One of the constant challenges of an institute director, particularly one who runs an institute for advanced study, is the struggle to persuade PI’s to invest in the collective intellectual life of Krasnow, as well as their own scientific program. Given the very real limitations of our time, this can seem like a zero-sum game.

It can seem very tempting indeed to decide that attending the Monday seminar is less important than finishing that grant or paper with a deadline looming. It can seem that a better allocation of labor is working on that very last replication needed to write something up, even as that decision may remove the trainee from the scientific give-and-take that only the collective can offer.

Let me make the counter-case: the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is the intellectual home of those who work here. The PI’s and trainees who make up our faculty can decide to make that home an enriched, highly stimulating environment….or….we can all decide to be latch-key kids where we come into this beautiful environment to do our thinking and science, mostly alone, and then head home to our personal lives.

If we want to make that environment the enriched version that I mentioned above, then it takes an individual commitment from each of us in order to make it happen. If we rely on others to attend seminars, to engage our fellow faculty on issues that may not be central to our research, to telecommute at the cost of scientific argument, then what results is a true tragedy of the commons. Not only that, but we send the message to our trainees that such an impoverished environment is the way things should be.

This past Monday, Gerry Rubin, Director of the Janelia Farm Campus of HHMI, gave an exciting talk about his work at revealing the true complexity of the Drosophila neural network. But he also talked about his ideals for the “experiment” taking place at Janelia. One of the key points that struck me, was how critical collaborative intellectual exchange is to that project.

I agree with him on that.

Accordingly, I’ll be working on new ways to persuade and argue for a greater scientific “civic engagement” among our faculty.

Jim