Presidential Perspective
Dr. James Gentile speaks at PKAL Leadership Meeting in Chicago
Research Corporation President James Gentile delivered the following speech at the Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) Faculty for the 21 st Century Leadership Meeting in Chicago.
PKAL is an informal national alliance of some 20,000 or so researchers and educators working to build strong learning environments for undergraduate students in mathematics, engineering, and the various fields of science, with a focus on what works.
Dr. Gentile most recently served on PKAL’s national steering committee, and was asked to discuss his personal vision as it relates to the organization. Although the extemporaneous speech was delivered in November, 2006, a transcript only recently became available.
Research Corporation is publishing Dr. Gentile’s remarks now because they point to an overall direction for undergraduate STEM education in light of the profound sea change occurring in science today. The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of our most important research, Dr. Gentile argues, demands strong personal bonds and a healthy sense of community among researchers, educators and others who hope to move our nation forward in the 21 st century.
I’ve been with Project Kaleidoscope since 1989, a length of time that allows me to reflect on what has been a profoundly meaningful experience, although at the get-go I merely assumed I’d been invited to a one-time meeting with people I’d never met.
However, to my surprise and delight, when we walked out of that first session, we held a collective vision. I would not have thought this could happen, but it did: People from different backgrounds who had no “turf” issues to impede them saw a problem of importance and resolved to make a difference.
It changed my life.
Those of us in PKAL’s leadership over the years have come to view it as an opportunity to serve the community; but it’s also more than that.
It’s a life-shaping experience, one that gets to the very essence of who we’ve become, or are becoming, as individuals -- a complex mix of scientist, educator, campus citizen and an active member of our peer communities.
Of course, what brought us into this scholarly world in the first place is a passion for research; and what brought us into teaching is a desire to promote student learning in ways that connect to our passion for research. Stepping back to reframe our view more broadly, however, we can see how other people have influenced our individual desires and goals when it comes to research and education.
Ultimately then, it’s people who drive the process of scientific advancement.
Let me explore this view – that people are central to our process – by mentioning some of the folks I’ve met along the way who’ve had a significant impact on my life. And I hope doing so will prompt you to reflect on those who’ve made important contributions to your growth as scholar, as well.
One of the earliest was Art Galston, a plant physiologist I met while I was doing a postdoc in the Department of Human Genetics at Yale University School of Medicine. He helped me through a tough period in my life: In my research I’d discovered that a widely used pesticide was carcinogenic. The company holding the patent wasn’t thrilled about that, which made me a tad apprehensive, to put it mildly. After I’d voiced my fears a few too many times, someone told me I should go talk to Art.
So I walked from the medical school to the Kline Tower of Biology to talk with this plant guy, thinking along the way how weird it was -- “Do plants and humans have anything at all in relationship to one another?” Did I mention I was young then, and that this was a long time ago?
Come to find out, Art had had a similar problem with a pesticide that he had developed. It was a problem of a more complex moral and political nature -- that pesticide was later to be commonly known as Agent Orange. He’d been emotionally devastated to learn how it was being used in Vietnam.
Art’s response to my request for help was, “Let’s go talk to somebody,” namely the person who’d helped him wrestle through his problem, the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, a New Haven minister and anti-war activist.
Together he and Art Galston, through our conversations about fundamental beliefs, helped me work through my fear and intellectual confusion those many years ago. They perhaps unknowingly helped me to find courage I was not sure I had.
But there’s more to this story. Fast forward to my present position as president of the Research Corporation (RC), America’s first foundation for the advancement of science.
Quickly, to give you a sense of the history and impact of Research Corporation, many years ago the foundation invested in research that wiped out the nutrition-based disease beriberi; it also invested in MotherCraft, a program to ensure that women bearing children in poor countries had good nutrition. RC research has also put many antibiotics on the market that have improved countless lives.
But my story is about the people you meet along the way, so I’ll return to Art. When I assumed this position, he was among the first to send his congratulations. And it surprised me because Art and I had not communicated in well-over a decade. In a brief e-mail he said: “Jim, so you’re at Research Corporation -- you finally got it right, give me a call sometime. Art.”
Even now his words astonish me -- the people you meet along the way continue to watch you, expecting great things of you. People you meet along the way. You’re meeting each other right now aren’t you? Isn’t that important?
I still communicate with my major professor at Illinois State University, Herman Brockman. The key question he asks me most every time we’re talking is, “What have you learned lately?” I usually answer reflexively with some bit of scientific data, and he says, “…no, no, no. I can read all that in the literature. What have you learned?”
Those of you within PKAL need to ask that of one another, because it’s part of being a community: What have you learned about yourself? What have you learned about your students? What have you learned about your institution? What have you learned about science, about the details of science, where science is going, where science education is going?
Those are the kinds of conversations I have with Brockman and other people I’ve met along the way. Those are the conversations you need to have, not with yourself in a mirror, but with your colleagues. And they should be conversations and not monologues – and to have a good conversation, you must listen.
Let me tell you about Herb Adler, who’s probably unknown to most of you. When I came to the RC, he was chair of the board, as well as a part of Halcyon, one of the nation’s biggest hedge funds. My conversations with him were about what it means to have a board, and about relations between boards and presidents. And also about what it means to make a difference in the world. These conversations helped a great deal with my transition at RC.
Herb died recently from cancer, and the week after his funeral I got a note from him -- it turned out that on his death bed Herb wrote to people he considered to be friends. In mine he concluded with a quote from William Butler Yeats: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.” It was a powerful reminder to me of the meaning of friendship and the impact that we have on people, and they in turn have on us.
One final story about people you meet along the way. Just before leaving Hope College as dean, I was sitting in a local coffee shop when and a former student came by, a young woman of exquisite talent, an MD. I hadn’t seen her for several years, but we’d published three papers together while she was an undergraduate, and we’d attended a few scientific conferences together as well.
She came up to me and said, “Jim, they told me you were here -- I was looking for you.” She wasn’t from town, which meant she’d come some distance to talk.
“I’ve been wrestling with life right now,” she said. “I’m OK now, but I was really wrestling with it.” Part of the reason for her struggles was something we all face – she’d gone over the 40-year barrier, and she was having a hard time with that. She said a therapist asked her, “Who do you know who’s been past that milestone?” And then she remembered my 40 th birthday.
To celebrate I’d taken all my students windsurfing. She recalled that I’d said, “This is, like, way cool, because I’ve got about 40 years left.” And she said, “I remember that more than anything else about that day. Somehow it really helped me get over it.” In other words, what she remembered was me as a human being, not so much as a professional helping her get her degrees or writing “important” journal articles.
People you meet along the way. So that’s a glimpse at what PKAL is about. The key thing is, what are you going to do with it? What difference can PKAL mean to you and your career?
Also, how can we understand the current national scene through the lens offered by the PKAL community?
Let me try to describe what I’m getting at: When I was growing up, I thought it would be really cool to take apart my old Zenith transistor radio -- it had lots of interesting stuff, transistors and resistors and more. This greatly annoyed my father, because he couldn’t put it all back together – nor could I, truth be told. But I learned a basic lesson from that experience, namely that the parts contribute to the whole, but by themselves they’re just parts. Ultimately, as I found out the hard way, it was the music that was important to me, not all the little parts in the plastic case.
Today, I find myself concerned with the whole, and I’ve been asking why we study science, math and engineering as if they’re nothing but separate little parts while ignoring the greater Zenith.
Acting together in PKAL, we ought to be able to invent – or promote – the concept of systems science. “Interdisciplinary” is a great word, but everyone uses it. No one thinks about systems science, yet that’s really what we must be about. We must be addressing key problems by knowing what the component parts are and knowing what they do well, with a profound understanding that unless those components are interacting with one another they’re worth nothing. As a community we must be asking, “How do the pieces fit?”
And asking such a question is one of the primary reasons to keep connected to the people you meet along the way.
With colleagues you can begin to anticipate who the students are and will be in your classrooms and labs – recognizing that you mostly share responsibility for the same set of students. Then, you can think about where science is now and where it’s going, recognizing that research is no longer done in isolation, but rather by teams crossing disciplinary boundaries. Link these – students and science – and you’re suddenly planning for the decade to come, when today’s students are professionals. I guarantee you they’ll be doing systems science. And here’s my point: That means they can’t be trained in a simple, linear fashion within an artificially limited discipline. In other words, they can’t be trained in the same way we were trained.
So anticipating where research and education are going are two facets of the same task our community faces. And because science is a team sport (probably one of the greatest second only to NFL football), it’s imperative that we have a collegial approach, both to research and to teaching science as well.
When it comes to teaching, I often use the metaphor of organ versus organism. If you teach only biology, physics, mathematics or chemistry, you’re creating the equivalent of a single organ. But it’s the organism that truly lives. I have yet to see a liver that can survive on its own unless all the other organs are functioning with it. We must teach whole systems.
Also, to be effective among an increasingly diverse student population facing an increasingly complex body of scientific knowledge, our nation requires a commitment to exploring and implementing many and varied pedagogical styles -- including straight out lecturing, which ain’t all that bad for some students, some of the time.
Finally, I was asked to present my personal vision, and this is mine: to have an impact on as many people as possible, but always be who you are when you do it. Don’t be like me, don’t be like Jeanne Narum. Don’t be like those “people you meet along the way.” Be yourself.
You owe it to your students to remain who you are. The essence of who you are needs to come out all the time. You owe it to your colleagues. When you feel like yelling, don’t yell, but you owe it to them to let them know that you feel like yelling.
You all have visions and agendas, right? And you’re all going to follow them through, right? Just remember that leadership is a form of risk-taking.
I’m expecting reports from all of you in about five years. I hope we can come back and I can listen to you tell me about what you’ve learned. Thank you.