Killing BioAnthro

If you’re brave enough to make the walk to the barren land north of Annenberg, I’d suggest making a trip to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The museum is filled with interesting pieces collected by Harvard researchers of yore, back when the museum used to engage in measuring the skulls of different peoples to determine the evolution of each race.

Today, the skull measuring has stopped, and the museum is now a nice quiet place filled with replicas of Mayan stone reliefs and ceremonial objects from the different natives of Oceania. And if you venture up to the fifth floor you can watch one of the miracles of the academic world: how a concentration dies.

Last year, the College began to implement its new life sciences curriculum. The first step was the creation of Life Sciences 1a and 1b as introductory courses into any Life Sciences track. The result was predictable. Life Science 1b, “An Integrated Introduction to the Life Sciences: Genetics, Genomics, and Evolution” received a CUE score on average one point lower than other natural science courses with a quarter of its veterans recommending for people to not take the course.

The second step was the division of the biology and bio-chemistry concentrations into five new concentrations: chemical and physical biology, human evolutionary biology (HEB), ,olecular and cellular biology, neurobiology, and organismic and evolutionary biology. The Life Sciences initiative also took over the chemistry concentration, the social and cognitive neurosciences track in psychology and the biological anthropology concentration in Anthropology. While as a whole, this step was a well-planned movement to provide smaller concentrations to students, one problem existed: HEB was identical to biological anthropology in every way except that it replaced social anthropology and archaeology requirements with pre-med classes.

The obvious effect was a flight of pre-med students who would have potentially concentrated in the interdisciplinary biological anthropology to the HEB, which is little more than concentrating in pre-med. Overnight, BioAnthro quietly started to fade into that sacred elephant-burial ground where concentrations go to die. All the biological anthropology classes from the tutorials on up have been renumbered to HEB classes. Students who attempted to get a study card signed for biological anthropology were encouraged by the department to strongly consider HEB. As a result, biological anthropology has gone from a small but lively concentration to one in which at the beginning of this semester only three sophomores still exist.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m one of the three. On the books, a concentration that uses scientific data and cultural studies to create a picture of what it means to be human sounds like a perfect model for an institution that a few months ago pledged $50 million to interdisciplinary studies. However, the $50 million initiative didn’t come through the normal channels of Faculty of Arts and Sciences funding. It came as a direct mandate from the Corporation. In a university that prides itself on its intellectual freedom and the talent of its faculty, why does interdisciplinary work have to be forced?

The root cause is a language barrier. Faculty members of the sciences and the humanities strongly adhere to the belief that the world can either be exclusively expressed in math or in words. Social science also splits off the world in this manner. Any student who is taking intermediate microeconomics needs to decide if he wants to take a class taught in English or in math. If the former, he is to take Economics 1010a, “Microeconomic Theory.” If the latter, Economics 1011a, “Microeconomic Theory.” Science theses should typically have math. Humanities theses typically should not.

Not addressing this language barrier is why most interdisciplinary initiatives have failed except in joining concentrations that lie within the same tradition area. The combination of history and literature or chemistry and physics are offered as concentrations but nothing joins fields like mathematics and English or history and economics.

Our liberal arts education at Harvard is provided by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, not the Faculty of Arts or Sciences. A well-balanced education isn’t the quickest path to fulfill requirements for professional school, but rather a slow process that gives students tools through which they can comprehend the world they live in. Harvard needs to take more seriously its commitment to interdisciplinary studies that not only cross departmental lines, but also cross the humanities-science barrier. If not, then we will be able to watch the death of more concentrations in the near future.

Steven T. Cupps ’09 is a biological anthropology concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.