Fall Message from Dean Brett Steele
How do we return?
A year ago, I was asking how we begin.
I was beginning. Many of you were beginning. We were, for the first time, beginning together.
This year, I am returning; many of you are returning to start a known process anew, and to take the next iterative step forward in your lives, in your work, in your teaching, in your research, and in your creative practice and the many forms in which that takes shape.
How do we come back to our practice, to our community, to our institution with all of the promise of a brand new endeavor? How do we revisit and test—and, at times, discard—patterns and assumptions that are no longer leading us forward?
One might begin by asking questions about what we are doing and why. This is how I will spend part of my fall—alongside valued colleagues from across campus, and alongside many of you—returning to some of the fundamental questions that underpin all of our disciplines. What is beauty? What is freedom? What is failure? In teaching my first class as part of this remarkable school, 10 Questions will be an attempt to return to and learn from the discovery, the inquiry, and the conversations that are the foundation of our work and the foundation of a university. We’re thrilled to be able to dissolve the boundaries of this public university and invite the public to join us in the classroom for this hybrid academic course and public events series. I hope to see many of you on Tuesday evenings for this energetic exchange of ideas.
For those students, parents, faculty, staff, and friends joining us for the first time, I wish you a warm welcome. I know that you bring your own rich pasts, histories, passions, commitments, and questions with you into the present and into our shared community. In just a few days, a new journey will begin as we breathe new life into the classrooms, studios, and performance halls that we share and within which we will, individually and collectively, shape the future.
Later this year, we will begin to celebrate UCLA’s centennial. Ranked the #1 public research university in the nation, we take great pride in recognizing that the arts have been at the core of the university—an integral part of its DNA—since its beginning in 1919. As we honor this occasion, it provides the opportunity to both celebrate the past and the many accomplishments that have led us to the present and to question how we would like to begin crafting the future. How will we challenge the assumptions that no longer serve us as individuals, as a community, and as a society? What questions will we ask as artists, architects, scholars, forward-looking thinkers and innovators who, through our creative research and practice, will begin to shape the next century?
I look forward to seeing and experiencing your work in the days and months ahead and to beginning new conversations and deepening ongoing ones as we return to our work here on campus and as we continue reach out beyond the 420 acres of UCLA to help shape the future of the city and world around us.
My best wishes to you all for an invigorating and productive fall quarter,
Brett
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