Professional vs Liberal Education

In yesterday’s post, I mused about several aspects of David Labaree’s book, A Perfect Mess, on the unique features of the U.S. higher education system. Today’s post focuses on Chapter 4 (“Mutual Subversion”) discussing the interesting tension and dance between the liberal and the professional aspects. Before getting into the weeds, here’s Labaree’s summary of these two motifs:

 

“The dominant motif is that over the years professional education has become dominant in colleges and universities, in the process subverting the earlier function of providing liberal education. The more muted motif is that… liberal education has gradually pushed back against professional education, in the process quietly subverting it… these two motifs weave together into… mutual subversion, in which the professional has come to dominate the goals of higher education while the liberal has come to dominate its content.” [italics are mine]

 

There’s a tension between public good and private good. As discussed in yesterday’s post, if one subscribes to the “belief that education exists in order to provide society with the job skills it needs and to provide individual with the job opportunities they want”, then it is no surprise that professional concerns have become the dominant goal. The road to upward mobility was to professionalize. The new gatekeeper to the guild of the professionals is a university-level credential. As employers increasingly demand a university degree to get one’s foot in the door, whether or not the training or content of that degree is relevant, it seems that almost everyone (except perhaps some of the academics themselves) – students, parents, employers, politicians, university leaders, journalists – are banging on the drum that colleges need to do a better job preparing students to be such professionals.

 

In the age of the Internet, with science and technology continuing to dominate industry (or at least that’s the widespread view of most folks), the professional becomes associated with subject matter that, at first glance, seems easier to connect to a job. For professional degrees (medicine, law, engineering, accounting, computer science, and many others), this link seems clear. For the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics) and some of the social sciences (psychology, economics) the link is reasonably easy to make. For others, and especially the humanities, the link seems less obvious in both the political and public eye. Since the humanities are most often associated with a liberal arts education, we in the university have a front row seat to witnessing the many and varied attempts by academics in the humanities to make the liberal arts ‘relevant’ to professional concerns and success in life. (Here are some book examples.)

  

Historically, the addition of land-grant colleges by the states, originally emphasizing “vocational education and providing practical solutions to public problems” into the messy system highlights this slant towards the professional over the liberal. Community colleges, formerly ‘junior’ colleges were founded for similar reasons – to provide the manpower for blue-collar ‘semi-professional’ careers (the semi distinction being a way to stratify and protect one’s turf).

 

But when you turn your gaze on how the curriculum has evolved at community colleges and land-grant colleges (now full-fledged universities with a broader array of programs), interesting you see a shift away from the professional and towards the liberal or ‘academic’. For example, ‘normal’ schools were first set up to train elementary school teachers; soon these became teachers’ colleges, and then full-service colleges. The course content has veered away from the practical to the theoretical. Many of the oldest and most prestigious private universities today started out to train clergy. Many of them still have divinity schools which now focus primarily on theology in an academic sense; the ‘practical skills’ training of pastoral care has been relegated to newer and less prestigious entrants into the higher education scene. Similar narratives can be drawn for law schools and business schools.

 

Labaree intriguingly suggests that “the shift toward the professional and the vocational… has been more rhetorical than substantive. Maybe it is best understood as largely a marketing tool, which makes a university education seem more useful and relevant than it really is… liberal arts colleges after World War I started marketing their traditional liberal programs as places to the learn the practical skills needed for success in the white-collar workplace. We see colleges and universities doing the same today. They emphasize the usefulness of liberal learning – as training in business-relevant skills in communications, problem-solving, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship.”

 

These ‘skills’ are what liberal arts colleges (mine included) are heavily selling as to the value of their education. Schools at the top of the pinnacle do not need to beat on this drum, where it’s obvious that social advance by associating with the elite strata is a clear path to opening doors. But since all institutions are trying to move up (see my previous post highlighting Labaree’s four rules), the drum beats loud in most institutions. Here’s another intriguing suggestion from Labaree: “From this perspective, the aim of education is to prepare students to compete effectively in the contest for social positions, and that means a system that maintains maximum flexibility for students by providing an education that allows access to the broadest array of occupational possibilities.”

 

Good to keep one’s options open. Just in case. Especially when everything in life seems to be accelerating.

 

Why has liberal content continued to subvert the professional goal? Labaree thinks it’s because of the tension between a private good and a public good, and in particular that social mobility trumps social efficiency: “Lawmakers kept trying to push students into vocational colleges and students kept demanding and getting access to the liberal education and university structure they wanted, since these offered them the widest array of social opportunities [i.e., advancement].” Students (and their parents) think that the lower-prestige vocational programs are less likely to help them move up. So what if these entry-level vocational programs provide broad access to the clamoring masses? You might not get very far, at least if your goal is social mobility.

 

Credentialism is not a new thing. But it has risen acutely, and possibly for the worse, over the last few decades. So what if the content of professional education more and more resembles the modern liberal arts? If credentialism is the driving force, the content might not matter. Labaree emphasizes that this has “dramatically distorted the teaching and learning process, by focusing students’ attention on the extrinsic rewards that come from acquiring an academic credential and thus undermining the incentive to learn… What we end up with… is an increasingly liberal form of education… drained of liberal content by the same vocational purposes that brought about this expansion in the first place.” [author’s italics] Mutual subversion indeed. And it's no wonder that students freak out even more than usual if they think their credential might not look so good.

 

The chapter concludes with a depressing note quoting historian Laurence Veysey: “It would only slightly caricature the situation to conclude that the most important function of the American professor lay in posing requirements sufficiently difficult to give college graduates a sense of pride, yet not so demanding as to deny the degree to anyone who pledged four years of his parent’s resources and his own time in residence at an academic institution.” Ugh. We’re stuck in a system. And if there’s one thing systems are good at, it is entrenching themselves.

Temporal Bandwidth

I don’t remember much of college, but I probably did not take advantage of being forced to take humanities courses. Coming from a country with a different education system where we were “streamed” early on (I was placed in the sciences) and had little choice in the classes we took, it was bewildering to be offered a smorgasbord of choice at the liberal arts college I attended here in the U.S. The college was also known for its core rigorous Western civilization course required of all first-year students.

 

Due to the oddity of being the first person from my country to attend said college, it was unclear how exactly some of my prior coursework might “transfer” (many countries have more extensive secondary education compared to the U.S.) After talking to a chemistry faculty member, it was decided that instead of taking General Chemistry, I should be placed directly into Organic Chemistry. Now it turned out that first-year students hardly ever wanted to take or be in O-Chem and so consequently the main O-Chem lectures were scheduled at exactly the same time as the core Humanities course. I received special permission to delay that Humanities core requirement.

 

But then the next year, I was enrolled in P-Chem which was, you guessed it, scheduled at exactly the same time because no one ever tried to take O-Chem and P-Chem simultaneously (O-Chem being a pre-requisite) and thus delayed my Humanities experience another year. Having figured out I could graduate in three years with some course cramming, I was finally enrolled in the intro Hum course, the only senior taking the class with a cohort of first-years. (I was careful not to reveal I was a senior and tried to blend in.) I was also writing my senior thesis in Chemistry at the time, and due to some unexpected things come up in research (which they often do), let’s say I devoted much more time to chemistry and um, skipped a bunch of Hum classes. (I had privately discussed this with the instructor who agreed it was okay.)

 

I might have thought differently back then if I had read Alan Jacob’s new book Breaking Bread with the Dead. It’s a breezy enjoyable read, and I agree with much of what he writes. Of course I’ve had much more appreciation for the humanities since college, and I had read many of the ‘classics’ that he mentions ranging from the usual Greco-Roman antiquity stuff to more recent literature. Many, but not all, of his examples come from a standard Western civ canon, now no longer a given in such twenty-first century intro Hum core courses. Even my stalwart college has bowed to the pressure to include more diverse voices, not necessarily a bad thing.

 

Jacob values the classics, and he thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss them even in this day and age. While he provides memorable vignettes and arguments, the thrust of his book that caught my attention was that reading what seems like a foreign dead past (and as an international student, it was all foreign to me) is valuable for combating what he calls presentism – the ever-accelerating information-deluge age we are in right this moment. My present students have grown up in it, and I try to empathize with the pressures they face in this deluge so focused on the now, even when I don’t quite comprehend it. (I guess I’m a ‘slow professor’.)

 

Jacob makes the argument (with relevance to the social polarization in the U.S. where folks seem only to tune into ‘what their itching ears want to hear’ to quote the Bible, and old classic of sorts) that the sense that the ‘other’ might pollute oneself and should be avoided, is due to experiencing information overload. Here’s what he says: “information overload [is] a sense that we are always receiving more sheer data than we know how to evaluate – and a more general feeling of social acceleration – the perception that the world is not only changing but changing faster and faster. What those closely related experiences tend to require from us is information triage.” And how do you triage? As efficiently and quickly as possible, usually from close-to-instantaneous judgments without significant forethought. We’re doing this all the time these days, trying our best to avoid pop-ups trying to gain our attention through the world wild web.

 

How can we avoid being “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming”? (The Bible is very quotable!) Jacob suggests the idea of developing temporal bandwidth. The idea is that spending time living not just in the present, but infused by the past and future, increases your temporal bandwidth – and in doing so, gives you a heftier personal density. This density helps keeps you grounded when you are being buffeted by information overload, and you can do a better and more thoughtful job in your triage.

 

I find it amusing that bandwidth and density are terms most often used in science-technology settings. They may seem strange bedfellows – after all, if you literally increase your width without increasing your mass by a higher proportion (more than cubically!) your density will actually decrease. Jacob doesn’t address this because he uses these words to evoke an image of breadth, solidity, and firmness. To push his analogy a little further, I’d say he would advocate for significantly increasing your ‘mass’ of knowledge of the past, even if it is foreign to your ears. I think he’d say especially so. And he marshals vignettes throughout his book to support this argument.

 

Personal density isn’t something that bothers me, now that I’m old and stuck in my ways. I do see my students seeking and exploring who they are. Oh, the joys (and horrors) of youth! However, I think the idea of temporal bandwidth is interesting to consider. I happen to enjoy reading history. It’s what I read the most, outside of science. History of science is even better! Maybe that liberal arts education did help me gain an appreciation for the humanities and its intersection with the social and natural sciences. I do read very widely, and I read a lot. (If you follow my blog regularly you already know this since I regularly write about what I read.)

 

Have I developed temporal bandwidth? Maybe. I’m not sure how one measures one’s temporal bandwidth. Surely it can’t be just by counting the number of books I’ve read or coming up with some scale rating for the intellectual density of those books, as pretentious as that sounds. I’m much more comfortable thinking about complexity than I used to be; but maybe it’s because I study complex systems in chemistry so I happen to read a lot on the topic. The subtitle of Jacobs’ book is “A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind”. Am I more tranquil? Compared to my younger days, certainly, but I don’t know if that’s attributed to reading voraciously. I also have what I think is a stable job doing what I enjoy, and I know that’s a rare and fortunate position to be in, especially these days. I suspect there are multiple routes to the tranquil mind, and they may not all pass through widening one’s temporal bandwidth. Prayer, meditation, focusing on a being who transcends time and space, may also be other avenues that lead to similar states. I don’t know. And I’m not worrying about it!

The Glass Bead Game

Imagine the ivoriest of ivory towers; a place where scholars focus on the life of the mind, with fellow scholars of like mind. No distractions from the messiness of the ‘real’ world outside. Your meals, lodgings, and basic daily needs are provided. Your task is to contemplate knowledge across the liberal arts, synthesizing new connections between different disciplines, even as this activity deepens each area of knowledge. It sounds like a veritable Eden for academics.

Such an idyllic situation could come to pass, if a rich-enough country or government decided to pour resources into setting up such an institution. Faint glimmers in the present day exist in the sciences, typically set up with private money. In olden times of patronage, monasteries sprung into being as places of both isolation and learning – sometimes even training teacher-priests.

In The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse, such a place exists some three to four hundred years from now. After a time of turmoil, the nations are in relative peace, and a scholarly class has been elevated to pursue the life of the mind. Youngsters who show promise are ushered into elite schools, and through a weeding process, the crème de la crème emerges to occupy the ivoriest tower. These intellectual-powerhouses engage in what is known as the Glass Bead Game, an abstract, mind-absorbing, activity involving the great synthesis of Knowledge with a capital K.

The novel is a biography of one such individual, a talented orphan named Joseph Knecht. Plucked from obscurity, he becomes a protégé of the elites, rising to the rank of Magister Ludi, master of the Glass Bead Game. His talent is first discovered through music, but he quickly absorbs and adapts the arts, the humanities, the sciences, into his own elite and rarefied education once given the opportunity. But weaved into his life, impinging upon it, is the outside world. He finds such glimpses annoying at first, but they begin a change in him as he gradually synthesizes what he has been taught with what he is being shielded from.

Teaching and mentorship feature prominently. In exchange for supporting its monastic existence, the ivory tower supplies teachers – purveyors of knowledge – to both elite and prosaic schools all over. Joseph finds joy in teaching, where previously he considered it a burden and a distraction to his own research. He begins to desire making a greater impact out there in the ‘real’ world. The delicacy of close-mentoring relationships is explored with Joseph as both mentee and mentor, juxtaposing the challenge when different talented individuals with very different temperaments and motives come together.

The novel explores, in a somewhat abstract way, the relationship between ‘pure’ disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches. Some ivory tower scholars focus almost exclusively on deepening their own disciplines; others are cross-disciplinary synthesizers; and there are tensions between these groups. What does it mean to be creative? What does it mean to create new knowledge? Is a synthesis of known things new knowledge? Can a vocabulary be created that spans, or even transcends, the classical disciplines? The creation of this connective-vocabulary is assumed to have taken place in some symbolic-thematic form, although the descriptions are necessarily vague in the novel. It’s hard to imagine something you can’t quite imagine; like the finite attempting to grasp the infinite.

No institution is bereft of its own internal politics. The ivory tower has its own version as those of us in academia know full well. Hesse closely explores the relationship between politics and history; not a rarefied history of events connecting abstractions but one that is ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. The elite scholars shudder at the latter, seeing it as something impure and to be avoided. But Joseph learns much from a sabbatical-like sojourn to a monastery for several years. The Roman Catholic church is still alive and well in Hesse’s future world, and having survived the travails of many centuries, it has lessons of encouragement and warning to the seemingly humanistic-atheistic bent of the latest ivory tower and its Glass Bead Game players.

There is a playfulness to the narrative in The Glass Bead Game. The ‘biographers’ of the protagonist couch their story in all seriousness, pontificating as you might expect an ivory tower secluded scholar to do. I had the strange feeling of jibing with their pronouncements in a weaving sort of way – sideways rather than head-on. The preface to the novel reminds the reader of its tongue-in-cheek nature, and I think that’s a good way to read it. The prose sounds heavy but you should read it ‘light’ and not read it over-seriously.

This is my first Hesse novel. More than eighty years after its publication, I found it an uncanny read given the present-day assault on higher education especially questioning of the value of a liberal arts education. In the novel, history looks back at an age of wars and futility, and is glad that we got past that era – which sounds eerily like our era today. Somehow civilization came around to the idea of glorifying elite education and deeming it worthy of support in The Glass Bead Game, but it doesn’t look like we’re headed in that direction – at least one that is government-supported; a private technocratic oligarchy seems a likelier bet in our world to support such endeavors. And we see an accelerated widening divide between rich-elites and the not-so-haves, with no peaceful solution, no Eden, in sight.

Science vs Sorcery: Wicked Edition

What really is the difference between science and sorcery?

In the novel Wicked, Glinda poses the question to her instructor during Sorcery class. She and her classmates had previously observed Doctor Nikidik’s “Extract of Biological Intention” imbue a seemingly dead inanimate object with a life of its own in… wait for it… Life Science class. Unfortunately, the details of the theory are not heard by the students, because Nikidik drones boringly – like Professor Binns if this was Harry Potter’s History of Magic class. I would have been very interested to know about the Essence of Life, but all the students heard was:

A little sauce for the soup [mumble]… as if creation were an unconcluded [mumble]… notwithstanding the obligations of all sentient [mumble]… and so as a little exercise to make those nodding off in the back of the [mumble]… behold a little mundane miracle, courtesy of [mumble]…

Then bam! Said object given new freedom of intention almost kills a student. Suddenly everyone pays attention.

I’d love to get my hands on some Extract of Biological Intention. It sounds chemical. Maybe the essence can be distilled from some mixture created by a Potions master, though none is mentioned in Wicked. The existence of such an extract would dissolve completely the already fuzzy dividing line between chemistry and biology, between a Physical Science and a Life Science. If I could make or acquire said potion sometime this year – no, I’m not actually going to bother trying – it would fit very nicely with the team-taught class I’m planning with a biology colleague next spring, since I’m still on sabbatical this spring semester! It would be a wicked demo (pun intended), and students would pay attention every class onwards.

Too bad there’s no other information forthcoming, so back to the story in Wicked.

Glinda is now in Miss (why not Doctor?) Greyling’s Sorcery class wondering about the division between science and sorcery. After all, what she and her fellow students observed in Life Science class looked like a spell had been cast on the inanimate object. Think about it. When you see what you thought was a dead thing behaving as a living thing would, you could imagine living things as being magically animated via sorcery. Let’s consider Greyling’s response.

Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled… it is Art. One might in fact call it the Superior, or the Finest, Art. It bypasses the Fine Arts of painting and drama and recitation. It doesn’t pose or represent the world. It becomes. A very noble calling.

First, there’s a distinction between reductionism and emergence, the former associated with science and the latter with sorcery. My view as a scientist is that reductionism and emergence are two sides of the same explanative coin. Although reductionism is what students are mostly exposed to in science class, there’s a sort of symmetry that binds it to emergence – a harmony of constraint and diversification, possibly explaining why life is modular and why subsystems can be modeled using coarse-grained approaches.

Synthesis versus analysis? As a chemist, these two fundamental activities are once again two sides of the same coin. When I discuss research opportunities with students, I use the words Making and Measuring to broadly describe the activities of professional chemists. Some of us do a bit more of one than the other, but they’re both crucial to the chemical enterprise and to the chemical education of our students. We teach our students make molecules and measure their properties.

A distinction is also made between the arts and the sciences. Sorcery is the zenith of the Arts, according to Greyling. We might call sorcery a dark art today, but in stories involving magic, sorcery is presented more as a skill than an art. There’s a similar confusion over the meaning of a “liberal arts” education. We think the “arts” refers to Art, conjuring in our minds painting, dance, theatre, and the like. But in ancient and medieval parlance, the arts are what we would today call skills. Medieval science and engineering were “trade arts”. Sorcery, as least in its practical rather than theoretical form, would be more of a trade art.

I’ve previously argued that Potions is more science than art, chemistry being the natural equivalent of Potions in the non-magical world. I would further claim that scientific knowledge extends to superior magical prowess, but that’s another long topic. But even in our Muggle world, the distinction between science and art is not clear-cut. Expertise in the sciences has much in common with expertise in the arts. Novices bungling in the sciences bungle in the arts in similar ways. Different kinds of knowing, but still within Knowledge unified.

But the novel isn’t about science or magic. It’s about people and politics, societies and communities, friendship and betrayal, what makes us human, why we see others as less-than-human. It’s about the foibles and problems of life, some we think can be alleviated by science, so why not sorcery too? Wizards should try to improve dire conditions. Greyling continues:

Can there be a higher desire to change the world? Not through Utopian blueprints, but really to order change? To revise the misshapen, reshape the mistaken, to justify the margins of this ragged error of a universe? Through sorcery to survive?

Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, has weaved a clever tale in creating the world of Oz. The main protagonist, Elphaba, who eventually becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, is born standing out with her green skin and sharp teeth. She eventually goes to college, but unlike her roommate Glinda, Elphaba pursues what we would call the natural sciences and not sorcery. It’s an interesting tale of growth, confusion, (im)maturity, and the aforementioned foibles of life. The nature of science and sorcery is a tiny figment of the story, a mere sideline that I’ve chosen to highlight.

I’ve yet to see the award-winning musical based on Maguire’s book, but I’ve been told there are significant differences. I’m now looking forward to experiencing the musical, as part of expanding my experience beyond the philistine. While I enjoyed parts of the novel and its overall intriguing storyline, there are scattered distractions that weaken the plot. The ending is rushed, messy, does not hang together well, and in my opinion this makes it a letdown ultimately. Perhaps I will better enjoy the musical reinterpretation, although I suspect it will not incorporate additional information about the difference between science and sorcery, at least in theory; but it might blend science and art on the stage in joyous sensation.

On Poetry

I became a Philistine in my twenties. Partly it’s because that’s when I entered college and discovered my love of science. Chemistry tickled my brain in a sublimely satisfying way. I enjoyed reading ahead in my textbook, working on problems, and yes, even taking exams. Studying no longer felt like a chore. I stopped reading fiction, thinking it child’s play. I never understood poetry, thinking it frivolous and bombastic. Science and technology was the way of the future – ideas and imagination, yet grounded in reality. I was definitely a Wizard, not a Prophet.

Let me back up.

I grew up in a country with a (then) rigid school system with no choices in class schedules and subjects. National exam results shunted students along pre-determined pathways; mine happened to steer me towards the sciences in high school, but I never really understood nor loved the subject material. National exams were a chore, a rite of passage to be endured, and like many of my fellow classmates, I waited until the last minute to cram for the exam. I enjoyed school. But not for the learning. I enjoyed my time outside of school even more. Playing with friends. Reading fiction. Enjoying Choose-Your-Own-Adventures. I also enjoyed reading non-fiction, but made no distinction between different genres. Library access was limited, so I devoured everything I could get my hands on. However, I had read no poetry beyond childhood nursery rhymes.

College allowed me to choose my classes for the first time. This was bewildering, especially since I chose to attend a liberal arts college in the U.S. that I knew nothing about, beyond the very nice brochure and the generous financial aid package. I took solely science and math courses my first year, because I didn’t know any better. It’s when I discovered my love of chemistry, for which I’m very thankful! But I had to fulfil the distribution breadth requirements of my liberal arts education. In my second year, I chose philosophy and psychology to cover those bases while taking every chemistry class I could fit into my schedule. I avoided any class that smacked of Literature, not that I knew what it was. The required “freshman” humanities class was delayed until my final year, and to be honest, I skipped class aplenty while working on my chemistry senior thesis.

In my thirties, starting as a faculty member at a liberal arts college, I began to broaden my scope – at least enough, to be a competent academic adviser. I listened sympathetically to students agonizing over their schedule choices, especially since many of them had much broader interests than I did when entering college. I educated myself on the value of different majors in areas I was unfamiliar – the humanities and social sciences. I prepared to answer questions about the value of a liberal arts education, although I suspect my answers were simplistic in those early days. Several of my chemistry student advisees told me how much they enjoyed their sophomore-level poetry class offered through the English department; I made a mental note of it as an academic adviser.

Since then I’ve returned to the broader reading diet of my childhood. My choices are abundant and I’ve learned to be picky; I’ve blogged about a number of those books (but not all). This past year, there’s been a resurgence of sci-fi/fantasy; I recently finished the Broken Earth series and the trilogy that began with The Three-Body Problem. I think (or at least hope) I’ve been thoughtful about How-To-Read different genres. Yet I’ve managed to avoid poetry all these years.

But on holiday this week, a book caught my eye: How to Read Slowly by James Sire. I’d read the Mortimer Adler classic which has especially shaped how I read fiction. Browsing  through Sire’s book, I was reminded of thoughtful habits to get the most out of my reading – be it information or pleasure. I considered skipping the chapter on poetry, but I’m glad I persevered. Sire cracked open what to me was mystifying – why anyone actually enjoyed poetry. I’ve read poems before, recommended by friends, but found them obtuse and boring. That’s because I did not read slowly enough, and didn’t understand how to approach poetry.

Sire describes poetry as “Catching Reality in a Mirror”. Here are two paragraphs from his description.

About the great events of life prose seems and inadequate means of expression. Love, death, fate, the capture of a city, the defeat of an archenemy: to reflect on these with depth is to engage, if only internally, in a poetic monolog. Whenever one feels deeply, whenever mere words seem inadequate to capture the quality of a moment or an idea, we turn to poetry, either by writing it or searching for the right poem to read and meditate on.

In great literature – poetry and fiction – we see ourselves, our friends, our enemies, the world around us. We see our interests portrayed in bold relief – our questions asked better than we can ask them, our problems pictured better than we can picture them by ourselves, our fantasies realized beyond our fondest dreams, our fears confirmed in horrors more horrible than our nightmares, our hopes fulfilled past our ability to yearn or desire.

But Sire does more than pontificate about the joys of poetry. He guides the reader through several different types of poems, pointing out the interesting unique features of each piece. Good poems, great poems, are carefully constructed and multi-layered. A single quick read will never do. I should have known better. I tell my students that when they read primary literature they won’t understand it the first time. Usually it’s because they don’t have the experience and they trip over the dense, technical language. But things become a little clearer on a second or third read. The same is true for poetry.

In playful paragraphs, Sire exhorts the reader to re-read the poem after he reveals each morsel of analysis. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I was on holiday, what the heck? Maybe there’s something to this mumbo-jumbo. Then lo and behold, I was very surprised at how it works! I can’t quite describe the delightful surprise I encountered on a second reading, on a third reading. Read aloud, Sire exhorts. I did so – and again I was surprised at the difference it makes. It’s like a light turning on – illuminating the poem. It’s deeper and more interesting than I would have imagined. I now think reading poetry might be both pleasurable and informative. But I have to read slowly, allowing the colorful language and rhythm to sink in according to its own timing.

Reading Sire’s chapter on poetry shed light on something I’d been pondering recently – Is it possible to read nonlinearly? I don’t mean jumping pages in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure; that’s still a linear storyline. I’m thinking of whether it’s possible to read multi-linearly, through several different channels at once. The initial conundrum comes from my origin-of-life reading: Why is information linearly encoded in DNA/RNA and proteins? There are other branched molecules, oligomers, and polymers, in biochemistry – but the main so-called information-carrying molecules are linear chains.

Think about how we read. Symbols on a page. One after another. Linear. Maybe left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, but still linear. Hypertext with branching links? You might zig and zag, but it’s still one-dimensional. Is it because our brain is a linear processor at heart? Action potentials flow one-way. But neurons are arranged in an intricate web, and there’s an interesting interplay between the digital and the analog in the way information is received and responded to in our brains.

We can process information through multiple channels. I’m sitting in front of a TV screen with subtitles, with the volume on, and I understand both languages. I’m watching, reading and listening, simultaneously. 3D-TV. If a next-gen TV released some olfactory molecules, a fourth channel would open for my sense of smell. 4D-TV. The information in each strand might be impinging upon me linearly, but I’m processing in parallel. Multi-linear. It’s a richer experience. Perhaps more efficient, kinda like slime mold quorum sensing.

Our bodies and minds are taking in so much more information than our conscious awareness processes. To get a glimpse of the richness, we could attend to different aspects of the multi-linear information stream. Our friends could help us by co-experiencing an event providing an even richer smorgasbord, as each person notices different sights, smells and sounds.

Poetry does something similar, yet different. The medium might simply be words, but the words have been thoughtfully arranged for a multi-linear experience – one that requires multiple readings, voiced readings, slow readings. It might be the closest thing we can do to  communicate depth-of-experience where mere non-fictive description simply will not suffice.

L.A.S.T.

I’ve coined a new acronym: L.A.S.T. stands for Liberal Arts Style Teaching. I admit it’s an ill-suited acronym and unlikely to catch on.

At the institution I’m visiting, a question was posed to me: At a liberal arts college, does one teach chemistry differently compared to being at an R1 institution? That made me wonder if L.A.S.T. exists,* and if so, is it qualitatively different? Is it superior? Liberal arts colleges tout superior teaching and learning experiences. Do these really play out?

I’ve explored some significant differences for science faculty at liberal arts colleges versus R1 institutions, and class size is certainly one major difference. Having small class sizes allows me to pedagogical things I think would be less effective in larger classes. There is hopefully a lot more back-and-forth discussion between professor and student, and also among students. It’s easier to have students come up to the board and show their work. I know all my student’s names and how each of them are doing in my class, which helps on-the-fly when I’m answering questions. (I have some idea what’s behind the question.) But if we’re talking about class size, you wouldn’t expect much difference between a liberal arts college and an R1 for small classes (specialized upper division electives, perhaps).

Maybe it’s the attitude of the faculty member towards the liberal arts curriculum. Are liberal arts college professors better at looking over the fence and making connections to fields outside their own in their teaching? I do this, but I don’t know if I do so more or any better than my counterpart at an R1. Perhaps it plays out more in office conversations with my students. When a student visits, we talk chemistry, but I often ask the student what other classes they are in and what sorts of things interest them. Maybe that’s unique to me, and if I was an R1 professor I might do the same thing. Except that an R1 professor teaching a large G-Chem or O-Chem lecture would almost never have students visit their office. Students would just go see their TAs if they had questions. So perhaps the milieu of the liberal arts college encourages more frequent direct interactions between student and professor. This also plays out in G-Chem or O-Chem lab where in a liberal arts college, professors are the instructors; at an R1 graduate TAs are the instructors. Or could it be more active learning in the classroom?

The other close interaction a liberal arts college chemistry professor has with students is close mentoring in undergraduate research. At an R1, an undergraduate is often working with a grad student or postdoc, rather than the professor. There are also other opportunities in the community-feel of a liberal arts college that encourages interactions between undergraduates and professors outside the classroom, office or lab. Perhaps there are just as many opportunities at an R1, but I’m guessing most chemistry professors at an R1 only rarely attend these sorts of events – there are grants and papers to write if you aren’t interacting directly with the students and postdocs in your lab.

But I’m still skirting the question of whether there’s such a unique thing as L.A.S.T. If small class sizes and being in a setup that encourages more faculty-student interaction is all that’s needed, then an R1 can perhaps provide the same student experience. In fact, many large R1 institutions have smaller “Honors” colleges within them to do just that. The difficulty with extending to the student body at large is a matter of scale and cost. There’s a reason why private institutions are so much more expensive, and smaller-sized institutions such as liberal arts colleges more so.

As the prime conduit of providing or facilitating the liberal arts education, maybe faculty are the key as to whether students experience L.A.S.T. or not. In chemistry, and the natural sciences more generally, the faculty candidate best suited to a liberal arts college is quite different from an R1. The type of student who opts for a liberal arts college instead of a large public institution might also be different in a number of respects, on average, for a variety of reasons. Maybe there’s a synergy leading to a particular cultural milieu at liberal arts colleges, for better or worse. So maybe it’s not so much that liberal arts colleges have a particular teaching style, but that the culture surrounding teaching and learning is different. Is it superior? That’s the subject of a different blog post.

*A faculty member actually used the phrase “Liberal Arts Style Teaching”; it’s the first time I’ve heard that specific phrase.

Science at a Liberal Arts College

I’ve had a number of conversations the past several weeks about how science departments operate in Selective Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs) versus Research-Intensive Institutions (R1s). I will limit discussion to institutions in the U.S. since that’s the context I’m most familiar with.

What is a SLAC? The ‘Oberlin Group’ will give you a sense of the institutions that fall into this category. At present, they have an average size of 2000 students, and most range between 1600 and 2400. They are private institutions, expensive to attend, although often generous with financial aid. They typically do not have graduate programs (if present, these are tiny) and the focus is almost exclusively on undergraduate education.

R1 institutions are typically much larger universities with over 5000 students, and some of the flagship public institutions have tens of thousands. They are prestigious in the sense of brand-name recognition. Private R1s tend to be smaller in size and more expensive, but they can be generous with financial aid. Public institutions are more affordable although costs are rising more steeply at the flagships than at the regionals. R1s have a range of graduate programs, and in particular Ph.D. programs in the sciences.

At a SLAC, class sizes are smaller. While you might have a hundred students in general chemistry, some programs split into smaller sections. At my institution, introductory classes are capped at 40, so that’s the typical size of my standard G-Chem class. (Honors classes are capped at 20.) At a large public R1, you might well have 400 students in G-Chem, and there might be several of these large lecture sections being run every year. The size is capped by the limits of available lecture theaters. As a professor, I would much, much rather teach smaller classes where I can learn everyone’s name and even get to know some of my students with their quirks and interests. Pedagogically, I can do different things with a smaller class that would be more challenging with a few hundred students in the same room.

Teaching loads at a SLAC are noticeably higher. Many of the Oberlin Group schools have what is known as a ‘3-2’ load – a faculty member teaches 3 classes one semester, and 2 classes the other semester. I’m limiting the rest of my discussion to tenure-line faculty because there are typically fewer adjunct faculty (with variable loads) at SLACs although those numbers are growing. At an R1, the load might be ‘1-1’ or even ‘1-0’ for tenure-line faculty; and much of the teaching is done by graduate students and adjunct faculty. Graduate students also often do the grading and hold office hours for large introductory level science courses. At a SLAC, the professor does all of this. Hence, a lot of a faculty member’s time goes into teaching at a SLAC.

New faculty members are anxious about trying to get tenure. At an R1, getting tenure is predominantly based on research productivity. This is measured in two main forms: bringing in external grant funding and publishing high profile scientific articles. Giving presentations, serving on discipline-related committees or editorial boards, and other activities that are profile-raising are helpful, but grant funding and getting articles published are the main metrics. Thus, a faculty member’s time and energy is focused on these two activities. To get into the ‘virtuous’ (but vicious) cycle, you need workers to accomplish the research. Thus, one needs to support graduate students and postdoctoral researchers with large, typically million-dollar, grants. Undergraduates (unless very talented and willing to put in lots of time) are typically not as productive, since they have classes and other commitments. As a faculty member, much of your time is spent writing (grant proposals and articles).

In contrast, undergraduate research is a selling point of SLACs with strong science programs. As a faculty member, much of my time is spent directly mentoring the students through the research process. (I get to know my research students well!) Yes, I do spend time writing proposals and getting articles published, but it’s a much smaller slice of my schedule. I’m also directly involved in generating research results; that ‘extra’ bit of work on my part is often needed to turn an undergraduate research project into a publishable article for a ‘good’ or at least ‘decent’ journal. I am able to small chunks of research and writing during the semester, but it mostly gets done during the summer. When classes are in session during the semester, that takes the lion’s share of my time.

At a SLAC, you have to be a good-to-excellent teacher to achieve tenure. You also have to show some research productivity (grants and publications) although not at the quantitative levels of an R1. At a smaller school, service to the department and university is also an important component. (Someone has to serve on committees and help with administrative work!) In recent years, service expectations have been lowered for junior faculty as research expectations have crept higher. At an R1, as long as you’re not a poor teacher or generating lots of student complaints, that’s typically good enough to satisfy the teaching part of the portfolio in the sciences since research has become the all-important criterion. Junior faculty members are typically ‘shielded’ from service so they can spend more time beefing up their research portfolio.

Academic advising is an important part of being a SLAC faculty member. You meet with your advisees regularly, help them navigate their academic lives through college, discuss career and post-college plans, and get to know them as individuals. I very much enjoy this part of my job, although it does take time. At an R1, an undergraduate may get little to no advising from a tenure-line faculty member unless you were working in the lab. Many schools have moved towards having professional career academic advisers who may meet with a few hundred students per semester. Forging connections is so much harder.

In a small department, the faculty and staff all know each other and (hopefully) work well together. Much of the equipment and responsibilities are shared because that’s the only way to function effectively without millions of dollars of grant funding to pay for equipment and personnel in one’s own research lab. Teaching and research are blended, with plenty of overlap at a SLAC, while they are generally considered very separate activities at an R1. Thus, the division of labor and resources differs significantly between the two types of institutions. In an R1 the faculty may not all know each other, or the staff, or the student majors. At a SLAC, all the student majors are known personally by one or more faculty members.

From conversations with colleagues in areas outside the natural sciences, the differences between being a faculty member at a SLAC versus an R1 are not as stark, although there are differences. Although not very common, faculty occasionally move between the two types of institutions in the humanities and the social sciences. Such moves are very rare in the sciences. At the outset, the stark differences for faculty in the natural sciences means that someone applying for a faculty position needs to clearly understand these differences and tailor the application accordingly. Having sat on many hiring committees, I can say that not understanding what it means to be at a liberal arts college in the sciences pretty much disqualifies a candidate given the strong applicant pools. As a postdoctoral research fellow, I made a clear choice to work at a liberal arts college and not at a research institution because I wanted undergraduate education (in its various forms) to be my focus.

A final cautionary note: As interest in a liberal arts education increases outside the U.S., and we see new institutions and partnerships sprouting, I have noticed a lack of understanding as to what a liberal arts college is – even as efforts are being made to replicate some of its aspects. A liberal education or liberal arts curriculum is not the same as a liberal arts college. Yes, liberal arts colleges by definition subscribe to a liberal arts curriculum, but many universities in the U.S. have such curricula but would not be anything like a liberal arts college, from the experience of faculty, staff and students. However, the two have often been conflated, and not recognizing the stark difference between institutional types (irrespective of curricula) has led, in my opinion, to challenges and problems in science departments trying to navigate the morass and confusion of differing ideas and unrealistic expectations.

Connecting the Liberal Arts

It’s my fault that my students have been thinking about the liberal arts and what having a liberal education might mean for them. In addition to the Open Classroom last week, involving first-year students in my general chemistry class and throughout the Living Learning Community, I also had the students (just) in my class read and discuss an article by William Cronon. Here’s a snapshot of the title, abstract and citation.

Cronon begins the article by discussing why the terms “liberal arts” or “liberal education” are confusing in this day and age. What was true in 1988 when this article was written is still true 30 years later. My students found his definitions and distinctions helpful; several of them commented that before setting foot on our college campus they didn’t really know what a liberal arts education meant, beyond it being ‘holistic’ and having to take different classes outside of your major of interest. They heard a bit more about it during orientation, and I discussed it in my first meeting with them at the beginning of the fall semester as we talked about why the college has a core curriculum.

The article then provides a very brief two-paragraph history of the liberal arts from medieval times to the present day. I like his apt description of what the liberal arts looks like to students (and sometimes to faculty, staff and administrators) – lists! Cronon writes: “[we] offer plenty of complicated lists with which we try to identify the courses and distribution requirements that constitute a liberal education.” There are “curricular tables and credit formulas” that are unique to each institution but there are also many similarities in what constitutes a ‘core’. However, “no matter how deliberately [curriculum requirements] have been hammered out in committee meetings, it’s not clear what these carefully and articulated requirements have to do with human freedom.”

Recognizing the irony of his approach, Cronon comes up with his list of what a liberal education might look like. The question: “How does one recognize liberally educated people?” To see his list of ten things, you’ll have to read the article in full. I will just highlight a few that jumped out to the students and me. (I gave students prompt questions for discussions along with the article ahead of time, and they came to class prepared!)

They listen and they hear. Cronon makes the point that it is hard work to really listen carefully to someone and pay full attention. Students resonated with this. I thought this was interesting given the ultra-distracting technological culture that we live in. Students, often glued to their cellphones, also recognize this. I have my students take a seven-day timelog to learn where their time goes, and one student said she didn’t realize how often and how much time she would spend being distracted by her phone, and took concrete steps to tackle the problem. (Kudos to her!)

They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth. Several students expressed how they now thought, after reading Cronon’s article, that a liberal education has a lot to do with learning how to learn – being a life-long learner. Hurrah! I had this as a point to bring up, but they came up with it. Students also commented how they didn’t like the idea of “rigor for its own sake”. I should have tried to tease out this train of thought, but since the students were on a roll – and I had prefaced the discussion with the fact that I should not be doing most of the talking – I didn’t interrupt the flow of conversation and let it move on.

They nurture and empower the people around them. My first-year students are young and idealistic – good for them! It’s a reminder to my jaded older self that this is something I should pay attention to. This point also brought home student observations that Cronon’s list had nothing to do with curricular distribution requirements. This led to a discussion of how one could well graduate having fulfilled the core curriculum, but not actually imbibing what it means to have a liberal education. I think a student commented that “your education is what you make of it” and there was talk about how they were responsible for making their own personal connections to the liberal arts and their goals in life. I was very pleased by this discussion!

They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism. This was the one that jumped out at me, because I feel that this day and age lionizes individual branding and self-promotion. Perhaps the rise of the thought leader falls into this category? I can’t do better than using Cronon’s own words: “This is another way of saying that they can understand the power of other people’s dreams and nightmares as well as their own. They have the intellectual range and emotional generosity to step outside their own experiences and prejudices, thereby opening themselves to perspectives different from their own.”

Cronon closes with two caveats on his own article. Firstly, students should not expect, having taken their core curriculum courses, to have been liberally educated. He writes: “A liberal education is not something any of us ever achieve; it’s not a state. Rather it is a way of living in the face of our own ignorance…” Secondly, his list can be misinterpreted to stress individualistic self-improvement. Cronon turns the focus on the community of learners. “In the act of making us free, it also binds us to the communities that gave us our freedom in the first place…” With an allusion to the idea of (the Greek’s) agape love, Cronon argues that “liberal education nurtures human freedom in the service of human community”. His take-home mnemonic for all this? Only Connect… (from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End).