Artists, educators and authors will gather on the Cornell next month for a public symposium to discuss the teaching of creativity and the presence and import of the arts and artistic intelligence across the disciplines of the university.

The symposium, "Creating Minds," opens Friday, Feb. 28, at 4:30 p.m. in Statler Auditorium, with an introduction by Cornell President Hunter Rawlings and a presentation by Robert Fitzpatrick, dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University and former president of the California Institute of the Arts. Fitzpatrick will address the relationship between education and arts policy on the federal and state level and explore ways to take the arts from being peripheral in a university education to being central.

All sessions are free and open to the public.

Organizers say the symposium is meant to challenge traditional academics and explore an imagination-based, creativity-based model. "The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) in planning this symposium invited speakers who would focus on the significance of artistic intelligence and the value of art-based teaching across the disciplines," said CCA director Anna Geske.

Opening the all-day session March 1, which begins at 8:45 a.m., is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago and author of the recently published book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. He will be followed by Marcia Tucker, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, and naturalist writer, poet and Cornell alumna Diane Ackerman, author of the book The Natural History of the Senses, which was the focus of a popular PBS series, and, most recently, A Slender Thread. All presentations March 1 will take place in the David L. Call Auditorium in Kennedy Hall.

The afternoon session begins at 1:30 p.m. with a talk by the prominent American composer John Harbison, who is on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Immediately following Harbison's presentation, Cornell Provost Don Randel will host a discussion on the issues that have been raised and address the question of how one can influence an institution in these directions.

The symposium concludes with a panel discussion by Cornell faculty on incorporating the teaching of creativity into academic programs and how this will influence the culture of the institution. Faculty panelists for the presentation, which begins at 4 p.m., will be Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate, the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor in Humane Letters, chemistry professor and poet; Salah Hassan, assistant professor of Africana studies; Jean Locey, professor of art; and William Streett, professor emeritus of chemical engineering. Francille Firebaugh, dean of the College of Human Ecology, will moderate the discussion.

Cornell will host another symposium on the subject of creativity on April 18 from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Barnes Hall on the Cornell campus. Participating in the discussion, which will address the nature of creative work, will be art critic Donald Kuspit, Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell; George Vaillant, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and director of research for the division of psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital; Robert Scanlan, literary director of the American Repertory Theatre and associate director of the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University; and Cornell faculty members Kenneth A. McClane, the W.E. B. DuBois Professor of Literature; Kay WalkingStick, associate professor of art; and Henry Richardson, associate professor of architecture. Moderating the discussion is Howard Risatti, professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The April 18 symposium is sponsored by the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large Program, the Department of Art, the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, the Cornell Council for the Arts and the Rose Goldsen Fund.