Despite Delays, Convergence Yields Positive Outcomes

Covid canceled our plans for an in-person "Convergence" town hall in April 2020 and the accompanying performance of The Force of Things. A re-imagined virtual Convergence symposium took place nearly a year later in February 2021, and The Force of Things was finally developed and performed in January 2022.

The in-person performance of The Force of Things had a sold-out run, with professors and classes ranging from the Dartmouth Music Department to the English Department, to the Anthropology Department engaging with the show and its themes of environment and energy.

The virtual Convergence symposium was a great success, unfolding on Zoom over five hours split between two afternoons, with an accompanying evening performance. There were over 300 attendees; about two-thirds of attendees were Dartmouth-affiliated, with the remaining one-third representing all regions of the country and about 20 people from other countries. Our national partners, The Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) were instrumental in garnering this national audience as well as helping to introduce the background and scope of the symposium. 14 Dartmouth students presented their work and 8 Dartmouth professors presented or spoke, representing 7 different academic departments. The conference also featured short performances by 6 non-Dartmouth artists/performers whose work embodied ideas and best practices of arts integration on themes of climate and energy.

A year and a half later, we are able to see that the Convergence symposium represented the Hopkins Center and Dartmouth planting our metaphorical flag in the national arts integration landscape. It inspired our Arts Integration Initiative, which is a new initiative to support arts-centric research, incubate interdisciplinary projects, and advance faculty-student mentorship at Dartmouth. This new multi-year initiative received $100,000 in funding from the Provost's office in 2021, which was granted in part due to the demonstrated success of Convergence. Although we didn't realize it at the time, the Irving Institute's funding for Convergence was in fact seed funding for launching the Arts Integration Initiative, which strives to put arts at the core of learning in a liberal arts education and to increase visibility and opportunities for arts-integrative work on campus. The Initiative is a large umbrella, the first step of which was a pilot grant program launched in Fall 2021. Of 31 submissions, the program wound up funding 4 student-led projects and 5 faculty-led projects, to be completed in the 2021/22 academic year. Read more about the initiative and the projects here: https://hop.dartmouth.edu/arts-at-the-core/arts-integration-initiative

The resounding success of our 2021 grants has led to plans for another round of grants in fall 2022, as well as planning for the next steps of the initiative: asset-mapping to fine-tune our understanding of the needs, desires, and possibilities of our campus, and planning for a digital and potentially physical arts integration commons as part of the campus' new Arts District.