Some of you know that my home field is the performing arts—mainly doing theater but also opera and music, along with a few years as the presenter of our Great Performances series in the Center for the Arts in the last decade. Coming from that background I have a deep familiarity with what we call audience development, the end result of which is crassly termed—both in the arts and, I’ve since learned, in the more exotic field of enrollment planning and management—“butts in seats.” The relationship of general education here (and almost everywhere) to that particular occupancy issue is well-known and not my direct subject today.

Instead I’m interested in the longer view of audience development as a primary opportunity, even an obligation, in liberal and general education. When we teach a general education course (which, in the well-known formulation, is most likely the last course a given student will ever take in our field) we are doing audience development work in at least two senses that transcend particular butts in specific revenue-generating seats.

In a gen ed classroom we’re given a chance to develop a long-term audience for a couple of things we love, or we wouldn’t be here—our home discipline, and the life of the mind. Our gen ed classes are a vehicle for the cultivation of society’s broader and deeper engagement with—you name it—the hottest issues in contemporary physics or global economics or the creative arts or citizenship. To take the next step, beyond building a constituency for any one discipline, developing a passion for the life of the mind creates a permanent audience for the work of the university as a whole—for the very idea of a university (in perhaps a slightly post-Newman iteration).

In that sense, our academic audience development represents the essence of enlightened self-interest. By energizing today’s gen ed student with both the white-hot excitement of our various fields and a sense of their relationship to a larger set of questions that confront us all, we create tomorrow’s marketplace for our particular goods and, over a slightly more distant horizon, a livelier, more engaged, and perhaps (to dream a little) a more just and peaceful world. With the requisite number of butts in the appropriate seats, of course.