art is not a separated realm of elevated objects; it is a process through which experience is organized, intensified, and made newly intelligible. Art “functioned as an experience,” she writes, “which engaged a process of inquiry that extended connections between various aspects of living.” The phrase matters. Inquiry here is not secondary commentary on an already completed object. It is the activity of making, sensing, relating, and reflecting through which significance emerges.
Sellers-Young emphasizes Dewey’s insistence that artistic practice requires “attention to detail” capable of exciting “the potential for meaning.” This is one of the essay’s quiet but central terms. Detail is not opposed to social consequence; it is the route by which consequence becomes perceptible. One learns, through art, to notice relation, interval, texture, structure, and form—the very things that generalized discourse often misses. In Deweyan terms, such perception alters future action: “The artist and the audience for art were in Dewey’s opinion transformed as they intuited new concepts which influenced future reactions to their environment.” This is an educational claim before it is an aesthetic one. The arts train not only expression but transformed responsiveness.
That transformation is also social. Sellers-Young briefly notes Dewey’s belief that art could help “evolve democratic ideals.” She does not elaborate democracy into political theory, but the point is clear enough in context. If art is continuous with life, and if it reorganizes how people perceive and connect experiences, then it has consequences for participation, judgment, and the shared life of institutions. In this respect the essay’s educational argument is not finally about producing more artists, though it certainly includes artistic formation. It is about producing forms of attention adequate to a complex common world.
Florida and the changed language of justification
Florida enters the essay not as a philosophical equal to Dewey but as the name for a changed cultural conjuncture. Sellers-Young is explicit that his work is “a product of the cyber world and related urban environment,” one in which creativity has been detached from the specialist domain of the arts and generalized into a model of labor. The “creative class,” as she quotes him, consists of professionals who “engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment” and who share a “creative ethos” valuing “creativity, individuality, difference and merit.” Creativity here is no longer exclusively artistic; it names a broader social capacity exercised in technology, entrepreneurship, design, and innovation.
Sellers-Young recognizes the force of this shift. Florida’s important claim, for her purposes, is that the various forms of creativity “are in fact deeply interrelated.” His phrase “cross-fertilization and mutual stimulation” becomes a key hinge in the essay. It licenses a way of speaking to the contemporary university, where interdisciplinarity and innovation are increasingly prized, without conceding that the arts matter only insofar as they imitate the sciences or contribute directly to the marketplace. If technological, economic, and artistic creativity stimulate one another, then arts education can no longer be placed outside the central intellectual mission of the university.
But Sellers-Young is too careful a scholar of culture to let this argument remain innocent. She marks the distinction sharply: “Florida takes the creativity as a specialist practice of the process of an artist and popularizies it as an extension of the notion of innovation.” That sentence is diagnostically precise. Something is gained in this popularization—the social elevation of creativity, new routes of support for arts programs, a broader appreciation of creative process. Yet something is also changed. Creativity becomes aligned with economic success, entrepreneurialism, and the needs of the capitalist marketplace. The arts may thereby receive institutional legitimacy, but at the cost of being spoken for in a vocabulary not wholly their own.
The essay’s intelligence lies in holding this ambivalence rather than resolving it prematurely. Sellers-Young accepts that universities seek “external support, government or private donation,” and that the rhetoric of the “creative economy” has become one means of securing that support. She neither romanticizes refusal nor treats adaptation as transparent. Instead, she asks how the university might use the contemporary prestige of creativity without surrendering the arts’ capacity for critique, reflection, and transformation.
From genre and hierarchy to a media-saturated field
A substantial middle movement of the essay widens the frame by narrating a historical shift in the social position of the arts. In Dewey’s era, Sellers-Young suggests, the arts were more commonly stabilized by inherited classificatory schemes: genre distinctions, hierarchies of “classic” and “folk,” and associations with class or community identity. Those divisions were never natural, and she invokes Joann Kealiinohomoku’s famous argument that ballet itself should be understood as an “ethnic” form—grounded in a specific European class history rather than exempt from cultural particularity. This citation does more than challenge aesthetic hierarchy. It supports Sellers-Young’s larger claim that art cannot be cordoned off from social life, because the categories by which art is sorted are themselves historical and political.
From there the essay moves toward the contemporary world of blurred boundaries and accelerated circulation. The arts are now “noted for a spectrum of possibilities” involving “interaction between classic and contemporary traditions” and “an extended interdisciplinary dialogue across genres.” Appadurai’s account of globalization and “the imagination as a social practice” gives this claim a wider cultural horizon. The world of transnational flows—of people, media, technologies, capital, ideas—is increasingly shaped by images that mediate how places, peoples, and possibilities are imagined. In such a world, the arts are not marginal ornaments to social life. They are implicated in the very production of social imagination.
This is a decisive move in the essay. Arts advocacy often depends on claiming exceptional dignity for art. Sellers-Young instead stresses embeddedness. Because images now help organize social reality itself, the arts become indispensable not as sacred remnants but as practices through which mediation can be understood, contested, and reworked. This argument resonates strongly with her broader scholarship on transnational dance and intercultural performance, where forms never travel as intact essences but are reconstituted through new bodies, institutions, technologies, and fantasies. Here that same insight is applied to the university: the arts teach students how mediated worlds are made.
The arts in the academy: not supplement but method
When Sellers-Young turns directly to the university, she refuses the old division between artistic production and academic knowledge. Citing the “Creative Campus” report, she notes that the fine arts contribute through “research and creative activity, education, and public engagement.” The triad is important. It places the arts alongside other university functions rather than outside them, and it suggests that artistic work can be at once investigatory, pedagogical, and civic.
She then makes a stronger claim: the arts provide both “subjects for learning and ways to learn.” This is a succinct statement of the essay’s central educational intervention. The arts are not only objects of study—paintings, dances, plays, scores, histories—but also procedures of inquiry. Like other disciplines, they have “laboratories and archives”; they develop projects that “explore and advance our ‘ways of knowing.’” The phrase “ways of knowing” is not left abstract. Sellers-Young emphasizes that artistic processes engage sensory, attentional, emotional, cognitive, and motor capacities. When she quotes Eric Jensen’s formulation that these capacities are “the driving forces behind all other learning,” she is broadening the claim beyond disciplinary self-defense. Arts education matters because learning itself is more embodied, integrated, and multimodal than conventional academic structures often acknowledge.
This is one point at which the essay touches a longstanding concern in Sellers-Young’s work: the critique of disembodied knowledge. Elsewhere she would formulate this in overtly somatic terms, arguing that breath, sensation, movement, and imagery are central to cognition. In this article she writes more institutionally, but the underlying conviction is the same. The arts sharpen perception, cultivate reflective responsiveness, and train students in forms of inquiry that cannot be reduced to textual analysis or propositional argument alone.
Her example of Shakespeare is modest but revealing. The plays are artworks; they are also a way to comprehend “the history and cultural politics” of early modern England. This duality models her preferred understanding of arts education. Students should acquire technique and historical context, but also learn “to evaluate not only their personal creative process but the practice of art in society.” Artistic training, in this view, is neither mere craft instruction nor free-floating self-expression. It is an intellectual practice in which making, history, theory, and social analysis continually inform one another.
Against the split between practice and scholarship
The essay’s engagement with Shannon Jackson and Jill Dolan clarifies the institutional difficulty of this position. Jackson’s history of performance in the academy underscores the long tension between the practice of art and the scholarly study of art, a tension crystallized in the separation of the MFA from other academic degrees. Dolan, writing about the “increasingly corporate university,” worries that market logics threaten experimentation, making innovation financially risky and limiting opportunities for emerging artists.
Sellers-Young accepts both critiques. She grants that there is “a discomfort” with seeing the arts as part of a “creative economy affliated with a capitalist market place.” Yet she declines the implication that one must therefore choose between critical integrity and interdisciplinary pragmatism. Her response is the article’s constructive center: an approach she calls “performance as research.”
The phrase has a particular force in Sellers-Young’s hands. It does not mean that performance illustrates a prior argument, nor simply that artworks may be accompanied by scholarly framing. Rather, “the act of creation becomes the initial point of reference.” Knowledge emerges through embodied process, and that process is then brought into dialogue with other analytical frameworks. “Performance as research” thus mediates “between theory and practice in a constant state of discovery,” and it does so “at the intersections of text and the body.” This is one of the essay’s most compact formulations of what artistic inquiry does intellectually.
Seen within Sellers-Young’s career, the phrase is especially significant. Throughout her work, she insists that movement practice generates knowledge inaccessible from an exclusively external vantage. Yet she is equally wary of treating bodily experience as self-sufficient or culturally unmarked. “Performance as research” names a compromise in the best sense: practice leads, but reflection, comparison, history, translation, and collaboration remain essential. The body is not opposed to theory; it is where inquiry begins.
The Plastic Rose Project: misunderstanding as knowledge
The essay’s first case study, the Plastic Rose Project, gives this methodological claim its most precise demonstration. The project involved a 1995 exchange between UC Davis and Kinki University in Osaka, with each institution producing Shogo Ohta’s Shi No Bara (Rose of Death). Students acted, designed, translated, managed, and discussed; performances traveled in both directions; seminars addressed translation, textual interpretation, and cultural context. What interests Sellers-Young is not simply that the project was international. It is that it turned theatrical collaboration into an inquiry into the conditions of understanding.
Her example of the word “interval” is especially telling. In the Japanese context, the term referred to “a moment of stillness between the moments of action in the script.” But the British-trained director of the English-language production understood it as an intermission. The mistranslation is not trivial. It exposes how dramaturgical concepts are sedimented in practice, not merely in vocabulary. A word carries an entire understanding of time, pacing, spectatorship, and performative structure. Translation here becomes a rehearsal of the limits of apparent equivalence.
The discussion of Stanislavski works similarly. Both groups believed themselves grounded in Stanislavskian realism, yet “they each interpreted him differently.” For the Japanese actors, realism was “the physical action derived from the positioning of the character within the culture”; for the American actors, it was “psychological based on the motivation of the moment.” Again, the point is not simply that cultures differ. It is that what appears to be a shared technique is already culturally inflected. Actor training is revealed as a historically situated system of embodiment, not a universal toolset.
This case study condenses several of Sellers-Young’s enduring concerns. First, intercultural exchange is valuable not because it produces immediate harmony or accurate representation, but because it makes assumptions visible. Second, embodied practice discloses what abstract multicultural rhetoric cannot: differences in timing, motivation, stillness, text, and bodily action. Third, media images and curricular simplifications distort understanding. UC Davis students imagined Japanese theatre through Noh and Kabuki; Japanese students imagined Americans through Hollywood. The exchange destabilized both. Students learned that global media offer “a limited view” and that translation requires “an indepth knowledge of the country of origin and the country in which the production will be performed.”
What is finally at stake in this example is self-knowledge through encounter. The dialogue “deepened their knowledge of their personal process,” Sellers-Young writes, and thus enhanced “an individual student’s personal creative process.” This is not a retreat into individualism. It suggests that one becomes conscious of one’s own methods, habits, and assumptions only through embodied negotiation with others. Such a claim would later become central to Sellers-Young’s reflexive and intercultural scholarship, but it is already fully present here.
The Creativity Project: interdisciplinarity beyond slogan
If the Plastic Rose Project explores cultural translation, the Creativity Project examines interdisciplinarity in a stronger, less rhetorical sense. Initiated during Sellers-Young’s tenure at the Mondavi Center, the project was inspired by Richard Florida’s visit and explicitly framed around the broad reach of creativity across the university and surrounding community. But the essay carefully refuses to let “creativity” remain a managerial buzzword. It gives the term substance by locating it in actual collaborations among artists, scientists, technologists, and students.
Merce Cunningham serves as a generative emblem. Sellers-Young describes him as “a human bridge, a living connection between modernism and postmodernism, art and science, intellectualism and spirituality.” The phrasing is expansive but not vague. Cunningham’s work had indeed traversed cognition, Zen Buddhism, kinesiology, motion capture, and computer science. He exemplifies the kind of artist whose process cannot be confined within a single disciplinary frame. In choosing him, Sellers-Young implicitly advances an idea of artistic rigor that is experimental, synthetic, and technologically alert without ceasing to be embodied.
The project’s most sustained example is Della Davidson’s Collapse (suddenly falling down), a work developed in conversation with geologists, physicists, computer scientists, and filmmakers. Here the essay’s argument becomes unusually vivid. The performance drew on Jared Diamond’s account of social and ecological breakdown while incorporating LIDAR-generated 3D images of landslides and erosion. Scientific visualization, allegorical narrative, and bodily action were not simply juxtaposed; they were made to work on one another.
Sellers-Young describes the piece as divided into “three interactive segments”: rotating 3D earth images, a Beckett-like Easter Island narrative about the last tree, and dancers who embodied collapse in states of falling, catching, crumpling, resistance, and rebuilding. Her description of the dancers is notably concrete: one body “overcome by gravity,” another launching herself repeatedly onto the floor, another rebuilding and destroying structures of boxes. This specificity matters. It shows that “collapse” is not treated as a purely thematic concept. It is materialized in weight, locomotion, impact, and effort. The body gives abstraction consequence.
Technology, in this account, is not ornamental spectacle. LIDAR alters perception by making landscape process visible from multiple vantage points. Choreography, narrative, and projection together produce “multiple perspectives on the concept of collapse.” In post-performance discussion, Davidson reports that collaboration with scientists helped her appreciate “the complexity of the human-enviornment dimension and how this dimension is revealed through technology.” The sentence nicely captures Sellers-Young’s broader position on technology, visible in later work as well: technologies can deepen inquiry when they reorganize perception and relation, but they do not supersede embodied understanding. They become part of the ecology of research.
This example also reveals the ethical reach of the article. Interdisciplinarity is not valuable only because it produces novelty. It is needed because contemporary problems—environmental fragility, genocide, globalization, social breakdown—are themselves layered and interconnected. A single disciplinary language cannot hold them adequately. The arts contribute by giving form to complexity: by allowing audiences to apprehend simultaneity, contradiction, affective force, and bodily implication.
Afterlives and institutional form
One of the essay’s most quietly persuasive moves is its attention to aftermath. Sellers-Young notes that collaborations continued after the Creativity Project officially ended. Members of the Cunningham Company worked with animation students around the software Life Forms; dancers and visual artists began exploring reciprocal relations between animation and choreography. This continuation matters because it shifts the defense of the arts away from one-off events and toward institutional culture. The arts generate durable networks of experimentation. They alter how departments imagine their possible interlocutors. In Florida’s vocabulary, one might call this cross-fertilization; in Dewey’s, an extension of experience into future action. Sellers-Young’s point is that arts initiatives can reconfigure the university’s internal ecology of thought.
There is a broader implication here about what a campus can be. The university is valuable not simply as a collection of departments but as a site where diverse “analytical styles” can meet: empirical science, contextual social analysis, humanistic interpretation, and artistic creation. Sellers-Young’s formulation recalls her later commitment to the arts as civic and ecological knowledge. Even in this institutional essay, she understands the campus less as a bureaucracy than as a field of possible encounters.
The activated mind, and the senses of thought
The final movement of the article draws on Henry Giroux and Martha Nussbaum to articulate the educational stakes of this interdisciplinary arts model. Giroux’s emphasis on broad knowledge and critical skills, and Nussbaum’s call for an “activated mind,” help Sellers-Young frame the arts as central to the cultivation of flexibility, self-examination, and responsiveness to interdependence. The “activated mind” is “liberate[d]… from the bondage and habit of custom”; it remains in “an ongoing state of examination of self and the world.” This description could serve equally well for the best outcomes of artistic training.
Yet Sellers-Young does not leave the matter at the level of liberal educational ideals. She returns to what the arts specifically add. Arts-based inquiry helps students “see what they look at, hear what they listen to, and feel what they touch.” It is a memorable formulation, and one that deserves close attention. The phrase is not merely rhetorical. It distinguishes sensation from perception, hearing from listening, contact from felt relation. Arts education, in other words, refines awareness; it trains the passage from raw encounter to attentive apprehension. Such training is both embodied and cognitive, and it stretches “minds and bodies beyond the boundaries of the printed text or the rules of what is provable.”
That last contrast is crucial. Sellers-Young is not dismissing print or proof. She is naming their limits when treated as exhaustive models of knowledge. The arts prepare students for “the ambiguities and uncertainties present in the everyday affairs of human existence.” Freed from “rigid certainty,” students can imagine “multiple solutions to social and technological problems.” The language of ambiguity and multiplicity anticipates much in Sellers-Young’s later work: the insistence that embodied practices cultivate tolerance for uncertainty, that cultural encounter complicates inherited categories, and that creativity lies in adaptive reorganization rather than the repetition of fixed methods.
A pivotal essay in Sellers-Young’s trajectory
Within Sellers-Young’s intellectual development, “The Value of Arts in Higher Education” occupies an important mediating position. It does not have the ethnographic density of her work on ritual in Sudan, nor the sharp anti-Orientalist nuance of her belly dance scholarship, nor the fully elaborated somatic reflexivity of her later autoethnographic writings. But it translates key commitments from all those domains into the institutional language of arts education. One can see, in compressed form, several propositions that would remain central to her oeuvre: art as inquiry; technique as consciousness-forming; cultural exchange as productive unsettlement; interdisciplinarity as necessary but ethically complex; and embodied practice as a mode of knowledge irreducible to abstract discourse.
The essay is also revealing for what it does not do. It does not make the arts valuable by claiming that they are morally uplifting, socially pure, or economically miraculous. Nor does it insist on a fragile autonomy. Instead it argues from implication, relation, and method. The arts are enmeshed in media, institutions, technologies, and market pressures; they may be recruited by the language of innovation; they may sit uneasily within the corporate university. But precisely because of that, they are needed as sites where students learn to navigate mediation, ambiguity, collaboration, and the coexistence of multiple frameworks.
One can hear in this argument the mature Sellers-Young view that bodies never encounter the world from nowhere. A student in the theatre, dance, or visual arts studio is learning more than skill. She is learning how perception is organized, how categories fail, how collaboration exposes assumption, how technologies reframe embodiment, and how knowledge changes when one must make it with others. “Performance as research” becomes, in this sense, less a niche methodological slogan than a proposition about the university itself: that making and thinking need not be opposed; that embodied inquiry belongs within serious scholarship; and that the arts help form the kinds of intelligence contemporary life demands but cannot reliably produce on its own.
For that reason, the essay continues to speak beyond the immediate debates of 2009. The pressure to justify the arts has only intensified, and the temptation remains either to defend them as ineffable goods or to translate them wholly into the metrics of innovation. Sellers-Young’s essay offers a more demanding alternative. It asks the university to recognize that the arts produce knowledge through forms of experience, collaboration, and embodied attention that are neither ancillary to intellectual life nor fully commensurable with prevailing administrative vocabularies. They are valuable because they educate perception into thought, and thought into responsive action. In a globalized, mediated, and unstable world, that is not a luxury. It is an academic necessity.
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