Making science a hot topic
By Ronald A. Crutcher
The Oscar that Al Gore won for his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, coupled with the film‚s box office success, illustrates that global climate change has been accepted as fact. An international panel of scientists recently concluded, for the first time, that it is almost a certainty that human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half-century. At the same time, Congress has established several new committees to consider the issue in hearings that happen almost daily, according to the journal Nature. Nearly every candidate for president has taken a stand on what should be done and when. And town meeting voters throughout New Hampshire spent the spring considering climate change referenda that they hope will lead to more attention on the issue when primary season begins in earnest.
The journey that brought us to this moment illustrates the value of cross-disciplinary study. The evidence that informs our understanding of the issues of global warming were collected by biologists and meteorologists, archeologists and geologists, chemists and social scientists. When collected and connected, the work of hundreds of researchers makes it clear that the Earth‚s ris-ing temperature represents a trend that could have a catastrophic effect in the future, and alarmingly, perhaps not all that far into the future.
Yet our ability to act on the scientific evidence that points to humans‚ role in global climate change depends upon broader societal and political understanding of the issues. The difficulty of achieving social and political consensus around a new idea with troubling implications is evident in our slow and halting attempts to grapple with the problems that human civilization and industry have created. Clearly, fluency in the methods and meaning of scientific endeavor is important not only for scientists, but for all citizens, particularly those who are in positions of leadership.
Questions of science lie at the heart of many of our most complicated and urgent public policy debates, and not only those related to global warming. Scientific and quantitative literacy is essential for every educated citizen who wants to parse a candidate‚s report on the economy, evaluate the health risk factors associated with their lifestyle choices or critique the suitability of public policy initiatives to guard against a pandemic.
Liberal arts colleges can play an important role in meeting the challenges we face as a society. Higher education researchers note that liberal arts colleges produce a disproportionately large share of the scholars who earn advanced degrees in the sciences. One study showed that although liberal arts colleges enrolled only 8 percent of all four-year college students from 1990 to 1995, their graduates received more than 17 percent of all the Ph.D.‚s awarded in science. The close interaction between students and faculty that liberal arts colleges offer undoubtedly plays a critical role in the liberal arts college difference.
Wheaton exemplifies the strength of the liberal arts colleges‚ contributions to science study. The college's faculty members are recognized leaders in their fields˜be it the study of mercury contamination of marine life, the geology of distant parts of our solar system or the development of high-powered lasers. And as these professors pursue their research, their insights as practicing scientists inform classroom and laboratory teaching. Faculty research also creates opportunities for students to become involved in scientific study as undergraduates, and in many cases, to share authorship on a journal article or conference presentation. For example, six Wheaton students working with biology professors Bob Morris and Shawn McCafferty were listed as co-authors of an article in the journal Science for their contributions to sequencing the genome of the sea ur-chin. Such experiences inspire students to pursue advanced study, and set them apart when applying for admission to doctoral programs and for scholarships. Indeed, one of the students involved in the sea urchin research, Ashlan Musante '08, won a Goldwater Scholarship that recognizes her prom-ise as a future scientist.
Thanks to the college's "connected" curriculum, Wheaton is uniquely well suited to promote a collaborative approach to the natural sciences and quantitative analysis. Modern science relies on teams of researchers rather than the solitary scientist of popular imagination. Wheaton‚s science faculty has a strong tradition of encouraging cross-disciplinary explorations that promote an appreciation for the power of science and mathematics as ways of knowing. The importance of continuing and strengthening that tradition cannot be overstated.
