Winter Message from Dean Brett Steele
Happy New Year and welcome back!
I always find the new year, and each new quarter, to be filled with questions. What will this year bring? What promises lie in store? What challenges will we grapple with anew? It is a moment of possibility in which the right questions can help to clarify one’s journey and hone one’s purpose.
I also am finding interrogation critical at this particular moment, given the particular circumstances in our world. The right questions, after all, help us frame our mission—they give us the opportunity to seed new beginnings, new ideas, new forms, new solutions.
I am grateful to all who joined us on campus and across the city for this fall’s inaugural “10 Questions.” Over the course of 10 weeks, we welcomed incredible minds and voices from across our school, our campus, and our city to ponder 10 essential questions. The dialogue was profound, enlightening and only the beginning. It revealed how important sincere inquiry across disciplines can be, how essential it is to test one’s assumptions, and how instrumental asking fundamental questions can be in creating a strong community.
Remarkably, but not surprisingly, our conversations here at UCLA resonated well beyond the bounds of our 420-acre campus across our city. This is what makes all of our work in the School of the Arts and Architecture so vital. From work in our classrooms and studios, to our research, to our civic role as a public university, we ask: “What is our future and how will we shape it?”
What I am very much coming to appreciate as a member of this remarkable community is that to ask questions about UCLA is to ask questions about Los Angeles.
That is a daunting but invigorating charge. As we cross the threshold of a new year, one can feel the energy of the future throughout the city and across our campus. We see creative minds and makers seeking out Los Angeles as fertile ground for their creations for the future. From Google's imminent arrival in the neighborhood, to the Berggruen Institute’s hilltop headquarters a stone’s throw from campus, to the scores of artists, architects, designers, performers, makers and thinkers operating out of their studios across the region—we are literally surrounded by—and an integral part of—a city actively imagining and, critically, making the future.
What a thrilling time to be in Los Angeles, what a vital time to be part of UCLA to both feed that energy and, when necessary, to question it.
I invite you, before we all become consumed once again with the essential work of a new term, a new year, to take a moment to question the future. What is your essential question for this moment? What are the questions that will fuel your work, your journey?
I know the sincerity of that inquiry will inspire our students, our work, our art, and our world.
Thank you for all you do and all best for 2019,
Brett
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