51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú

You have to love the academic calendar as a rhythm to live by.

As I’ve told a number of you, each year at this time I feel like the Phoenix — rising from its own ashes, but I realize that this may not be the most encouraging metaphor with which to start a new academic year. So, we might think instead about the Hindu belief in rebirth…with each new cycle, a step closer to perfection.

Without passing judgment on what constitutes perfection here, I will say that, at least, we begin this year at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú in a distinctly different place than last year; for one, we have a scientist as our president, and two, but this is not so unusual, there is a scientist addressing you at convocation.

Furthermore, the number of 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú students who graduate with a science major has changed dramatically. From 1989-1992, 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú graduating classes averaged seven science majors per year — less than 5% of the graduating classes in those years. But from 2005-2009, the number of science graduates per year rose to 47, almost 20% of the graduating class.

• Hear Professor Copp speak [right-click to download audio]

This suggests that a new picture of 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú is emerging, one in which science has a higher profile. This change is noteworthy, and even jarring to some, because of 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú’ long history and well-deserved renown for its strengths in the humanities and arts.

We might well ask happened to 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú? In the next few minutes, I’d like to offer a personal and anecdotal reflection on that question.

The curriculum is indeed changing at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú — and not simply in its science profile — but I’d like to suggest that, in a way fundamental to 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú, it is not changing as dramatically as it may appear at first glance.

The very first class at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú entered 82 years ago this month, in September of 1927. Fifty students came to this brand-new college to be taught by five professors — a 10:1 ratio, by the way — something we’re trying to return to now. Among those first five faculty members was Hartley Burr Alexander — a philosopher and poet who immediately established 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú’ credentials in the humanities. In fact, the curriculum was created at the outset with a clear focus on the humanities. But another of those first five faculty members was Sarah Atsatt — a biologist — a nationally known herpetologist — PhD at UC Berkeley — who studied the behavior of reptiles.

In a college focused on the humanities and soon to be recognized for its achievements in the arts — this is after all the college of Millard Sheets (51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú 1932-1955) — the inaugural faculty was 20% science. How was this hiring of a biologist justified?

In his speech upon the opening of the College, the first president of 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú, Ernest Jaqua, invoked a new conception of the humanities and laid the groundwork for another hallmark of a 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú education, interdisciplinarity. To be true to the record, I need to mention that he also structured the last two years at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú as a time to focus on preparing 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú students for a restricted range of “female” professions (with the exception of teaching) — so he didn’t get everything right.

But interdisciplinarity is the aspect on which I’d like to focus.

An interdisciplinary curriculum may seem natural to us because we’ve been living with it. But in some respects it’s crazy: an easy thing to talk about but a very difficult thing to actually do.

So why is it difficult? Many reasons, but a central one is communication — language – and I’m not talking about jargon. There are about 250,000 distinct words in the OED – more than enough to go around, you would think. But in practice, there is such a paucity of words that faculty members in different disciplines are comp

Let me start with a simple example close to home, within science — the word translation. To a biologist, translation is a major step in the formation of a protein from the instructions laid out in a gene. Translation happens in the cell’s cytoplasm, outside the nucleus. But to a physicist, translation means movement of an object’s center of mass, as opposed to rotation about that center of mass. So when one biologist talks to another biologist and uses the word translation, they understand each other. And when two physicists use the same word, they also understand each other. But when a biologist is talking to a physicist and uses the word translation, they very well might not understand each other at all. The physicist could easily walk away from the conversation believing that the mRNA moves — translates — back into the nucleus to take part in protein synthesis — a serious misunderstanding.

What’s more, the biologist and the physicist may not even know that they don’t understand each other! This is the risk of trying to be interdisciplinary — confusion and misunderstanding instead of clarity and epiphanies.

Now, let me take a couple of personal examples from my experience teaching in Core I. In the fall semester, the Core I faculty meet every Thursday over lunch to discuss the course. In those moments when we’re not talking about such crucial issues as how many points to assign to each question of an exam, we discuss ideas. Not having been deeply trained in the humanities, I work pretty hard to track the conversation. The word “reason” comes up and I think, “Great, I’m all over this. I know what reason means.” It means solving a problem by using information — data — to eliminate unlikely explanations and come to one or a small handful of likely explanations. Its purpose is to resolve a pre-determined problem, and its result, if done well, is true.

But what I hold in my head as the definition of reason writ large, is to my colleagues in the humanities merely one category of reason — instrumental reason. My hegemonic definition of reason — now there’s a word you don’t often hear a scientist utter — is replaced by a more constrained view, and one in which the truth of the outcome may not be the most interesting or important feature. So, we’re all using the word reason in our discussion without realizing that we don’t quite know what the other person means, and again we don’t know that we don’t know.

What do we do about this? I’m going to inflict another Core I anecdote on you to suggest how we resolve this problem. In another Core I discussion a professor said, “The self is contingent.” All the other professors nod their heads … except me. I’m waiting for the rest of the sentence. Contingent upon what? Turns out that just “contingent” is enough, although I didn’t know that at the time.

Two mistakes were made in that discussion: the other professor for assuming that everyone understands what had been said, and mine for not asking, “What do you mean?”

Which of these mistakes was the more egregious? Hint: I’m the one having to openly confess to you the limitations of my vocabulary. So, the solutions, which of course you guessed already, are, in part, to be mindful of disciplinary differences in vocabulary and, more important, to have the courage to ask for clarification. I have a homework assignment for lunch — a lunch work assignment. Find someone who doesn’t share your academic interests and identify a word you both use, but in different ways.

If clear communication across disciplinary boundaries is as difficult as I have suggested above, then we should probably throw up our hands, retreat to our departments, and give up trying to be interdisciplinary.

Here’s why that might be a good idea: A shared dictionary is one of the things that allows communication within a discipline to be concise, clear, and precise at least some of the time. The benefit is rapid advancement of ideas. Disciplines have their role, and it is a crucial one.

But here’s why it would be a terrible idea to abandon the difficult and continuing work of creating an interdisciplinary curriculum. At the same time that a discipline, as its name implies, lends focus and much needed constraint to an examination of ideas, it also narrows the view. It can certainly narrow the vocabulary, as my examples suggest. Ironically, in my view we need to promote interdisciplinary interactions to get us out of the ruts of our disciplines and enliven our disciplines as much as to reveal surprising new avenues for recognizing and solving problems and new perspectives on old problems.

Let me offer a sobering example, the explosion of the first atomic bomb outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico. On seeing the brilliant flash following detonation, Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said, “It worked.” But moments after that initial exultation over the scientific achievement, he quoted the Hindu text, the Baghavad Gita, where Vishnu says,”Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” What makes this particularly meaningful is that Vishnu, in the Hindu trinity, is the preserver, the giver and provider.

The fact that that quote occurred to Oppenheimer at that moment reflects his profound ambivalence over what he and others had just done. This ambivalence led many of the Manhattan scientists to petition the President not to actually use the atomic bomb in the war but to conduct a demonstration of its power instead.

My point here is that Oppenheimer reached into one of the world’s great texts to give words to his uncertainty. We should not underestimate the power of that ability — of the humanities and arts to be a place where scientists, indeed all of us, can go for broader meaning.

On a lighter note, I can certainly say that the language of my own discipline, biology, would be much poorer if not for interaction with the humanities. Examples abound in the naming of things.

Cyclops, in Greek mythology, refers to a one-eyed giant. But in biology, a Cyclops is a very tiny planktonic animal with one eye in the middle of its head. Now, that’s funny.

Bucephalus was the name of Alexander the Great’s favorite horse — almost as famous as its rider. But Bucephalus is also the name of a small parasitic worm that infects freshwater mussels and fishes! How the heck did a parasitic worm get named after Alexander the Great’s horse? The parasite doesn’t have a big ox-like head as “Bucephalus” implies. A possible clue: Bucephalus, the parasite, was discovered and first named in Turkey, in 1827. Of course, Alexander the Great had rampaged through Turkey (Asia Minor) on Bucephalus (the horse) — events that may have left behind more than a few bad feelings. So, when the chance for a biologist who knew some history to get revenge 2,300 years later, he took it.

We have at least two choices for achieving interdisciplinarity: We can strengthen disciplines and then have them interact with all the friction and sparks that might entail, or we can bring them together under one umbrella and try to erase the disciplinary boundaries. Neuroscience is a highly interdisciplinary field that seems to be taking the latter strategy. Last summer, I caught a glimpse of why this might not be the better plan. The context is trivial — a TV show — a one-hour science program on “Music and the Mind.” Right away I’m on edge. The title promised too much; Music and the Mind, not Music and the Brain. Now, I’m not one to think there is any difference between mind and brain, but the use of the word “mind” in the title of that program implies that we know much more about the brain than we do.

It was downhill from there. The bulk of the program dealt with fMRI studies of the parts of the brain that are metabolically active when a person listens to different types of music. The question was whether the fMRI analysis can reveal when a person is listening to music they like. The answer was a definitive yes.

Now, this was good science on an interesting question. But there was never a hint of uncertainty about the meaning of the fMRI images — no discussion of how, if the thresholds for detecting signal over background are changed just a bit, the images and interpretations might be quite different. As Jeff Goldbloom said in Jurassic Park, there was no humility there. Or as an engineer wrote, “False confidence is evil! Avoid it.”

It was the smug attitude that really got me. The implication that we have investigated this problem and here is the answer — settled, done. Also, there was an implied foreclosure on a whole host of other questions about music and the mind, as if other disciplines had nothing to contribute to the discussion.

Last month’s town hall meetings on healthcare provided one more example, as if we needed it, that data-driven arguments are not sufficient to carry the day on complex social issues. A deeper appreciation of human motivation is required. We could make a similar case regarding genetically modified foods or vaccines and autism and a host of other issues. Making the public more scientifically literate is not the solution, or at least not all of it.

51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú has the solution. In its interdisciplinary education, 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú fosters exactly the sort of wide-ranging examination of issues, with respect for diverse perspectives, that promotes productive discourse on thorny issues. We pay a price when we don’t confront head-on the tensions and confusions and uncertainties that lie at the interface between disciplines. These tensions, misunderstanding, argument, and confusion are inherent outcomes of creating an interdisciplinary curriculum, as 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú has been doing for the past 82 years.

It might be argued, then, that President Jaqua and others were misguided in organizing a college around academic disciplines and then expecting it to promote an interdisciplinary education. But in my view, it is exactly the tension among disciplines that lies at the heart of a vibrant interdisciplinary curriculum. It is the conflict over words that drives a broadening of our vocabularies and generates new perspectives on problems within our own disciplines, even as it reveals whole new classes of interesting issues.

True, disciplines have their place in a college curriculum, even or maybe especially in an interdisciplinary one. But the interaction among disciplines also has its place, at least in the more courageous institutions, and we should work hard to keep that alive as well.

So what happened to 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú?

In many ways, a great deal.

But in at least one important way, nothing at all, unless, of course, we quit paying attention.