Hail Dudley

LAST WEEK THE Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Baird Professor of Science Dudley R. Herschbach with the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in molecular motion. At Harvard, however, Herschbach deserves another kind of recognition--for his commitment to undergraduate teaching and community life.

Winning the prestigious award for research that most students--or most people for that matter--would find incomprehensible makes Herschbach all the more an example to the University at large. The lesson is that Harvard's often overriding emphasis on research--exemplified in the way it makes tenure decisions--need not preempt top scholars from a commitment to teaching.

It is encouraging that Herschbach, having won recognition for research on "the lunatic fringe" of science, turns out to be the most able to explain his research not only in plain English, but in graphically illustrative terms. He drew an analogy last Wednesday--the day the Boston Red Sox won the American League penant--to show how his work makes it possible to look at the motion of individual molecules rather than groups of them. "Suppose baseball were played by millions of pitchers throwing millions of balls at millions of batters at the same time. No one would be interested because no one would be able to see what was going on."

Herschbach's whole approach to teaching science--whether in press conferences or in classrooms--debunks the myth that the sciences and the humanities are "two cultures," radically opposed. More important than the poetry contests Herschbach holds in his freshman chemistry course is his role in the long-term development and "humanizing" of Harvard's science curriculum. In chairing the Curriculum Committee in Chemistry, he collaborated with Medical School administrators to establish the "life science"-oriented organic chemistry courses, Chem 17 and 27, as an alternative route through the "orgo" bottleneck.

Listing Herschbach's accomplishments hardly does justice to his contributions to the undergraduate community, but notable in his five-year term as Currier House co-master are his support for the Dance Marathon, the music program, as well as ethnic awareness--for which he and his wife, Georgene, were given an honorary award by the Black Students Association.

Having won the Nobel Prize, Herschbach didn't sit back on his laurels last week. He immediately decided to use his $95,000 to set up a fund for young artists and musicians. Even at Harvard not many professors win the Nobel Prize--Herschbach is the 30th to do so--but like the students in his classrooms, the College community can learn from his example.