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Spring 1996
A Student, A Teacher, A Place to Learn
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The
context keeps changing. As the millennium races to its end, rapid
transformation of knowledge is a given in the human condition. Knowing
how fast knowledge changes, no one would want to rely on the curriculum
of Mark Hopkins’ day for the latest word in chemistry, economics
or psychology. If Mark Hopkins’ day was 10 years ago, or five, the
epistemic gap would still occur, though less obviously. But Hopkins
was a moral philosopher, not an engineer or a scientist. Does inquiry
keep the curriculum changing everywhere, in every field?
Consider
a famous remark by another famous university president. In 1945
Harvard’s James B. Conant claimed that "there is only one proved
method of assisting the advancement of pure science -- that of picking
men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct
themselves." Whatever the merits of the rest of Conant’s advice,
no reader in the mid-’90s can miss the moral distance from the mid-’40s
implied by the single word, "men." Yes, history’s acceleration since
Conant’s time drives not only the "advancement of pure science"
of which he spoke but the whole spectrum of learning, all the fields
in which the women and men of UCLA’s faculty are pioneering.
Research
changes the world; the world changes research; and learning stays
lively only by moving quickly with these changes. In 1971, when
I took my first university job, a hell curve was useful for grading
large classes, three strikes made an out in baseball, and a rational
choice seemed reasonable in anybody’s ballpark. But insert these
terms in a timelier list:
- AIDS
- Bell
Curve
- California
Civil Rights Initiative
- Cognitive
Science
- Deconstruction
- Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell
- 40,000
Layoffs
- History
Standards
- Human
Genome
- Hypertext
- O.J.
- Perestroika
- Political
Correctness
- Rational
Choice
- Recovered
Memory
- Three
Strikes
- WWW
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