The Herald recently published an article about the problems shared by the various interdisciplinary programs at Brown ("Interdisciplinary programs can struggle in departmental system," Feb. 8). The basic conclusion of this long and thorough piece was the University's respect for the autonomy of its various departments has the undesirable consequence of hanging interdisciplinary programs out to dry. In other words, whenever hard choices have to be made by any given department - such as deciding for what sub-field to hire a new professor or where a budget reduction must fall - interdisciplinary programs always get the short end of the stick because departments look to preserving their own strength and prestige before worrying about the health of a program not entirely within their purview.
The departments really can't be faulted for using this decision calculus. Like investors in a stock market, departments pay the most attention to the stock in which they are most heavily invested because it affects their potential gains or losses most.
Contrary to what our economics department might want you to believe simply "letting the free market run its course" is not always the best course of action. The structure of the funding system is such that the value of interdisciplinary programs can never be determined by the amount of money allocated to them by individual departments. This is why the University administration must sometimes intervene in the academic market - much like a government - and correct for "negative externalities" like the harm done to interdisciplinary programs.
It's been about a year since a group of graduating biomedical ethics concentrators made noise about the slow death of their program on the Herald's Opinions page.
Biomedical ethics is an area of study that is only going to become more relevant in the next few decades. The work on interpretation of genome data from the Human Genome Project is still in its initial stages, and society has not even begun to reap the enormous benefits of this global endeavor. Rapid advances in biotechnology will soon give unprecedented power to human beings over things once thought to rest solely in the hands of God. The question of to what extent we ought to use the power of authorship over our progeny and, ultimately, the future of humanity will be one of the great moral debates of the 21st century. Removing Brown from this debate is just one compelling example of the real harms that will be done to the University if the administration does not propose a comprehensive solution to the dilemma faced by interdisciplinary programs.
If we do allow biomedical ethics to be completely phased out at the end of 2008, that decision may well prove to be a moment of self-definition. As a matter of principle, Brown has always been the "Ivy with a conscience." In general, Brown students are the kind of people who lie awake in bed at night and think about the world, its problems and how to solve them. As an institution whose conscience is the hallmark of its character, it befits us to show a commitment to valuing moral discourse - particularly the genre of moral discourse that is likely to be most prevalent in the near future.
To take another example, a degree in Middle East studies is highly marketable, and people who concentrate in Middle East studies today will play a central role in determining what the international landscape of tomorrow will look like. They will have the ears of our leaders, and the policies and strategies they suggest will bear heavily on whether we are indeed doomed to the "clash of civilizations" predicted by Samuel Huntington or whether we will be able to put common humanity above our differences.
To be clear, Middle East studies isn't slated to be phased out like biomedical ethics, but with recent reductions in its class offerings and faculty - and as a consequence, its number of concentrators - one has to wonder how long it might be before it suffers the fate of its interdisciplinary counterpart. If Brown wants to continue to attract people who have an impact on the world - and who are concerned with how the world "ought" to be - it must act at this critical juncture to save biomedical ethics, revive Middle East studies and support all interdisciplinary programs.
Things that have a great impact on human destiny generally happen at the intersection of different fields, and not surprisingly, employers are more than eager to hire graduates whose course of study has been focused specifically on these intersections.
Aggressive support of Brown's interdisciplinary programs is justified by both pragmatism and principle. Today, the University is unfortunately letting those programs slide into disrepair.
Don Trella '08 is concentrating in the inter-interdisciplinary Middle Eastern Biomedical Ethics program.