Roger Malina, Professor of Physics, Arts, and Humanities,
Edith O’Donnell Chair of Arts and Science, Professor of Physics
Robert Stern, Professor of Geosciences
Frederick Turner, Founders Professor emeritus in the School of Arts and Humanities, Co-Editor of Mundus Artium
This is a draft of the article as of 5/21/2024. It has been submitted for publication to a journal. This draft will be deleted if the article is accepted for publication.
We welcome comments and inputs to the article- as we explain it is anecdotal in nature and cannot be 100 factual. For example we cannot mention by name the 100s of people who contributed to the emergence of the arts and humanities at UTDallas.
If you would like to send inputs send an email to rxm116130@utdallas.edu or comment below
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leach us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.
Huntsman, What Quarry?
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1939)
There’s no success like failure…
Love Minus Zero
Bob Dylan
1. The Future of the Arts and Humanities
Mundus Artium is largely devoted to poetry and ideas, and to the worldwide tradition of the humanities that preserves them. One of the great homes of that tradition, and often the source of new creative work, is the university, specifically the liberal arts university, with its libraries, its guides to new work, and its hospitality to young creators. Ever since its origins around the eleventh century in Hanoi, Fez, Paris, Bologna, and Oxford, it has supplied writers and thinkers to the world.
This journal began in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas about fifty years ago. One of the characteristic trends in that time was the hollowing-out and shrinkage of arts and humanities institutions as science, technology, engineering, mathematics became more emphasized, and business claimed many students who saw no future in the liberal arts. But the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas grew and flourished in that apparently hostile environment.
If the academic environment that has nourished so many writers, poets, and thinkers is to survive, it might, thought the writers of this essay, be a good idea to see how one such institution emerged as it adapted to the changing academic environment.
2. Emergence and the emergent university
The University of Texas at Dallas’s Emergence Group (the authors of this essay) is an informal and unfunded group of faculty in different fields. In the summer 2024 issue of the Athenaeum Review we explored the exciting concept of emergence. In recent decades emergence has become a major theme in most areas of scientific study (https://athenaeumreview.org/essay/a-brief-history-of-emergence/). The group’s inquiries, which began by looking at emergence in the “hard” sciences such as physics, chemistry, geology and biology, turned to emergence on the level of human society and culture.
UTD, as an institution we know well, was an immediate candidate for such a study. We belong to a very young university, much of whose early history we remember. One of the schools in the university, now called the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (BAHT), has seen remarkable growth and transformation since it started as the School of Arts and Humanities in 1975. This School grew and evolved when many other humanities departments have been shrinking all over the country and indeed in the West in general. We decided to focus on this particular series of events as exemplifying emergence in a human social context, and time this contribution to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the School.
To reconstruct its emergence, we must first understand its history. BAHT’s name, we noticed, changed several times since its origin. Immediately, other examples of volatile name changing presented themselves in the history of strongly emergent human institutions. We think that one sign of an emerging institution is that its name changes often.
This was a fertile line of inquiry, and we decided to put together an anecdotal account of the key events and connections that led to the present Bass School and its new Pantheon, the Athenaeum, that will open in 2026.
3. What is emergence?
Emergence is the propensity for any high energy, far-from-equilibrium system to self-organize in ways that cannot be predicted from knowing its individual components. Emergence is closely related to self-organization and complexity, and is revealed by complex interdependence in systems and speciation in biological evolution. Spiral galaxies, chemical catalysis, hydrothermal systems, oceanic currents and tides, hurricanes, living organisms, ecosystems, economies, civilizations, political systems, and war are some of the many examples of emergent phenomena, where low-level rules give rise to higher-level complexity with new rules. Causation is both bottom-up and top-down: the interacting parts determine the whole, while the whole determines the arrangement and activity of the parts. Feedback is a feature of complex, far-from-equilibrium systems, not a “bug”. Entirely new properties and behaviors “emerge,” without direction and with characteristics that cannot be predicted from knowing properties of the constituents alone. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.
The study of emergence is complicated by the richness and inescapability of the feedbacks that drive it. The reductionist scientific device of the closed experiment where all extraneous inputs are excluded from the lab or protected by a naturally isolated locale cannot be used, since emergence is a phenomenon of open systems, not closed ones. Cut off all the external thermal, chemical, electromagnetic and mechanical influences on a hurricane, and the hurricane disappears. Still, modern computers can at least model highly complex systems and correct themselves experimentally by running a model and recalibrating equations and inputs when it fails. An array of mathematical devices such as Bayesian and Boolean logic, fractal mathematics, and chaos theory can help understand the results.
But when it comes to emergence in human contexts, much greater epistemological and practical problems confound understanding. Feedbacks endemic to all such systems now include the investigation itself. The observer effect becomes overwhelming, because the subjects of study are also the students of it, and any knowledge gained about a human system is itself a new and disruptive element of the system being studied. The actors not only have incentives to bias the investigation but are changed by the investigation itself in such a way that their incentives change too. The market in ideas is a market of insider traders. We can tell stories but we cannot be objective. We experienced this effect when we shared an early draft of this manuscript with BAHT faculty.
As faculty members of the University of Texas at Dallas, an emergent institution if ever there was one, we ourselves are such actors. The idea of the university itself is emergent, changing as institutions of specialized education evolved from religious seminaries, merchant guilds, and feudal bureaucracies in medieval times, through colleges focused on the classics during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and increasingly disciplinary educational institutions including scientific research during the Industrial Revolution, to the technologically sophisticated multiversity of today, focused on teaching a wide range of subjects to post-adolescents and to pure and applied research. The University of Texas at Dallas has had its own emergence, evolving in 55 years from a private research center focused on geoscience, space science, and molecular biology to a large interdisciplinary top-flight research university that is dominated by the business and engineering schools.
In this essay, we build on new understandings of emergence, applying them to understanding universities by focusing on the emergence of one part of UTD: The Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology.
4. How should we study and write about emergence in human societies?
Our effort immediately confronts the problem of how to discuss the subject at all. To call it a study invokes expectations that prejudice the reader toward established modes of understanding. The subject may need a different genre of investigation and reporting.
It is easier to write about emergence in the “hard sciences”–biology, geology, chemistry, physics, etcetera–than in human society, because human social emergence occurs in a broader context of societal emergence, involves the investigators, and is ongoing. Another key point is that Emergence is nested and hierarchical. We can’t imagine UTD emergence without recognizing the incredible growth happening in north central Texas and especially on the northern flank of Dallas, where UTD is located. It is also fraught, trying to understand something that is still emerging. Once an emergence is complete it can be retraced and even replicated to some extent, and thus understood. But an ongoing emergence like UTD and BAHT is by definition unpredictable: if it were predictable, it would be complete already. But the USA, the DFW Metroplex, UTD, and the Bass School are all still strongly emerging. The emergence of a new level of complex integration provides the perspective, perhaps including the computational resources, to recognize the events and structures of earlier lower-level emergences–and that may be why the new level emerged in first place.
Understanding current emergence requires cognitive and literary strategies different from the reductive methods we use to understand past ones. Here to know is to act, to act is to know. We are essentially talking about the genres of prophecy, poetry, parable, and anecdote, which are human methods enabling us to diagnose highly volatile situations and plan to deal with them. They are like cave-paintings of a hunt that are emotional drivers of action and suggest plans of action.
Science, which deals with falsifiable explanations, is not in itself sufficient to deal with current human emergences. The rightly prized scientific and scholarly principles of detachment–the walls between the observer and the observed, between epistemology (how we know) and ontology (what we know)—are missing. Any ongoing emergence event on this level inevitably includes ourselves as part of the feedback system we are trying to understand.
Both science and history use a powerful tool: reduction, that is, by eliminating other factors in the observed phenomenon, to discover the single key variable that makes the difference. Reduction simplifies by identifying key drivers and ignoring other information thought to be superfluous to the conclusion. Emergence, however, works in exactly the opposite way: it requires the complexity of factors, which provides the pressure for the appearance of a new level of reality; it feeds, as life feeds, on the flow of increasing entropy itself. Studies of abiogenesis are unanimous in requiring hugely various, volatile, unpredictable and heterogeneous situations, like the “primordial soup” of Earth’s early marine or lacustrine environments that led to the first living cells. Life is defined by the absence of any single key to its function. The emergence of human institutions–like markets, religions, and universities– requires an even more massive richness of elements and a strong flow of uncertainty and alternatives.
So this study of Bass School emergence is partly in the form of the anecdote, which is a narrative about events whose meanings arise out of the sequence of events themselves and the position and preparation of the viewer(s) of them and the teller(s) of the story. It is a story that conveys its ideas by implication, suggestion, ambivalence and irony, admits its own bias and incomplete knowledge in advance, and illuminates rather than insists. It is irreducibly personal (though the viewer and teller in this case is a group, not just an individual), and does not make truth claims. We do not intend to offend, only to explore. The art of “reading” such stories is the traditional business of the humanities, and the story we tell here is about a humanities institution that is recently and strongly emergent. Though our story is largely one about a humanities school, that school is set in an originally science-dominated university founded by technologists, and that is unusually interested in and sympathetic to science. We hope our story may be scientifically useful as a provider of fertile hypotheses to be tested by more reductive means.
5. BAHT: the institutional history
The history of the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at UTD can be summarized in seven chapters:
i: Before UTD: The Failed Think Tank (1961-1969)
The story begins in 1961, with the founding of the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest (GRCSW) by Geophysical Services Inc. and Texas Instruments pioneers Eugene McDermott, J. Erik Jonsson, and Cecil Green. These three were inspired by the brilliant atmospheric physicist Lloyd Berkner and they recruited him to move to Dallas to help the GSI-TI visionaries reverse the flight of young, scientifically talented people to the east and west coasts by building the GRCSW as a magnet for scientific research. The institute initially was housed in what is now the Fondren Science Library at Southern Methodist University, but SMU could not afford the cost of graduate education required by GRCSW. Rebuffed, the GSI/TI leaders bought 1200 acres of cotton fields in Richardson, Texas in 1963. While initially focused on science and technology, specifically geosciences, space sciences, and molecular biology, the GRCSW’s vision encompassed a broader, interdisciplinary approach. President John F. Kennedy acknowledged the Center in his prepared speech for Dallas (tragically never delivered) in November,1963, praising its potential to “unlock the secrets of nature” and “enlighten the understanding of man.”
The first facility, the Laboratory of Earth and Planetary Science (later named the Founders Building), opened in 1964, the same year that a heart attack forced its visionary leader Berkner to retire. The Graduate Research Center of the Southwest was renamed the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in 1967. The hope was that graduate students from around Texas would flock to use its state-of-the-art equipment, but this never happened to the extent hoped for. Cecil Green decided to try a different approach by televising classes, building a television classroom studio and a 250’ tall broadcasting tower, starting the Texas Association for Graduate Education and Research (TAGER) network. TAGER never really took off and its last class was televised in 1995. The TAGER tower remains, silently (but usefully hosting cellphone relays) towering over the bustling campus, the last real monument to the failed GRCSW/SWCAS thinktank.
(FIG 1, 2 about here)
ii: UT Dallas Infancy (1969-1975)
In 1969, SCAS formally joined the University of Texas System as The University of Texas at Dallas, offering courses for graduate students and upper division undergraduates. While still primarily science-oriented – basically, half of what is now the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics – UTD offered several courses in the humanities, like philosophy and history.
These courses served two purposes: enriching the education of science students and laying the groundwork for a future humanities program. Significantly UTD began as a graduate research institution, taking on upper and lower division undergraduates later, and not, as with many new universities of the post-GI Bill era, as an undergraduate lower-division school that later added graduate programs. Its first mission thus was not the creation of new academic specialists but the broad education of young scientists.
iii: Formation of the School of Arts and Humanities (1975)
In 1975, the Schools of Arts and Humanities, Economic, Policy and Political Sciences, Human Development, General Studies and Management were officially established in the second wave of UTD schools. The addition of these five new Schools marked a significant shift, including recognizing the importance of the humanities alongside science and technology at UTD. A&H initially offered three Bachelor of Arts degrees: History, Literature, and Philosophy. The interdisciplinary theme which, we will see, is one main marker of this history, was established early.
iv: Early Years of the School (1975-2003)
The school focused on building a strong foundation in the humanities, emphasizing critical thinking, communication, and cultural understanding. Major new programs were added, including Visual and Performing Arts and Communication Studies. Special groups were formed on campus, focused on specific fertile topics. 0ne of the most important, serving a seed for others that followed, was the Translation Center (1978), which received a major NEH grant for translation as a model for interdisciplinary education.
v: Expansion and Interdisciplinarity (2003-2022)
During this period, several other key centers and institutes were established, including the Center for Latin American Studies, the Confucius Institute, the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, the Center for Values in Science and Technology, the Edith O’Donnell Institute for Art History, and the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Museums. The School embraced interdisciplinary approaches, encouraging collaboration between different disciplines within the humanities and with other schools at UTD.
vi: The Founding of ATEC (2002-2008)
Strong research and teaching within A&H in areas like the history and philosophy of science and technology, humanistic and scholarly uses of computers, digital media, game design, and interactive art led to the creation of the Arts Computer Lab (1999). A major in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (ATEC), was approved and formally established in 2002. ATEC was created as a separate School with its own majors in 2008 alongside the School of Arts and Humanities.
vii: The Rejoining of ATEC with A&H (2022)
In August 2022, the School of Arts and Humanities merged back with the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication to form the School of Arts, Humanities and Technology. This consolidation recognized that the two Schools needed each other to thrive and aims to leverage the strengths of both schools to foster greater innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration. It remains committed to the core values of the humanities while exploring the intersections with technology and emerging fields.
viii. The Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (BAHT or the Bass School).
As the result of a major gift, The Bass School offers a wider range of degrees and programs, including new offerings in data arts, design, and media production.
In the course of this history, the University’s student body grew from a few hundred to over 30,000, and A&H/ATEC/AHT/BAHT grew from zero students to over 2,100.
5. The people involved
The real energies that create emergence are not the administrative power structures, but those structures provide chinks and loopholes where creative and disruptive faculty and students can do their creative work. Those structures, and the power struggles of the office-holders, can enfranchise, retard or even smother the creativity, new ideas, imaginative reframings and creative relationships that inhabit them. But the formal structures are sterile in themselves. Let us look at some of the dramatis personae, the live minds that populated the emerging A&H/ATEC/AHT/BAHT School.
The first major players were Bryce Jordan, the first president of UTD, Alex Clark, the vice president, and Robert Plant Armstrong, the first dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. Significantly, Jordan was an eminent musicologist, Clark was a Jazz enthusiast (as well as being a distinguished scholar of law and sociology), and Armstrong was a mythologist and expert on African art. Though they were highly intelligent and organized thinkers in the enlightenment tradition of reason, all three were committed to the intangible and basically impractical impulse of the arts. All three understood that the administrative structures they led were valuable only as the home of a living spirit that emanates from the relationships and work of the individuals within it. One of Clark’s favorite sayings was “The cardinal rules of being a good administrator are first not sweating the small stuff, and secondly realizing it is all small stuff.” His wry Scottish wit nicely catches the humility of all three. Power for them was not a goal but a tool.
Other members of the school’s early dramatis personae were: Robert Rutford, the second president of UTD; Rainer Schulte, the creator and director of the Center for Translation Studies; Robert Corrigan, the second dean of A&H, and David Daniel, the fourth president of the university. Rutford, like the other early players, was an adventurer, a romantic. A mountain is named after him in Antarctica, where as a geologist he won the National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Service Medal for his pathbreaking exploits and discoveries. Rainer Schulte was a romantic too, of another kind. A poet, growing up in the ruins of postwar Berlin and dreaming of human unity, he set out to make translation into the glue to hold humankind together. He was the founder and first editor of Mundus Artium. Corrigan was another adventurer, a member of a remarkable generation of stage directors, drama theorists, and theatrical entrepreneurs that fired up the acting world through the sixties, seventies, and eighties. David Daniel, a distinguished civil engineer, saw his mission to hire exceptionally innovative and faculty and insist on excellence in research; his fundraising skills with the Texas legislature opened up the university’s future.
Schulte’s Center for Translation Studies set a trend across the whole university. There had been previous working groups of this kind, neither schools nor departments in themselves, created to tackle specific scientific problems and teaching by involving students directly in the work (such as an important math-physics group studying the topology of the universe). But the Translation Center’s success in a very different field inspired similar UTD centers that largely shaped its future. “Centers” multiplied on the campus, relatively unbound by the demands of major curriculums, departments, and academic hierarchies, changing as their research suggested. The Centers were also characterized by their interdisciplinary thrust. Translation not only involves different national literature fields but also major sociological, anthropological and philosophical issues raised by the problems of linguistics and meaning itself.
Robert Corrigan inherited a School with an established interdisciplinary graduate program but a more conventional departmental undergraduate program. He transformed it to extend the interdisciplinary mission to the whole School, creating a very unusual undergraduate degree structure. His many consequential hires included Frederick Turner, the poet-scholar and science fiction writer. Turner’s co-editorship of the Kenyon Review and pathbreaking work on the neurobiology of poetic meter had helped establish a major poetic movement, the New Formalism, and a revival of the philosophy of aesthetics based on neuroscience and anthropology, sometimes called Natural Classicism.
Corrigan’s appointment of Zsuzsanna Ozsváth was visionary: a former concert pianist and literary scholar, she became a celebrated Holocaust scholar and founded the UTD Center for Holocaust Studies. Her work translating Hungarian and German poetry with Frederick Turner was honored by Hungary’s highest literary prize. Later, under the deanship pf Dennis Kratz, Ozsváth would be a key figure in recruiting Edward M. Ackerman and his family as major patrons of the humanities at UTD. On Turner’s advice Corrigan also hired the extraordinary theater director, solo performer, and playwright Fred Curchack, who had a major effect on Dallas’s theatrical scene. Corrigan brought in several other luminaries including Timothy Redman, who revealed Mussolini’s Marxist roots in his major study of Ezra Pound and started UTD’s world-champion chess program, and Charles Bambach, whose profound application of continental philosophy, including Heidegger’s critique of technology, to the understanding of Shakespeare was an essential thread in the school’s weave.
Alex Clark was succeeded as Vice-President of the university in 1992 by Hobson Wildenthal. A distinguished nuclear physicist with a degree in English, and a passionate lover of classical music, he became a powerful and subtle administrator, a brilliant recruiter of faculty, students and patronage, and a backer of innovative interdisciplinarity. In his own words: “The University’s potential for transformative change and growth was apparent when I came, but the reality of the past years of progress far outstrips what would have been predicted from any sober assessment in 1992.” He insisted on excellence, and on his watch UTD became a major research university.
One feature of the rise of UTD was a close partnership between the Texas state university system and the generous and ambitious magnates of Texas. UTD was enabled to join the other UT campuses by the founders of Texas Instruments, Eugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson, and Cecil Green. Other major supporters, beside Edward Ackerman, include Edith O’Donnell and Margaret McDermott, and more recently Harry Bass, of the legendary oil dynasty. Margaret McDermott’s patronage enabled the recruitment of Richard Brettell, the distinguished art historian and museologist, whose presence at UTD and friendship with the Bass family was the most important factor in the emergence of the School of Arts and Humanities in its most recent incarnation as the Bass School.
UTD is something of a hybrid between the public and private university, and this ambiguity in its status may be another reason for its emergence: the ideology of wise public governance is balanced by the ideology of dynamic and creative private business, creating an ambiguous space available for creative action. One example is the physical transformation of the UTD campus, designed, on the advice of Brettell, by Peter Walker, the landscape architect of the gardens of the Twin Towers memorial in New York, and paid for by Margaret McDermott. Walker took a brutalist concrete campus that graphically expressed its official interdisciplinary mission by overhead walkways between the buildings, and set it in a spectacular canopy of green, with avenues of flowering trees reminiscent of Versailles, reflecting pools, retreats of native Texas prairie, and an amazing dome of wisteria. The science campus was now also a campus of art and beauty.
Perhaps the most important administrative figure in A&H history was Dennis Kratz, dean of the School from 1995 to 2019. Kratz, like others in this story, is an intellectual adventurer and romantic. A classicist and medievalist, his scholarly work was on the medieval epics of Alexander. Kratz is also a scholar of science fiction, former president of the American Literary Translators Association and co-editor of the Translation Review. He oversaw the creation of several new programs, including Arts and Technology, the Center for Values and Modern Technology, Emerging Media and Communications, the Confucius Institute and the Holocaust Center. His hires included Mihai Nadin, one of the pioneers of modern programming and the leading thinker in the field of anticipation studies, Pamela Gossin, editor of the influential Encyclopedia of Literature and Science, which helped establish nationally a whole new field in literature, Theresa Towner, the Faulkner scholar and prizewinning teacher of fantasy literature, Ming Dong Gu, director of the Confucius Institute from 2007 to 2018, perhaps the leading scholar of the relationship of Chinese and Western aesthetics and comparative thought, and the historian Nils Roemer, appointed at Zsuzsanna Ozsvath’s behest to lead the Holocaust Center, which had now become a major institution in the Dallas area. One of Kratz’s boldest moves was his part in the recruitment to the faculty of Roger Malina, who serves UTD both as an astronomer in the field of dark energy and matter and a professor of the interdisciplinary humanities. His interests and research include the culture of cybernetic technology, digital art, and AI.
Kratz also hired Tom Linehan, the computer design entrepreneur, to lead the Art and Technology program. Under Linehan’s guidance this program amalgamated with Emerging Media and Communications, and saw a huge increase in enrolments. There followed a period of extraordinary partnerships across disciplines and lively research in such areas as games, kinetics, translation, robotics, science fiction, virtual reality, social media, the psychology of anticipation, the history of science, and other topics. The animation and games program, for instance, rapidly grew under the guidance of Monica Evans and Todd Fechter into a world class creative research institution, sought out by national studios like Pixar and DreamWorks. But the lopsided economics of the school strained and confused the chain of command. The university administration split the school in two, leaving Arts and Humanities as it was before its new expansion, and establishing ATEC, the School of Art, Technology, and Emergent Communications, as a distinct School of its own in 2002. The creative ferment continued at ATEC under the deanship of Anne Balsamo after the split into two schools, featuring creative interdisciplinary research and teaching by such thinkers as Paul Fishwick, Mihai Nadin, Roger Malina, Monica Evans, Midori Kitagawa, and Marjorie Zielke.
But disciplinary specialization was never the dominating force at UTD as it was in most state multiversities. A&H people and ATEC people still sought each other’s company, and graduate students included members of the other school in their dissertation committees. The fission of one school into two had its drawbacks. It broke off the humanistic, literary and fine-arts tradition of arts and humanities from the technological, computational, and media challenges of the new millennium. Without the bite and stimulus of new technical means and their often chaotic social-media consequences, A&H perhaps became too comfortable; without the cultural memory and philosophical ballast of traditional humane studies, ATEC was consumed by trends it was designed to lead.
Ten years after the two schools separated, they rejoined and quickly were renamed as the Bass School. Emergence doesn’t just mean the division into separate species; it means the formation of multi-species ecosystems. This creative tension, we believe, is the future of BAHT. We suspect that the failed division of the school into two was a blessing in disguise, underlining the value of the original synthesis.
Nils Roemer succeeded Todd Fechter as the present dean of the Bass School, adroitly navigating the reunion of the two schools. Roemer (who hosted the emergence group for some of its working lunches) is a visionary healer of institutions. His wife Cricket, herself a graduate of UTD and former Turner student, has played the essential part of the salonnière or host, providing the intangible atmosphere of social pleasure that all such movements require.
What happened in A&H/BAHT could not have occurred without a nourishing medium around it of UTD faculty in other fields who were friendly to cross-disciplinary study. They include Ted Harpham, who pioneered the university’s honors school, the brilliant math-physicists Wolfgang Rindler, Istvan Ozsváth, and Ivor Robinson, W. Jay Dowling, the cognitive neuroscientist, and last but not least, Robert Stern, one of the world’s leading geoscientists in plate tectonics and undersea volcanoes, who was the prime mover in our emergence project.
More important than all these figures, however, are the students who gave the institution half of its reason for existence (the other half being research, in which students themselves play an important part). Of the tens of thousands of students who studied here, many went on to state, national, and international prominence; many stayed behind in the metroplex of Dallas and Fort Worth, participating in its staggering expansion from a population of about a million to nearly ten million today, and feeding back their ideas to their alma mater. To give a hint of their characteristic flavor, let us look at a few of them.
The astronaut Jim Reilly, the Nobel prizewinning cell biologist Aziz Sancar, the brilliant tycoon Naveen Jindal (who came back to endow UTD’s Naveen Jindal School of Business), the humanoid roboticist David Hanson and the nanotech entrepreneur James von Ehr graduated in other fields, but they learned in the context of our humanities school and its ideas. Our four international chess grandmasters naturally emerged from Tim Redman’s chess club. One of our state Representatives, Brian McCall, who now heads the Texas state university system, and got his PhD from Arts and Humanities. Several other graduates of ours are in Texas state government. More intriguing, perhaps, are such figures as Aaron Aryanpur the comedian of chaos, Gabriel Dawe the installation artist, James Wilder the classical guitarist, Tina Qin, who applies metaphor theory to data visualization, John McCaa, the longtime news anchor, the counterculture poets Robert Trammell, Tim Cloward, and Andrea Kibel, Mike Judge the creator of King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead, and Maryam Baig the translator of Urdu poetry who is a star of the Dallas stage. Andy Amato brought together Shakespeare with Heidegger in a book that helps to heal the rift between literature and philosophy. Seemee Ali is the Director of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and a potent force for the humanities in the city. Perhaps our most distinguished alum is Gjekë Marinaj, the Albanian poet who was a key figure in the overthrow of Albania’s totalitarian government and whose poetry is known worldwide, often nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Could UTD have provided such a culture of curiosity and collaboration without its unique history? Is this question a mere tautology? Is there a sort of recipe for emergence, or are recipes the very constraints that prevent it?
Let us look at some of the themes that emerge from this story of an institution.
6. Themes and meanings in this story
Before we come to what some call the “takeaway” of this tale, a caveat is needed. Perhaps as many as 50,000 people played significant parts in the emergence of BAHT. We know that we have left out of our account many who may have been just as important in what happened, whether out of ignorance or economy of words, and we apologize for the omissions. But as an unashamed anecdote, such is the nature of the beast. The very fact that there are many different possible stories about these events is, we argue, part of the reason that in their dialog with each other they contributed to the very emergence we chronicle.
The metaphor of the coral reef is useful here. The administrative structures whose history we have sketched are represented by the dead coral that supports the living reef and lets it get the sunlight energy it thrives on. The living coral is the activity of the departments, classes, committees, etc, that do the everyday work. The animals and plants that populate its nooks and crannies and grow the reef as a whole are the students and faculty with their ideas, conversations and creations. This is a hierarchy whose administrative base is relatively inert but stable, and whose human apex is increasingly volatile and innovative. Causation within it is both top down and bottom up. Like a tree, whose heartwood is dead and whose life is the sapwood, leaves, flowers and seeds that change through the seasons and generate new growth, coral is branchy, generating new structures and functions at its periphery, providing new niches for other organisms that can contribute to or change the capabilities of the whole ecosystem, and generating new evolutionary lines of development. Its students go forth to fertilize the civic waters.
If we look at the people described here we can already perceive some common features. Many of them were passionate about music–Jordan, Clark, and Wildenthal, for instance; Zsuzsanna Ozsváth had been a concert pianist as a child. Kratz was instrumental in creating and supporting the Richardson Symphony and its auditorium. The more general sense of beauty, and the understanding that beauty in the arts is a paradoxical combination of discipline with radical playfulness, seems frequent among them: Armstrong was an art historian, Brettell an art connoisseur, Corrigan a theatrical artist; Schulte and Turner are poets. Fred Curchack is an actor, a dramatist, and a theater director. During Kratz’s term he provided the artistic and musical luminaries of the school, such as Robert Rodriguez the composer, Greg Metz and Marilyn Waligore the visual artists, and Enric Madriguera the doyen of the classical guitar with new venues, and hired the musicologist Catherine Parsoneault.
Another theme is what one might call adventurousness. The lure of discovery was strong in Rutford, the polar explorer, and Stern, the investigator of deep ocean volcanoes, trenches, and the Sahara. Malina was the principal investigator for the Ultraviolet Explorer Satellite, and a juror for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Turner spent much of his boyhood in central Africa living in a tribal village with his anthropologist parents. Corrigan worked with Richard Schechner in the transgressive ritual theater movement of the 60’s, and transformed three major arts schools. Wolfgang Rindler coined the term “event horizon” to describe the point where, in a black hole, normal physics ceases to apply.
All these figures seem to have enjoyed being amateurs in much of their professional activities. Most of our best students have been interdisciplinary adventurers in the same spirit. Even the leadership had a refreshing strain of improvisation. Bryce Jordan, the first President, doodled the UTD logo, now known affectionately as the Bug, on a bit of paper. In most places a consulting team would be brought in for the purpose at great expense. Amateurs are literally lovers, and a fair amount of love went into the process of starting the place.
Related to this theme is what we might call UTD’s refugees. Rindler, a Kindertransport child, and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, a Holocaust survivor, were literal refugees. But it is safe to say that most builders of the UTD reef were refugees of one kind or another. Refugees by definition are not conformists, and they seek freedom. During the period of UTD’s rise, most of the humanities departments across the country were captured by the Foucauldian ideology of power that governed the humanities and social sciences by means of the national conferences such as the MLA, the AAA, the SCS, the AHA and the others, which were job markets as well as creators and enforcers of doctrine. But many of BAHT’s most effective people disliked the resultant thought control and felt the interdisciplinarity of UTD as a blessed air of freedom where they could think and breathe. Michael Simpson, interim dean of Arts and Humanities between 1992 when Corrigan resigned for health reasons and Kratz took over in 1997, was a traditional classicist passionately devoted to intellectual freedom, and helped keep the School skeptical about ideological commitments.
Roger Malina, whose boldness had exceeded the limits of Leonardo, the journal he has edited for forty years, found a home at UTD. UTD’s interdisciplinarity created different vocabularies than those inherited from European modernist and postmodernist radicalism. Timothy Redman, Pamela Gossin, and David Channell all had their differences with the current fashions in the national disciplinary associations. Brettell, who had been the head of the Dallas Museum of Art, but had differed with its board and faced other challenges, found refuge at UTD. Bonnie Pittman, another former director of the DMA, escaped the confines of orthodox arts management and came to UTD to work on the medical and neuroscience aspects of the arts.
UTD began in the world of molecular biology, atmospheric science, and geology, and this beginning perhaps insulated it from the fashions and ideologies of the mainline arts and humanities of the time with their intense critique and deconstruction of their own foundations. The leaders who followed the incorporation of SCAS into the UT system added the humanities and the arts for their own sake, and as nourishment for a civilization they hoped for in Texas–not as an arena for political struggle, postmodern self-condemnation, or right-wing indoctrination. Because of its unusual origin, UTD did not feel the need to build itself around a major football team and stadium; instead, it fielded what is arguably the best overall team in university-level competitive chess, became a major competitor in the National Debate Tournament, and hosted the Japan Karate Association’s national tournament three times.
Perhaps the most persistent intellectual theme in UTD’s history has been interdisciplinarity. Though the university’s presidents through the whole period were understandably eager to situate UTD as a “top tier” research university, and specialization seemed to be the way to excellence, there was always a strong counter-current that saw the potential of a higher kind of excellence, in pulling together the big picture of how all the forms of knowledge fit with and inform each other. UTD’s intellectual stars all seem to have united rich competence in a given “silo” of research with visionary understandings of how ideas nurtured in one field could transform others. In Brain and Behavioral Studies, Jay Dowling applied neuroscience to the study of the arts. Claud Stanley (“Stan”) Rupert was a pioneer in photobiology, a new field that united insights in molecular biology, optics, bacteriology, medicine, and even climatology. The math-physics group used topology to connect mathematics, astrophysics, and cosmology. In fields like engineering, economics, and neuroscience, UTD’s strengths have been in areas that straddle multiple disciplines: robotics, nanotechnology, systems and network theory, game theory, and of course translation. In BAHT itself, almost all of the faculty are discipline-transcenders. Thomas Riccio brings together anthropology and theater in ritual ethnodrama. Laura Kim brings the idea of the “blob” to all kinds of connected systems, including those that are not systems at all but simply sticky associations. Fred Curchack unites philosophy with multiple media–visual acoustic, literary, mystical–in stage production. John Pomara’s visual designs fuse science, technology, and art.
There are many ways that disciplines can be transcended:
Trans-disciplinary: crossing from one discipline to another, (but not necessarily integrating them with each other).
Multi-disciplinary: covering multiple disciplines (but not necessarily making them engage each other).
Inter-disciplinary: working in the creative space between disciplines (but not necessarily changing them in the process).
Some would add “pre-disciplinary” as a category: the tracing back of ideas in different disciplines to a powerful source that has since been pushed aside but that still has new insights to offer.
But the strongest and most constructive kinds integrate, engage, change and create. The danger of interdisciplinarity is that a word or formula, taken out of context, is often re-applied elsewhere in a way that is misleading or unhelpful. A pun–a superficial suggestive similarity in sound–is not the same as a powerful metaphor. True interdisciplinarity can identify a constitutive structure that shows up in a huge variety of contexts. Consider the tree diagram that shows up in decisions, the structure of logical argument, transistor networks, kinship systems, the branchy history of the Indo-European languages, the myth of the two trees of Eden, and Darwin’s first scratchy diagram of species descent. A deep understanding of all the “silos” involved is required to make those analogies useful; we do not simply carry off a concept as a magpie carries off a wristwatch to decorate its nest. Often at UTD there has been enough lively debate to keep our borrowing honest and to intellectually reimburse the lender.
Another key lesson in the emergence of UTD and BAHT is the importance of impactful failures and the essential role that failures play in ultimate success. We kept trying and only getting part-way to the goal. 60+ years later, we are encouraged to overlook the failures. They include the failure of GRCSW at SMU, the premature loss of GRCSW’s visionary leader Berkner, SCAS itself, TAGER, UTD’s loss of much of its environmental studies and anthropology programming, the difficult events that led to the recognition that ATEC was not working well while separated from Arts and Humanities, the destruction of a much-loved Art Barn that provided a central space for impromptu arts and performance events, and the long absence of a faculty club, a congenial place for faculty and students to think, eat and drink together. These failures were key factors in the emergence of today’s UTD, as they helped clarify what our ideal community of ideas ought to look like. With all its failures, today UTD is a resounding success: a nationally recognized research university with 32,000 remarkably diverse students, and it has surged ahead of older universities in the DFW metroplex. We earnestly hope that similar aspirations, experiments, and failures are in UTD’s future.
Another theme in the rise of BAHT, as in that of UTD as a whole, was its setting in an increasingly wealthy city and state, with a ballooning local population including many young families from all over the world and every state in the union. Dallas-Fort Worth’s population grew from about one and a half million to over eight million people during the time that UTD has been in existence. Dozens of major corporations relocated to the area. The availability of money was necessary for the emergence of UTD, but it was not sufficient. Money is like energy: its value depends on how it is used. Earth certainly needs the sun’s energy, but Venus gets much more and is a baked barren desert. The silver Spain extracted from the New World ruined its own domestic economy. Oil wealth can grow a country’s well-being or get spent on war. How money obtained by UTD found its expression made all the difference. But the money was there when UTD needed it.
The peculiar nature of Dallas-Fort Worth’s expansion, creating one-mile square neighborhoods with most economic levels represented in each (though with great variations) led to an unusual overall ethnic, religious, and cultural mix. The laissez-faire economy, with no state income tax and mild regulation, together with an abundance of cheap land, led to strong entrepreneurial activity with newly rich families seeking social recognition, a generally high disposable income, and a demand for culture. At UTD the wide range and balance of ethnicities and “races” within the student body and increasingly among faculty and staff, with a high proportion of upwardly-mobile second-generation students, short-circuited the stark political extremism and binary oppositions of many campuses across the nation, enabling people of different backgrounds to amicably work together.
Containing mildly “blue” cities in a “red” state, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex tended to avoid political extremism and tolerated pragmatic compromise. Many of the DFW elite have very high cultural ambitions and are willing to spend money on public buildings, infrastructure, and ideas. DFW may have some the best private collections of the Impressionists in existence. The Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth is perhaps the most perfect piece of modern museum architecture in the world. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture was for many years a source not only of ideas and cultural education, but of concrete schemes of architecture and city planning. All over the area the local municipalities compete to create performance spaces, galleries, historical and arts districts, and natural conservation areas. Expanding local universities and well-funded community colleges provide both educated consumers and sources of employment. BAHT and its predecessors were both beneficiaries and contributors to the area’s extraordinary transformation.
On a more mythic level, Dallas’s sense of cultural guilt at the murder of John F. Kennedy may also have been a factor. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and her husband, Istvan Ozsváth the UTD mathematician, were at the luncheon that John F. Kennedy would have addressed if he had not passed through Dealey Plaza. After the assassination, the city needed redemption and uplift. As a city, we all had to be on our best behavior and eschew acting like stereotypes. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, of which Turner and later Ozsváth, Brettell and Kratz were Fellows, made explicit the cultural, moral, and cultural issues in the City’s collective unconscious. Its founders, Louise and Donald Cowan, encouraged the emergence in Dallas of the “soul movement,” which featured such national figures as James Hillman, Thomas Moore, and Robert Sardello; by bringing the eye of humanistic literary interpretation to Dallas’s history, they made it real. Physical manifestations of Dallas’s urge to self-improvement, such as the Calatrava bridges, I.M. Pei’s Myerson Symphony Center, and the Klyde Warren Memorial Park, were matched by more spiritual constructions. Gail Thomas, the Institute’s most articulate leader in the crucial years of UTD’s evolution, and doyenne of Dallas’s cultural elite, was a friend of many of UTD’s most generous patrons. There is a sense in which UTD, and BAHT in particular, are part of Dallas’s act of penitence and restitution.
But these “macro” explanations of the environment of BAHT’s emergence still do not fully account for its behavior as a “strange attractor.” This mysterious entity might be better sought in such “micro” factors as the Ozsváths’ regular weekend dinners, to whom people from all of the university’s schools and many luminaries from the city were invited: a sort of salon within which ideas and imaginative visions could circulate. Entirely human factors, such as the superb staff of the school during the period, mostly local ladies of gentle but firm mien and honorable, such as Joellen Roach and Sherry Clarkson, played an intangible but perhaps essential part. The faculty could not behave badly under their wise, humorous and sometimes ironic gaze. One afternoon, when they were for a moment all departed on errands, occasioned the remark by one of the professors that the End Times had come, the Rapture had just happened, and the staff had all gone to eternal glory, leaving only the reprobate faculty behind.
In the city, gatherings such as the Fellows’ lunches at the Dallas Institute, and the meetings of the PEN Club and the Isthmus Institute further downtown, provided a sense of extended community. Schulte’s Translation Center was a hotbed of ideas. UTD’s resident composer, Robert Rodriguez, brought together two conversations, music and Latin American studies. Corrigan talked with Ozsváth, who talked with Turner, who talked with Gail Thomas, who talked with Brettell, who talked with McDermott and O’Donnell, who talked with Kratz and Wildenthal, who talked with Roemer, whose wife Cricket gave a platform to Ozsváth. Curchack’s work in local theaters, and the links between A&H and the excellent Undermain Theater downtown, inspired much talk about performativity. The Holocaust Center helped make Dallas an important locus of research in that field. The very discussions that created, separated, and rejoined A&H and ATEC helped bring into being imaginative conceptions that could then become concrete goals.
UTD seems to have given people the intellectual and cultural space to do interesting things, and to talk about it with other creative people. It is hard to resist the conclusion that it was conversations animated the emergence of the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. Conversations perhaps like the ones that precipitated this extended anecdote.
Figures:
Fig. 1. Geoscience graduate student Elaine Padovani using the SCAS Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). There are two firsts in this photo: this was the first SEM in a Texas academic institution and Elaine went on to become the first woman to earn a PhD at UTD (1977). Photo taken some time in 1968-1970.
Fig. 2. UTD TAGER before and after. Left: TAGER tower and SCAS, 1967. Right: Eclipse celebrants on Science Building quad 4.8.24. TAGER tower in background. Texas Alliance for Graduate Education used television to broadcast SCAS and UTD courses around N Texas, beginning 1967. The last TAGER course was broadcast in 1995. Is it time to resurrect TAGER, now that we have Zoom and the Internet?