{"id":1822,"date":"2009-08-17T12:43:17","date_gmt":"2009-08-17T19:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=1822"},"modified":"2013-07-31T11:23:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-31T15:23:57","slug":"the-school-of-the-arts-and-communication-gets-a-new-dean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=1822","title":{"rendered":"The School of the Arts and Communication Gets a New Dean"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"john
John Laughton, Dean of the School of the Arts and Communication<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

John Laughton <\/strong>comes to TCNJ from the University of Massachusetts\u2013Dartmouth, where he was most recently a professor and chair of the music department. He also served for seven years as the dean of the university\u2019s College of Visual and Performing Arts. He has more than 30 years experience as a higher education educator and administrator, international arts consultant and performer, and trained mediator.<\/p>\n

As an arts administrator, Laughton has developed arts programs in the United States and Brazil, served as an adviser to the Institute for International Education, and has served as an officer on the boards of the Fulbright Association and the Fulbright Center in Washington, DC. He has directed and produced the Tidewater Music Festival, Chesapeake SummerArts, and California Summer Arts.<\/p>\n

As a performer he has been broadcast nationally and internationally, and he has performed in major concert halls throughout the United States, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Brazil, and China. He is a two-time winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Grant, and twice the recipient of grants from the United States Information Agency for his concert\/teaching tours of Brazil.<\/p>\n

Laughton has served on the panel of judges for the Taneev International Chamber Music Festival in Russia and for The Fourth Georgian Competition of Musician-Performers in Tbilisi, Georgia. His publications include articles on the works of Darius Milhaud, commentary on the lives of contemporary Chinese artists, and articles on cultural democracy, censorship, and the arts<\/p>\n

\u201cI started my career as a professor at St. Mary\u2019s College in Maryland, and helped build that program into a school very similar to TCNJ,\u201d Laughton said when we talked with him last spring. \u201cIn fact, [St. Mary\u2019s] was kind of a model that a lot of states looked at when developing liberal arts colleges as an alternative to large state universities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laughton said it was too early to make any \u201cbroad generalizations\u201d about changes or new initiatives that might be in store for his school. \u201cMy first priority will be to bring people together, find out where things stand, what people\u2019s priorities are, and listen to what people have to say,\u201d he explained. \u201cSchools have their own culture that develops over the years,\u201d Laughton continued. \u201cThe people who have been here have ideas that they believe in, and that they\u2019ve used to transform and change programs. My goal is to find out more about these things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Laughton did discuss one somewhat-recent change at the College\u2014moving the Department of Communication Studies from the School of Culture and Society to its current home in the School of the Arts and Communication (that move took place in fall 2007).<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s a good match,\u201d Laughton said about combining communications and the arts within one school. \u201cConsidering \u2026 the way the arts play into the 21st century model of making contact with one another, and with influencing and impacting ideas\u2026the merging of those disciplines [i.e., art, music, and communications] was forward-looking on the part of the College.\u201d<\/p>\n

He pointed to today\u2019s popular methods of communicating\u2014for example, facebook, YouTube, and the iPhone\u2014as examples of how written communication blends with sound and visual culture to create the information that people process. \u201cTo connect these\u2026modes of communication, and to emphasize the strength of that way of communicating and\u2026effecting people\u2019s ideas and ways of looking at the world\u2026[is] more relevant now then it has ever been,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Laughton said he is committed to keeping open the lines of communication with alumni of the school\u2019s departments. \u201cI\u2019m eager to meet alumni, and understand what their dreams and aspirations are for the school, and help them anyway I can to promote their careers, because that likewise is beneficial to the school,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope alumni understand that any growth and development in the School of the Arts and Communication, and the College itself, adds value to their degrees. It\u2019s a win-win situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Laughton is an activist in arts, economic development, and violence prevention, serving on regional and national boards. He works with charitable organizations to raise money and awareness on how the arts can transform communities and educate across disciplines. In both California and Massachusetts, he organized campaigns in which artists and musicians helped young people living in areas of high gang activity to see \u201cthe importance of democracy, communal work, and cooperation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are concepts that they probably see in their gang environment, but don\u2019t ever see at work in other environments,\u201d he said. The programs he administered showed the young people that these concepts can work in \u201cnonviolent, safe environments.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Laughton comes to TCNJ from the University of Massachusetts\u2013Dartmouth, where he was most recently a professor and chair of the music department. He also served for seven years as the dean of the university\u2019s College of Visual and Performing Arts. He has more than 30 years experience as a higher education educator and administrator, international arts consultant and performer, and trained mediator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":1824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,10,28,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-online-exclusives","category-september-2009","category-on-campus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}