Hybrid teaching through Zoom and other digital platforms during the COVID-19 epidemic has been an illuminating as well as unsettling experience for many of us, especially for college students.
“Uncertainty about the pandemic and fear of infection are among the top sources of stress for this generation,” reports a nationwide poll conducted by MTV and The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “More than half (of Gen Z respondents) report that the pandemic has made it harder to have fun, and nearly half feel the same about being happy and maintaining their mental health. Many also report that it has been detrimental to their relationships with their friends, physical health, dating lives, pursuit of hobbies, and other important aspects of being a young person.”
The findings confirm our own daily contacts with students.
Nonetheless, many students have begun to adapt to new realities. Today’s freshman, let’s say tech savvy Jane Digital, can do lot of learning on her own. She believes that for every problem there must be an app, and if not, one can be created.
This do-it-yourself frame of mind, developed during these harrowing days of masked classroom teaching and remote learning, has raised new questions about how we teach, what we teach and why we teach the way we do.
Even before the pandemic, online platforms such as Coursera, Khan Academy and other internet-based learning enterprises were increasingly offering routine teaching.
MIT President L. Rafael Reif has called digital learning, in particular the massive open online courses known as MOOCs, “the most important innovation in education since the printing press,” which, beginning in the 15th century, liberated the European mind and enabled it to rediscover and reclaim its Greco-Roman spirit of rational inquiry. Something similar is happening today.
Digital learning platforms have the potential to liberate academia from routine teaching.
But what then to do with the expertise of highly qualified faculty members when they are relieved of some of the obligations of daily instruction, lectures, quizzes, research papers and exams, especially as we are rapidly entering the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence?
This is an opportunity for universities to become think tanks and to take up the responsibility of confronting the tough questions facing the world, such as: How would mRNA change global health? Can artificial intelligence enable us to predict and prevent financial meltdowns, racial and civil conflicts, and the next school shooting? Would AI enrich or diminish humanity?
Answering such questions requires more than super computational power, sophisticated algorithms or Big Data. It requires interdisciplinary, collaborative clusters of researchers, scientists, political thinkers and philosophers.
The goal of developing clusters of scholars who are unafraid to transgress disciplines and push the boundaries of conventional thinking is to wrestle with society’s most intricate challenges. The expectation is that disruption of intellectual boundaries would result in disruptive innovations.
To echo Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp’s thinking, “Convergence is a broad rethinking of how all … research can be conducted, so that we capitalize on a range of knowledge bases,” from STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to viruses and the liberal arts.
Over the years, American society has become more open and tolerant of diversity, despite the Trumpian backlash.
But academicians still live in intellectual silos, most of them publishing in journals that very few people read outside their disciplines. Interdisciplinary clusters aim to bust the silo mentality.
Bringing down the walls can be difficult, but some have been trying. For example, the Berkeley Startup Cluster touted itself as “a resource for innovative companies and budding entrepreneurs.” It’s a collaborative initiative of UC Berkeley, the local chamber of commerce, the downtown association, Berkeley National Laboratory and the city of Berkeley.
Such across-the-discipline collaborations from diverse and even unrelated fields lead to the opening up of what the evolutionary biologist Stuart A. Kauffman called “the adjacent possible” — the door that opens another door and creates possibilities of new futures. That’s the potential of cluster faculty doing collaborative research when the whole world is becoming one Big Data, which, as Forrest Gump would have said, is like a box of chocolates. “You never know what you’re gonna get.”
That’s the potential of faculty clusters exploring the “adjacent possible.” Serendipity could happen.
A cluster hiring initiative began at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1998, and today the university has 49 clusters ranging from the mundane to the esoteric, from the African diaspora to zebrafish biology. Dartmouth College has nine interdisciplinary academic clusters, including climate change, neural code, globalization, digital humanities, decision science, cybersecurity, cystic fibrosis, health care delivery and computational science, aimed at “enhancing Dartmouth’s impact in the world.”
But that raises a question. With millions of research dollars being spent on these cluster initiatives, how do you assess them? Without assessment, interdisciplinary academic clusters might become part of the establishment, more interested in their own survival than in doing innovation and solving big problems.
The way to keep multimillion-dollar cluster initiatives productive is to task them specifically, the way the United States tasked the Manhattan Project to produce a nuclear weapon; the way John F. Kennedy tasked NASA to land man on the moon; and the way the Trump administration tasked Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID-19 vaccine, which was done in eight months.
Universities must do more than teaching. They should own global problems.
Narain Batra, of Hartford, is the author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation. He teaches communications, social media and diplomacy at Norwich University, where he is a professor.