STS: "Great as a dialogue but not as a discipline"
"STS is great as a dialogue but not as a discipline concluded Stuart "Bill" Leslie in his opening remarks at the Fourteenth National STS Meeting (STS-14) in Baltimore on 4 March 1999. Leslie's address did much to set the tone for the meeting and validated the "umbrella structure" of the sponsoring National Association for Science, Technology, and Society. Now a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University who attended the First STS Meeting, also in Baltimore, as a reporter for The Sun, Leslie reminded us that our most important audience is not each other but our students and those who continue to educate themselves about science by, for example, visiting the exhibit on the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum or "Science in American Life" (reviewed in our Fall 1994 issue) at the National Museum of American History. Speaking to the title, "Who's Talking? Who's Listening? Who Cares? Reestablishing a Dialogue in STS," he said that "it might be well to recall that science studies owe a significant debt to historically- and socially-conscious scientists and engineers, who recognized that understanding the larger world in which science and technology are necessarily embedded was an indispensable, if relatively minor, part of a proper technical education."
Fitting "understanding the larger world in which science and technology are necessarily embedded" into the curriculum was not easy, Leslie noted, especially in undergraduate curricula such as engineering. As a case in point, he cited the example of Robert Thurston, "who almost singlehandedly invented mechanical engineering as an academic discipline" but "resented a required English course at Cornell which he thought displaced valuable space in his engineering curriculum." "Thurston had no real objection to liberal arts courses, so long as his students didn't have to take any," Leslie quipped.
Nor did the sciences mesh any better with the humanities, Leslie noted, even under Butler at Columbia or Hutchins at Chicago. On the other hand, medical education, under the leadership of Abraham Flexner, succeeded better at infusing the humanities and social sciences, partly because medical students had already earned an undergraduate degree.
After World War II, though, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recognized the importance of "an integrated program in the humanities and social sciences that would mark it as a leader in engineering education in the 1950s." "Perhaps it's no accident that MIT's president during much of this period was James Killian, himself a humanist," mused Leslie. Leslie also noted that at this time at MIT also originated the Physical Science Study Committee, which revolutionized secondary physics education and "put a human face on" it with the Science Study Series of short books related to the history of science.
Up the Charles River from MIT, Harvard President and chemist James Conant was at the same time "wrestling with similar questions about what to teach his undergraduates about science." In his On Understanding Science, Conant wrote that "We need a widespread understanding of science in this country, for only thus can science be assimilated into our secular cultural pattern." "Where MIT was trying to humanize the engineer and scientist, Harvard was trying to 'scientize the humanist.'" Leslie observed, and it did so with the Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, edited by Conant himself.
"A second round of soul searching inspired by the tragedy of Vietnam" subsequently led to Stanford University's program in "Values, Technology, and Science," with courses taught by "three faculty members, one from engineering, one from the social sciences, and one from the humanities," who lamented that the intersection of their fields was covered by none of them. "These efforts, and others like them at RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute], Georgia Tech, and other top engineering schools, still provide a valuable model," Leslie went on, "even if they did not accomplish all of their objectives."
"As STS (and history of science, for that matter) have become increasingly independent, the idea of teaching courses with colleagues from science or engineering seems to have become less appealing," Leslie next observed. "But I would maintain that there are still significant advantages to that older approach," he continued. "Sitting down with someone trained in a completely different discipline forces us to explain why we study science and technology in the way we do, to preach to someone other than the converted or the antagonistic." He noted that his "own department has offered courses on the social consequences of technology before, but those courses got a different spin when they were cotaught with a colleague from chemical engineering."
Thus, Leslie feels that considering STS as a discipline has deprived us of a forum for learning from people with different points of view, the very forum which National STS Meetings have provided. In fact, during the following question and answer period, Leslie acknowledged that he would like to do away with undergraduate majors -- they were originally conceived for graduate studies, he said. To which another STS-14 plenary speaker Alan Beck chimed, "While the world has problems, universities have departments."
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