Feature: Why Bother to Integrate Science and Humanities?
As specialization fragments the academic landscape, how can MSU offer students a coherent thread of knowledge? The answer is integrative studies.
In the late 19th century, colleges evolved into universities. Science became part of the curriculum, graduate programs were added and professional schools created. New departments emerged while the faculty developed increasingly specialized fields of study. This change caused concern everywhere. In Britain, for example, the land-grant movement of the U.S. which led to the founding of Michigan State University was mirrored by new colleges that provided a scientific education for non-traditional students. The graduates were employed in the technical fields that resulted from new discoveries in science. These colleges became disparagingly known as the 'red brick universities' in contrast to the mellow, aged stone appearance of Oxford and Cambridge!
The sciences often reap the blame for causing an apparent decline in the breadth of scholarship at our institutes of higher learning because of the increasing specialization required by the departments. My colleagues in other disciplines on this campus and others, however, have also become increasingly focussed in their academic endeavors.
The main criticism seems to be that we have become, and in turn our students expect, technical training institutes with the main ambition of the student being to obtain a job rather than an education. This situation is not new. After all, Oxford and Cambridge began as training schools for the clergy and the medical profession. The debate, however, is specious. Students should not come here to obtain a good education or a good job; they should come for both reasons. Without a good education most career opportunities are limited. Without a job it is hard to enjoy the fruits of a good education. We argue continually about the balance between what appears to be opposite goals whilst sometimes forgetting that they converge. A good education vs. a good job.
We have inherited a system that has become progressively fragmented over the past 150 years. The tendency for colleges within universities to focus on increasingly specialized fields drives the fragmentation further. Developing specialized departments from already specialized departments tends to make it difficult to hold a meaningful discussion on what is a meaningful education. I remember the chairman of the physics department at my undergraduate college proclaiming with a mixture of pride and embarrassment that his students were so immersed in physics upon graduation that they were not fit for normal society during the following six months. Increased specialization as a function of increased knowledge is common to all disciplines, not just the natural sciences.
I once made list of the material I intended to cover in a course that was not in the literature when I took a similar course myself. This new knowledge is based on an understanding of the material we did cover as undergraduates and that presents a dilemma--what to leave out whilst maintaining a coherent thread of understanding. The tendency has been to add more and more specialized courses as the knowledge base grew, continually trying to preserve what is basic from the old and add what is relevant from the new. Deciding what to omit is far more difficult than deciding what to add.
Integrative Studies.
Despite the continuing trend towards specialization the ideal of a broadly educated student has remained a goal in the American higher education system. It distinguishes the American system from almost all others and it places a great deal of stress on it. It has its roots partly in the classical tradition of the well-rounded person, sometimes romantically referred to as Renaissance Person. It is also rooted in the concept of the education of citizens for a participatory democracy. It has thrived under many names--'distribution requirement' and 'general education' are two of them. Following the review of undergraduate education MSU launched in the late 1980s a new term was developed: Integrative Studies.
The name encapsulated a belief that the fragmentation of disciplines had created separate cultures in the manner referred to by C.P. Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University and, that it was time to redress the balance. The term means different things to different people and when we discuss it on campus one is reminded of Humpty Dumpty's remark in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.' At its broadest, it can be interpreted as interdisciplinary, but how much so remains open to interpretation
In the natural sciences we recognize that each field provides background for the others in some way. The use of X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of DNA that provided the key to the genetic code, for example, involved an integration of physics, chemistry and biology. My own field, geology, could not be studied without a knowledge of physics chemistry, biology and mathematics.
One goal of the integrative studies program is to make this clear. We further develop the integrative nature of the courses by relating the subject matter to the environmental and medical consequences of utilizing natural resources concentrated by biological and geological processes. In these course we try to provide an insight into the way the scientific process works.
The program offers students an opportunity to study with faculty who have spent their life preparing to be scientists and who have put their skills to work in research laboratories. We cannot hope to review the whole of science in two semesters so we have chosen to illustrate the contribution of science to society from a variety of different disciplines and allow the students to choose two of them, one physical science and one biological science.
Why, many students ask, continue to force science courses on students who do not intend to pursue it as a career? The desire to create a Renaissance Person, a well-rounded citizen, is somewhat abstract. In an attempt to explain our goals in a more prosaic setting, and deflect it, I use an analogy at the beginning of my class. We often purchase a device that comes with a small tome: 'Read the instructions carefully before operating, partial assembly may be required.' The human race inherited the earth in its present form. It came with natural resources, an energy supply and a bountiful supply of food, but no instructions. Since we came on the scene we have attempted to operate the device by making up the instructions as we go along.
Bumbling Attempt.
Science can be thought of as our bumbling attempt to do this. With each step we take we discover new aspects of the physical and biological systems in which we live and in doing so we inevitably modify them. It is an important part of the student's education to understand that knowledge grows by trial and error and that the errors have only been corrected after more trials. The great breakthroughs in science have refined the way in which we pursue knowledge enabling us to recognize some of the problems in advance. However, the complexity of the systems we try to study means that we are still open to error in the interpretations we make.
We do not know in advance what we need to investigate in order to solve some of the more intransigent problems facing us. The biological processes behind diseases such as cancer are an example. Science and technology are frequently confused and the adverse effects of utilizing scientific knowledge in a variety of technologies are increasing used to suggest restrictions be placed on scientific investigations.