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U-M Town Hall focuses on integrating arts, humanities, and STEMM

June 4, 2019
Town hall image
Town hall attendees participated in an exercise in which they were given fake money and encouraged to place it in different buckets that funded different things related to arts integration. Photo by Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography 

On Tuesday, May 28, 2019, faculty, staff, and students from all academic disciplines came together at a Town Hall on the U‑M Ann Arbor campus to learn more about best practices for arts integration into the curriculum, based on findings from the 2018 report The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree.

Stamps School dean Guna Nadarajan was part of the 22-person expert committee that compiled the report, released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Stamps professor Ron Eglash and Stamps Associate Dean for Research, Creative Work, and Strategic Initiatives Dr. Jane Prophet were panelists at the Town Hall.

Organized by U‑M’s ArtsEngine and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), in partnership with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, this Town Hall was one of similar gatherings that a2ru and NASEM have hosted on campuses across the country in recent months. 

Writer Sydney Hawkins covered the Town Hall for the University Record. In her reporting, Hawkins quotes Rebecca Cunningham, associate vice president for research, in her opening remarks for the Town Hall.

“Consider some of the emerging challenges we face in today’s society: poverty, substance abuse, mobility. These are all complex issues, and we cannot address them strictly through the single lenses of engineering, medicine or the humanities. Integration helps us foster new research and develop creative solutions to address the world’s most pressing challenges.”

Town hall focuses on integrating arts, humanities and STEMM | University Record