Emerson prez: ‘Like MIT for the other side’
Emerson College President Lee Pelton joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program yesterday to discuss the institution’s role in Boston.
Q: This is a school that produces so many publishing and media interns around Boston. It must be a really great school to have that kind of a local impact.
A: I humorously describe Emerson as MIT for the other side of the brain, and what I mean by that is our Emerson students are like students who go to engineering school: they know what they want to do, they know that they want to be a civil engineer or an aeronautical engineer. And it’s a liberal arts base for both schools, but these are students who have known what they’ve wanted to do since they were 8 years old — and just like MIT, we have laboratories, but they’re creative laboratories: our stages, our studios and all other sorts of things. Experiential learning is a large part of what we do at Emerson.
Q: It’s so great that you allow these Emerson students to have these internships, because for me there was a big difference from reading the paper and being on the city desk and hearing the calls and hearing the assignments and things like that.
A: It’s important. We’re what I call Liberal Arts 2.0, and that is to say that we knit together theory and practice. When I was at Harvard, you could get credit for music theory but no credit for musical practice or performance. That slowly changed over time.
So we’ve been doing what liberal arts colleges are beginning to do, which is to knit together theory with practice. And so experiential learning, certificate programs, internships have become much more important, a more important part of the educational program.