Carolina Alumni Review - July/August 2008

and every other discipline. Business entrepreneurs are creative. Good teachers are creative. Anybody who is any good at almost anything is creative.

“And everyone is a consumer of creativity, too. It’s always been that way. But the university is usually a group of silos that coexist but are largely independent. My idea is to hurl the university into the future and link all these creative people together with the community. It is pan-disciplined.

“Today,” he continues in a casually confident tone, without zeal, “there are new opportunities to do this. The advent of the Internet has radically increased access to education, the arts and humanities. How are we as a community going to deal with that reality? The old models are dead. The Internet has made everything free. How are the universities and businesses and artists going to come to grips with that? I believe that ultimately it will be a tremendous benefit.

“But you have to work hard and be wide open to new possibilities. It is not about the easy commodity anymore, and by commodity I mean a commercial good as well as a university course. To hype a need that may not exist and then try to fill it … that’s the old world. The new world has an opportunity to be a more thoughtful, more comprehensive world, a more detailed, considerate, respectful and more engaged world.

“The challenge is to make people care about education and creative values and the creative life in general and be willing to share them. If we put all of our courses and programs — reading lists, lectures, presentations, workshops, concerts — on public access television for free, and make them available on the Internet for free, then a kid may stumble upon something and decide to become involved in theater or music or filmmaking instead of joining a gang. If that kid has to pay exorbitant tuition fees, or even file a bunch of forms to be eligible for tuition breaks, and then relocate to a campus, then it won’t happen. That’s the old model.”

This kind of thinking, of course, has serious detractors. Snyder, at lunch at the Loyola faculty club, was randomly seated at a table with several of his Loyola colleagues. Snyder continued talking about his vision for access to the arts and interdisciplinary studies at Loyola. His conversational style is warm and amiable, but the content of what

he says is threatening to traditional educators. The faculty members at the lunch table clearly were uneasy with his comments.

A professor in another department asked, “If what you say is true, that everything should be available for free on the Internet, then where does that leave us? How do we own our work? How will we get paid for our work?”

Snyder responded: “We have to find new ways to deliver knowledge and make it available to the public and pay for it. It is going to be harder and harder to justify and sustain the old model. College tuition is crippling kids who come out of college with all this debt. It decreases their options. We have to find new ways to package, sell and deliver education. There are some areas — for example, medicine and applied sciences — that won’t change much. But for the arts and humanities, we run the risk of extinction if we don’t grasp the new technologies and new ways of providing access. I think this is an opportunity, not a problem.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOS

‘We need more weirdos’

Snyder is lean and wiry, indicative of a careful diet and the 20-mile bike rides he takes several days a week. His gray hair hangs down past his shoulders, and there is something natural or unaffected — unconditioned, perhaps — about his presence that belies his years. Listening to him talk about his life and work, there’s no tension evident between his passion and his vocation. The work of jazz musicians is inextricable from their way of life. They don’t clock in and out. Their work is a calling. A connection like this often is beautiful, but the beauty never comes easily or predictably or without wounds. Snyder’s story bears this out.

He went to UNC-Greensboro with the help of a scholarship in 1966.

“It was the early days of UNC-G admitting males, and I think that was one reason I got that scholarship,” he said. He was largely bored, but one summer he took a criminology course to fill a requirement. Sparks flew.

“In the course, I spent a lot of time down at the courthouse in Greensboro, and I realized that I’d had the wrong idea about justice. I’d considered justice a sacrament, but I realized quickly that it wasn’t. It wasn’t practiced that way. I saw it as abusive and traumatic. So I wrote a paper arguing for chang-

ing the justice system to reflect true justice. I didn’t know if I had any idea what I was talking about. But the teacher called me out one day. I thought she was failing me. But she gave me an A plus on the paper and she encouraged me to go to law school.”

The next day Snyder drove to Chapel Hill and found his way into the office of Morris Gelblum, then associate dean in UNC’s School of Law. He saw a copy of the latest issue of The New Yorker on Gelblum’s desk, and it just so happened that Snyder had read an article about the Philadelphia Orchestra in that same issue a few days before.