Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [53]
The ideas for these changes have grown out of four decades of teaching, first at a small liberal arts college and now at a major research university. In many ways, undergraduate liberal arts institutions lend themselves to educational experimentation more readily than research universities. My experience at Williams was particularly instructive. Though my career began in the Department of Religion, for twenty-five of the thirty-six years I taught there I was not in any department and was free to collaborate with colleagues in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. Over the years, I worked with people in philosophy, literature, history, economics, art, architecture, media, information technology and graphic design. This experience has transformed my research and publication and has led to a broad range of interdisciplinary initiatives and courses.
Though all of these collaborations have been productive, one in particular is instructive in this context. The most difficult gap to bridge, I have stressed, is the one separating the natural sciences and the humanities. The level of specialization in the sciences and the limited focus of many people working in the humanities make communication extremely difficult. And yet, it is vitally important for scientists and humanists to engage in ongoing conversation and for students to examine the difficult social, political, economic and ethical questions contemporary sciences raise. In a world threatened by nuclear weapons, bioterrorism, epidemic disease and climate change and faced with questions raised by genetic engineering, neuroscience and nanotechnology, it is essential for scientists to reflect formally and critically on the implications of their work and for students to develop the scientific literacy necessary for them to be responsible citizens. There is a growing recognition in some circles of the need to open lines of communication among scientists, humanists and artists. David Edwards, Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard, writes in his recent book, Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, “Artscience [i.e., the creative synthesis of art and science] can thrive in research institutions today because science and art innovation demands the kind of culture mixing implied by crossing traditional art and science barriers. We may find the theoretical physicist turning into a material scientist, and the material scientist into a biologist. The sculptor turns into the installation artist and the installation artist goes digital.”1
Having worried about the problem of communication between scientists and nonscientists for many years, I proposed to teach a course that would probe questions of common concern with a colleague, Chip Lovett, who teaches in the Department of Chemistry at Williams. We borrowed the title of Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s well-known book What Is Life? The course was not designed to explore the existential questions of late adolescents but to investigate philosophical questions raised by the latest scientific understanding of life. Chip conducts cutting-edge research on AIDS and certain forms of cancer and is the rare teacher who can explain complicated scientific theories and ideas with remarkable clarity and accuracy. His classes in our course covered the basic chemical and biological processes that make life possible, and I introduced students to different historical and contemporary philosophical interpretations of biological life. We also required students to consider some social, political, economic and ethical questions like the beginning of life, abortion, genetic engineering, cloning,