Welcome to Creative Universities
Universities can be wonderful places of invention, ambition, understanding, innovation, creativity and excitement.
Here we celebrate and support this university ideal, world-wide. We invite you to join us.
Some Background
In 2002, a campaign entitled "Creative Campus" sought to highlight the creative opportunities that exist in universities. Let's be entirely clear: this was not another marketing campaign for a university, somewhere! Rather, the idea was very simple:
That whether students (or staff), or the general public, engaged with a university (any university!) in order to explore the arts, or to explore the sciences, whether the social sciences, the humanities, or any other form of knowledge, they should be empowered by that engagement to imagine the possibilities. No university, it was said, should be an "un-creative" space; no university should fail to encourage those within it, and those who engaged with it, to aspire to something more, something greater, than that which already exists.
High sounding words perhaps! But the Creative Campus campaign obviously struck a chord because, world-wide, people responded. They responded with eager interest. They agreed that universities should be places of inspiration and of creativity. They supported the idea of celebrating and developing this ideal, regardless of where they were located. They asked to know more about how we might do this.
From this relatively humble beginning (the original "Creative Campus" campaign had no funds at all, its first celebratory poster was printed on shiny sheets of ordinary copy paper, funded out of a private pocket!), has grown Creative Universities.
Creative Universities
Founded in 2008, Creative Universities is a celebration of the unique opportunities offered in the World's universities - for invention, ambition, understanding, innovation and creativity. Other ideals naturally arise from these core values: leadership, for starters, a commitment to inspiration and motivation; a belief and interest in knowledge, quite obviously; community, meaning the community of those who desire, seek or support the World's knowledge; integrity, meaning a commitment to a core set of values; diversity, meaning a belief in the importance of not discriminating on the basis of individual or social background; empowerment, meaning the transformative power of higher learning. . . .
If you want to know more, read our Charter (above). And then, why not join us in the celebration and support of the World's universities as truly inspirational, creative places?
Professor Graeme Harper
Chair, Creative Universities
chair@creativeuniversities.org