An institute for advanced study: what purpose?

In the short time before the Spring semester commences, it’s perhaps worthwhile to step back and consider the question of: why an institute for advanced study?

There are quite a few such institutes these days, and not just here in the States, but the granddaddy of them all is the one at Princeton, where Albert Einstein spent the War years in the 1940’s. That Institute has as its key mission “to encourage and support fundamental research in the sciences and humanities – the original, often speculative, thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world.”

Note the idea of producing advances that “change the way we understand the world”. That idea of course echos Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift. Not all research does this; most findings are incremental in nature. To aim for paradigm shifts is bold and fraught with risk.

Which brings to mind this commentary on venture capitalists, which appeared on my twitter feed today. Here the operative meme is that VC’s are too cautious these days. That like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, they should take bigger risks:

VC firms must behave more like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funds radical scientific innovations over long periods of time – and less like the National Institutes of Health, which prefers incremental, almost-sure advances.

I would argue that it is in institutes for advanced studies that such science takes place, often with great collective purpose and across seemingly vastly different domains of knowledge. It is certainly what we are about at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.

I’ll close with this quote, lifted from our web site, that captures Krasnow nicely:

In the end, we believe that there is no substitute for recruiting the very best people and turning them loose to explore the fascinating world of thought somehow emergent from our biological nature and evolution as Homo sapiens.

Both an Institute for Advanced Study and an Academic Unit: redux

As an academic unit of Mason we are slowly maturing. I am learning that I am the one to whom distraught students finally turn when something goes really awry. Similarly, we are learning to factor the teaching load into our faculty evaluations. But mostly, we are learning what it means to architect and then nurture new programs. We have minted our first PhD’s and are well on our way to the same for masters degree recipients. We are part of the multi-year self-evaluation cycle at Mason called Academic Program Review and we are learning to work with rubrics as we evaluate student learning outcomes.

At the same time, an interesting challenge: we have to keep focused, not on incremental research findings, but on the really big discoveries, the ones that change paradigms. Which means, we need to have faculty members who can do both: the teaching intertwined inextricably with the research.

Both an Institute for Advanced Study and an Academic Unit

One of the unusual aspects of the Krasnow Institute is that over the years, it has evolved into both a Institute for Advanced Study and a regular academic unit of George Mason University. One might construe the two, as mutually exclusive–how could a true Institute for Advanced Study offer programs and degrees–but from my own perspective, nothing could be further from reality. In fact, the degree programs with their graduate students and doctoral-level research, reinforce the scientific pursuits of Krasnow.

There’s another aspect to the equation though: having an academic unit embedded within an Institute for Advanced Study (as opposed to say a College or a School). The culture of an Institute for Advanced Study centers around scientists reaching across disciplines to solve fundamentally hard problems. Under such intellectually challenging circumstances, there is considerably less time for the famous academic “foul play” that Kingsley Amis‘ character, Lucky Jim, found himself embroiled in. Students thrive in this sort of milieu (Woods Hole comes to mind) precisely because they become themselves personally involved in the original research. Faculty thrive because they are rewarded for reaching across the typical disciplinary boundaries–for that is where the big payoffs in science lie.

MSU’s President: institutes detract

Here’s an interesting piece by Princeton’s Stan Katz on Michigan State University’s President Simon has concluded regarding excellence at the large public university:

MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon is quoted as saying that therefore “the university [must look] at the big picture before it considers any new program and balances societal needs with the institution’s strengths. . . . ‘You try to find areas where you can be one of the best, if not the best.’” The operational conclusion has been “the elimination of independent research centers, which have self-sustaining budgets and can create barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration.”

Forgive me, but I don’t see this logic. Seems to me, that institutes do the opposite–they in fact eliminate barriers that would naturally exist between conventional units to trans-disciplinary collaboration. Read the piece and see what you think.

Jim

Tea on the Institute Mezzanine

This past Monday we moved our 3:30PM pre-seminar tea out onto the beautiful Institute mezzanine and it drew a wonderful crowd of folks who spent the time talking about complexity, neuroscience, consciousness and all the other deep questions that go with tea and cookies in the half hour before we dive into the serious business of our weekly seminar.

Harold Morowitz, the founding director of the Institute once said that everyone should spend 5% of their time on the fringe of the paradigm (at least at an institute for advanced study). Part of the way we can accomplish that is by talking science over tea with an institute colleague whose disciplinary expertise is very different from our own.

I think we’ll continue to have those teas out on the mezzanine—with the institute woods greening up by the day–it’ll be a conducive environment for science at the fringe of the paradigm.

Jim

Three weeks into the Semester

I’ve been preparing a set of slides for a talk I’m giving on Monday about my vision for my second term as institute director. The process got me thinking about “institutes for advanced studies” in general and the one in Princeton in particular. The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is someone different from the platonic model in that it’s an integral part of a university. But in other aspects, the model is appropriate, I think.

I also gave a guest lecture yesterday for a grad class on the “state of American science”. It’s something I know a bit about–I’m afraid I was a bit too pessimistic for the cohort of first year students–funding for American science is getting squeezed by non-discretionary funding in the Federal Budget, and that’s a structural problem.

Most enjoyable, I got to sit down with my co-author, Lee Zwanziger, on the neuroethics book project that we’re hatching. I think it’s got great potential and we came up with a structure that I think is going to work.

Jim