The Rise of the Creative Campus

In the fall of 2013, my campus community—the University of Maryland—will move forward with its goal of becoming a worldwide leader in entrepreneurship by launching a new center to groom the next generation of innovative thinkers. The center advertises that it will offer workshops, classes, and experiences outside the classroom to promote the creative problem-solving skills employers seek and the economy needs to grow.

The University of Maryland is not alone in its promotion of entrepreneurship. Across the country, colleges and universities have established centers, competitions, and academic programs similarly dedicated to entrepreneurship. The ubiquity of entrepreneurship as a guiding force in U.S. higher education is nothing new. After all, innovation through research has been built into college and universities’ reason for being. Indeed, we have always sought to cultivate creative thinking. Yet, given the economic recession and cultural conversations surrounding the role of higher education in job creation, the presence of entrepreneurship on our campuses will only grow. And our promotion of innovation and creativity will be cast in a decidedly economical hue.   

This heightened presence sends clear signals to students about whom they should come to rely for employment and financial security upon graduation: themselves. The rise of the Creative Campus is emblematic of a larger process of developing highly individuated, flexible, competitive, and mobile students. It remains to be seen whether the entrepreneurial push in higher education will benefit individuals, communities, or a combination of the two.

The Broken Promise

The attentive observer cannot help but notice the negative turn in conversations surrounding higher education in the United States. Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times have all recently run feature stories on the problems facing our colleges and universities, namely rising tuition costs, mounting debt burdens, and poor employment prospects for students. The theme of these conversations is that “The Promise,” a persistent cultural assumption in America that hard work and a postsecondary degree will result in a job and prosperity, is under dire threat. Despite the evidence showing that college is still an investment with significant private and public returns, students and their families are scrutinizing the value of higher education like never before.

Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have weighed in on how they would help address these issues. While both candidates generically support making college affordable for middle class families, their approaches differ. Obama supports stepping up federal support for Pell Grants and community colleges, playing up in debates the important role of the latter in re-training unemployed workers, while regulating for-profit post-secondary providers. Romney generally advocates greater private sector participation in higher education funding and provision. Irrespective of their approach, both candidates couch their solutions to the issues confronting U.S. higher education in terms of what is required to reignite the sputtering economy. Whether it is cultural conversations regarding the demise of “The Promise” or reform ideas of presidential hopefuls, there is an unmistakable call to restore higher education as an innovative, job-creating machine.

The Rise of the Creative Campus

It is in this context that we can understand the inescapability of entrepreneurship in college and university strategic plans of late. Higher education leaders are responding to the call, building centers, hiring faculty and staff, and educating students in how to tap their creativity and generate big ideas. The whole purpose of these efforts is to remove or lessen the obstacles to translating an idea into a viable business. In these centers, students can connect with investors or Entrepreneurs-in-Residence to network or receive feedback on their product or pitch. They can even major in Entrepreneurship Studies and take courses that help them develop an entrepreneurial mindset. But the establishment of entrepreneurship centers is only the most direct and visible way that colleges and universities are positioning themselves to foster creativity.

Geographer Jamie Peck (2005) has pointed out how many cities have developed urban plans that cater to the “creative class,” many of them taking inspiration from Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. The basic premise of these plans is to invest in infrastructure that makes a city attractive to the “creatives” responsible for economic competitiveness, including manicured green areas, artistic venues, repurposed historic spaces, pedestrian and bike-friendly paths, and diverse eateries and other consumption magnets. We see similar plans emerging for campuses and nearby neighborhoods across the country. Although it is true some of these initiatives are products of sustainability movements and consumer preferences, there is reason to believe that higher education is staking its current and future legitimacy on creating an environment conducive to creativity.

Entrepreneurial Subjects

By betting on entrepreneurship and creative individuals as the drivers of economic growth, colleges and universities communicate to students that employment will not naturally follow conferment of a degree. In the same vein, politicians and the government do not hold the key to prosperity. Rather, students’ implicit understanding of the entrepreneurial push in higher education, to borrow from Florida, is that “there is no corporation or other large institution that will take care of us—that we are truly on our own” (2002: 115). Amidst continued economic uncertainty, students internalize the messages of entrepreneurship to mean that they should constantly enrich their own human capital and invest in themselves to develop the creative capacities that will set them apart from competitors in the labor market. Remaining at the margins are those college students who have not had access to the resources of self-capitalization, those with a creative deficit.

These entrepreneurial subjects may be pivotal in re-establishing the vitality of colleges and universities, and they may also jumpstart economic growth in America. The question we must ask is whether the big ideas we hope to foster are designed to solve social problems and benefit communities, or revive historical narratives of individual achievement and the “self-made” man or woman in the creation of elite knowledge competitors. If we increasingly expect students to shoulder the rising costs of their own post-secondary education, perhaps we should not be surprised to find them using their innovations to benefit themselves first and communities second.