Art, incorporated

Five years ago, Babson, a business college in Babson Park, Mass., offered little in the way of arts education. But administrators realized the school was failing to attract students who wanted a rounded college experience. Babson hired Burl Hash and made him director of its new Sorenson Center for the Arts, which oversees both performing and visual arts.

Now the college has theater groups and a community chorus, and Mr. Hash continues to find new ways to insert the arts into course work and extracurricular activities.

"We've used our jazz band as a way to springboard discussions on leadership issues," says Hash, whose background is in theater. "How do you have a jazz band that actually sticks together but allows a lot of people flexibility to go off in another direction? And how do you get it back? What do you do when you get a player who's not very good on your team? We found ... that it just provokes a whole different way of looking at things."

Hash has also lectured on leadership models in Shakespeare. And students can take theater training or a visual arts course to learn how to make more effective business presentations.

"More and more, the faculty here has begun to call me up and say, 'Wow. How could we use the arts to help solve this problem or help people see this problem better?' " Hash says. "So it's really fun, to tell you the truth."

Missy Fine, a Babson freshman, is one student managing to balance her interests in the arts and entrepreneurial business.

"There's not as many [arts] resources because it's a business school," says Ms. Fine, who grew up painting oils and watercolors and runs her own jewelry-design business. But there have been improvements, she agrees. "We never used to have potting wheels, but now we do.... Creativity is more talked about, and people share their creative ideas, not just their business ideas."

Science classes are on Jill Meredith's agenda. As director of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in central Massachusetts, she plans to collaborate with a physics professor to use the museum's collection of famous stop-motion photos made by Harold Edgerton.

Departments such as black studies, anthropology, Russian, and European studies already have drawn on the museum's collection of prints, Ms. Meredith says. Once the museum does a project with a department, the professors "come back again because they realize it's a terrific resource."

There's also a Teaching Gallery, where the museum brings objects out of storage for students to examine closely. Unlike at large art museums, none of Mead's paintings is behind glass. "We'll make anything accessible by appointment, whether it's a faculty member coming in with a class or a student project. And that's something they just can't do at a bigger museum," Meredith says.

In addition to spreading the word about art collections, schools find innovative ways to use performing-arts talent beyond the stage.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3