Cornerstones and Core Values

The means to accomplish the mission of the RCAH can be thought of spatially as the four cornerstones on which the college is built:  world history, art and culture, ethics, and engaged learning.  Together they define an open-minded public space within which students, faculty, and community partners can explore today’s common problems and create shared moral visions of the future.

1. World History. The main currents of history connect and divide peoples in various regions of the globe. World history is about what generates these currents, what they have meant to people, and what they have left in their wake. World history is not the story of a unified world system told from the top down, but rather a web of relationships and influences that have fluidly linked and distinguished the stories of many peoples and cultures. We see the strands of this web in the technology we rely upon, the clothes we wear, the monuments we honor (and topple), and the films we devour. We hear it in the music that entertains us and prompts us as consumers. We internalize it, sometimes literally in the cuisine that sustains us.


2. Art and Culture. As speakers, writers, and readers, as singers, composers, artists, and dancers, we make sense of our worlds through languages and expressions that have evolving dialects as well as basic structures. We respond to a ubiquitous visual culture – from billboards and insistent electronic advertisements to drawings, collages, sculpture, and functional architecture. Who we are as peoples, not just as individuals, depends upon our cultural identities, and these identities are increasingly global hybrids. This is not mere metaphorical shorthand, as we know from recent DNA studies of racial identity. However, metaphors are unavoidable as we try to translate from one culture to another. Understanding the meaning of metaphors such as global hybridity and cultural mélange requires an interdisciplinary education in the humanities, including the visual and performing arts. We may be able to change the metaphors we live by, but we cannot do away with them and still expect to achieve mutual understanding.


3. Ethics. Which cultural identities we display proudly, wear lightly on our sleeve, or hold at a distance are often highly contested moral questions. Which historical legacies we artistically memorialize and which ones we reject because we feel they are beneath us are matters for ethical judgment, even if ethics often seems to be woefully lacking in the choices many people make. Which languages we use to express our deepest feelings, how we move to the rhythms of nature, how well we respond to calls for help and expressions of joy – these are all matters of some choice. We face these challenges on an individual daily basis in our families and communities, and we sometimes face them on a grander scale when as a people we must decide how to allocate scarce resources and keep our word. How well we face these challenges and how much choice we have will depend in part on our abilities to understand how others have responded to earlier dilemmas and emergencies. Ethics, in the sense of how we should live our lives, is an integral part of coming to terms with the presence of the past and negotiating between competing and cross-cutting cultural identities. This presence, itself a metaphor, can be heard in the voices that oral historians have recorded, but it is also inscribed in the products we choose to use or do without.


4. Engaged Learning. In order to grasp the main currents of world history, the cultural challenges and opportunities that it has created, and the ethical values that are at stake, students and faculty of the RCAH are engaged in a variety of ways. Through the relationships and projects nurtured in this residential setting, they take even greater pleasure in the texts they study and the scores and scripts they perform as they prepare themselves for rigorous advanced disciplinary scholarship and agile interdisciplinary professional lives. They develop a greater compassion for the people with whom they work in diverse communities, whether they are near or far, whether in their native language or in another language. They learn to compose their thoughts more clearly, communicate them more effectively, and reflect upon them more cooperatively so that they can be of use in the world.

Within the space marked off by these four cornerstones, what common problems and moral visions are likely to be discovered and created?

The number of challenges and problems continues to grow, but the most important ones – poverty, hunger, and war – are hardly new. What is new is the way in which these problems are increasingly entangled with the traditional concerns of the arts and humanities. The fates of peoples in the least developed countries and in the poorest regions and communities of more developed countries are linked to our own along new vectors of exchange and resistance. Increasingly, for example, the films of Hollywood and Bollywood – and their ideals and demons – reach well beyond the borders of these metropoles. Increasingly, the incomes of families in poorer countries depend upon the remittances sent back to them from their relatives in the more developed world, and citizens of the developed world push back with new laws restricting immigration and cultural liberties. Increasingly, the very wealth of the developed world depends upon its ability to extract natural resources in the least developed countries and market them elsewhere.

This global flux in cultural goods, human capital, and natural resources (often at Ethernet speed) has given the traditional problems of poverty, hunger, and war greater complexity and urgency. The complexity and urgency are most apparent in phenomena such as environmental pollution and armed conflict, both of which continue to escalate. But they are also felt in neighborhoods and on campuses here and abroad where cultures intersect, blend, and sometimes collide over the laws governing intellectual property, the rights of foreign students and workers, and the competing interpretations of fair trade made by subsistence village farmers and large agricultural research companies. Issues such as reproductive health, genetically modified foods, and war crimes cannot be discussed, let alone resolved, in this fluid context without coming to terms with history, art, culture, and ethical judgment because these are the terms in which we live our lives.

If the most common problems of the 21st century are this daunting, what moral visions can we possibly share that will be equal to the task, and how should students in the RCAH learn about them? Whatever visions we consider, they must be broad and inclusive. They must be firmly planted in an historical understanding of what has been possible and what is likely to fail. Shared moral visions cannot be legislated as imperatives or even prudential maxims. They must be realistically imagined, creatively designed, and cooperatively revised on the ground with those who must live with their consequences. RCAH students, faculty, and community partners take cognizance of the wisdom of past generations and their legacies, but they do not rely upon these words as if they were engraved in stone. Using the considerable material ready at hand, they have their work cut out for them – and the RCAH provides them with the space, the tools, and the help to do it.