Creativity is not an academic interest in and of itself, but an attribute that can be applied to disciplines ranging from music and English to engineering and math. Starting next year, there will be a place on campus for creative thinkers of all academic interests to come together and share their love of creativity and the arts.

Next fall, North Campus is introducing the Living Arts Community, a new housing opportunity in Bursley Hall. Living Arts will require participants to take a one-credit class discussing creativity across the disciplines and would encourage students to take the creative process class, which was the inspiration for the program and is collectively taught by the four North Campus schools, if the students' schedules have room.

Living Arts will also give students the opportunity to work together on largely student-chosen projects. While the program director and others may offer suggestions — for instance, a celebration of the anniversary of the University Symphony Band's trip to Russia during the Cold War — it will be largely up to the students to decide what their involvement will entail.

Jean Leverich, the director of the Living Arts Community, has the kind of enthusiasm for the program that cannot be manufactured.

“It’s a dream job,” Leverich said of working with such a small group of students so closely.

Though she explained her role as simply “providing the sandbox and some parameters for play” along with a bit of friendly nagging, her intense passion and insistence on creating a program developed mostly by students is what gives the Living Arts Community steam.

“I really want to leave it to the students,” Leverich said.

In the fall, she will be asking the program’s enrollees what they envision or aspire to create, allowing for, as she put it, “lots of free-form jamming.”

“How would it really be about creative process if I was dictating, ‘You will be creative in the following ways?’ ” Leverich said, explaining that this oversaturation of structure is exactly what the program is attempting to battle on North Campus.

Leverich explained that one of the consequences of this overly structured curriculum is that students find themselves shuffled away into studios due to the focused nature of their programs and are never given the opportunity to work with students from other fields.

Nathan Zukoff, a senior in the Interdisciplinary Engineering Program and head of the idea organization, is familiar with such a feeling. The idea organization is a student-led, arts-inclined group that arranges visits from notable people and group projects facilitating and coordinating interdisciplinary efforts.

“I felt pigeonholed right away,” Zukoff said. “Had I been a freshman … I would have signed up (for the Living Arts Community), no problem.”

Leverich stressed “cross-field fertilization and collaboration” as a major goal of the Living Arts Community. This allows for a more open process that accepts diverse methods for creative problem solving.

Theresa Reid, executive director of the Arts on Earth Program, is entirely on board. Arts on Earth is a larger-scale organization that includes the Living Arts Community and idea. It states its mission as “integrating art-making and the arts into the life of the University” so as to “educate, create and collaborate.” And although Living Arts faced many difficulties at first, whether monetary problems or just the lack of a certain “spark,” now things are finally falling into place.

“I think that it’s really in the water in a way,” Reid said. “The deans just … clicked, and this is part of the fruit of that.”

David Munson, the Robert J.