Yesterday I had a visit from Dr. Lawrence Neeley who recently completed his PhD at Stanford and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at MIT. I met Dr. Neeley at Harvard last month and am extremely grateful for having the chance to have a chat with him on his area of expertise … which is expertise. With such a formidable younger mind before me, I couldn’t help but ask the question that everyone seems to ask me these days, “What do you see as a future imperative for RISD?” Lawrence sat and stewed for a moment, looked in the air for about five seconds, and came back with the following items:

• To realize that creativity is not some “loosey-goosey” activity but an extremely disciplined and rigorous approach built upon foundational skills and knowledge.
• To understand “focused expertise” as both narrow and broadening. In other words, the challenge being to engage in a single arena of thought deliberately while exercising ability to “focus broadly” onto a greater context simultaneously.
• The above said another way, “To connect a practiced skill set with higher level thinking.”
• An admonition to not pre-assume that a purely skill-building approach to learning is devoid of important and disciplined thoughts. His point being that deepening and broadening thoughts do naturally occur within the context of building concrete skills. He said this in relationship to what he called the bad label that “vocational education” has gotten in our country.

My takeaway from our conversation is the fact that every first-year RISD student undergoes an extremely rigorous year of foundational studies intermixed with liberal arts courses to give a humanistic context coupled with tremendous opportunities to build skills in a wide spectrum of art-thinking and design-thinking arenas. Neeley’s desired base is certainly right here at our RISD. Thank you, Lawrence, for your thought provoking ideas.