The observation that novelty is as old as the hills is made in the film Les Enfants Du Paradis. I was reminded of it this morning when I was reading Arthur Herman’s The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots Invention of the Modern World. Herman claims that the Glasgow merchant community ranked education as highly as good business sense. Patronage from two tobacco barons, John Glassford and Archibald Ingram, allowed Robert Foulis in 1753 to establish his School for the Art of Design.  Herman says:

“The University of Glasgow gave its imprimateur to the school, making it an official appendage of the university, like Foulis’s press and bookshop. Adam Smith helped him find rooms for classes and faculty, and Britain’s first academic school for design was launched.

Foulis hoped that his classes in sculpture, drawing and printing would become as essential to the curriculum as philosophy, mathematics or theology. ‘It is to be wished’, he said, ‘that all Universities were also academies, in order that artists should never be without learning, nor learned men without a taste for those arts that in all enlightened ages have been deemed liberal and polite.”

Sadly, Foulis’s academy failed and his school closed in 1775.

Stanford University Institute of Design

Fast forward to now and the recently established Stanford University Institute of Design. Of the cross-disciplinary collaboration that defines the Institute’s approach, the website says:

“Many talk about multi-disciplinary collaboration, but few are actually successful at sustaining attempts to see what will happen. Even strong partners often lose interest because they cannot get along well enough or long enough to see the fruits of the collaboration”

This candid assessment of multi-disciplinary collaboration is welcome. I have been wondering what the other Stanford faculties think of the new institute. Multi-disciplinary collaboration is only one element of innovation that many find challenging in higher education. My own experience, bringing Work-based Masters degrees into mainstream academic provision, met significant early resistance and suspicion that work-based learning is somehow not rigorous.

Going back to Herman and his account of Foulis’s School for the Art of Design, it would be really interesting to know what the Maths, Philosophy and Theology faculties at Glasgow University thought about the academic equivalence of the arts. Has academic snobbery always existed? And what part did it play, if any, in the failure of Foulis’s school? Who knows.

Herman says “In Foulis’s mind, the practical was inseparable from the theoretical”. A very modern work-based perspective has its roots in the 18th century. It does seem that novelty is as old as the hills.