Our Concentrations, Our Selves

Image Consciousness in Academia

By Josh Lerner

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illustration by Ari Savitzky
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When star professor Ken Miller gave his convocation address to Brown University's Class of 2009, he defined the liberal arts institution as a so-called trade school. By this definition, college students learn and craft a way of understanding the world. Miller delivered his epistemological approach to academics—with its focus on how we know, not what we know—to a wide cross-section of the student body. It would make sense, then, that his theory would be applicable to a wide variety of academic pursuits. But the speech, instead, was couched specifically in terms of the hard sciences.

Miller hinted at the best and worst parts of that age-old academic dichotomy: the division between arts and sciences. According to Miller, science is "a way of looking at the world" that "involves. the nature of reality itself." More broadly, all subject areas involve the questioning and investigating of reality. Perhaps the arts and sciences really are no different; both require critical reasoning and analysis, both teach a way of framing future knowledge. More complexly, however, the two subject areas contrast each other in the very ways they are alike. Broadly, yes, they all inform a way of knowing. But more specifically, they often teach opposite ways of knowing, and these divergent methods are what broadly define our academic pursuits.

Something scary evolves as we work toward a four-year degree. Picking a concentration becomes picking an epistemology, which is really like choosing a philosophy that governs one's life. No wonder sophomore year can be so stressful. The concentration label, with its implications of broad and long-lasting philosophies, becomes a subtle but misguided part of one's outward image on campus.

What's Your Concentration, Baby?

It's an inevitable question, bound to arise in a group of new acquaintances: what's your concentration? In a way, the answer is a great equalizer; most everyone on campus has got one, and that common ground is comforting when meeting someone about whom you may know nothing. Concentrations also give us a hint as to the purely academic behaviors of a student: what classes he may have taken; what buildings he frequents; which professors he knows. Finally, concentrations sometimes—certainly not always—clue us in to one's future career plans. We can probably predict with some validity how an engineering student will spend his professional years, though with the average English major, of course, things might be a bit more up in the air.

All of these tidbits of information are useful, to an extent, for broad description. But what I am wary of is the use of the concentration label to subtly define, or sum up, the student to which it belongs. Studiers of English instantly become poetic daydreamers, economics concentrators morph into venture capitalists, premedical students, no matter their good intentions, are sometimes reduced to nothing more than pre-professional hacks. An acquaintance once abandoned the standard wording of the question ("What's your concentration?") to ask me this loaded one instead: "what are you?" I've been asked this reductionist version a few times since. I like to respond, "I'm Josh."

Am I the only one who senses a sudden influx of insecurity when casual conversation morphs into concentration talk? One student cringes, after hearing her counterpart is an anthropology concentrator, admitting that she studies biochemistry. I've heard many students of the arts and humanities lament that they've never taken a science course at Brown. Meanwhile, science concentrators admit that they don't read books as often as they should. These accounts are admittedly anecdotal, but they nonetheless illuminate what I believe to be an undeniable observation: that a concentration becomes a surface image that follows its owner around. That image can be defined in countless ways, one of which is through the dichotomous lens of the arts-science split.

Cage Match

"Science," from an etymological standpoint, means knowledge. More than that, science is the systematic pursuit of information, through concrete and verifiable methods that lead, ideally, to a single truth. Science must be corroborated, peer-reviewed; it is open to interpretation, but only to a point. To a certain extent, there is room for interpretation, but, importantly, certain interpretations can be proven wrong. Western biomedicine, chemistry, even the social sciences must adhere to a strict scientific epistemology for validity.

The arts, on the other hand, represent creation. Makes sense, right? We think of artists—or good ones, at least—as creative people. But academically we cannot reserve this etymology only for the fine arts; that is, when we speak of the arts, we don't just speak of creating paintings, books, plays. There is a certain degree of creation and interpretation in the broader arts and humanities, as well. Two perspectives of history may oppose one another, yet both may be equally valid. Ethnographic observations of culture are framed by the experiences of the interpreter, and so become partly subjective, but are still deemed worthy of scholarly pursuit.

Fields of the arts and humanities align themselves, to a certain extent, with postmodernism. They may adhere to the theory that there exists no one concrete version of anything. Professors, theorists, and students use certain phrases—"social construction of reality," for example—that frame real events as nothing more than an infinite set of differing perceptions and interpretations. It's a great idea: culturally and humanitarianly sensitive; great fodder for critical discussion; and damn trippy, too. It also, however, flies in the face of scientific validity.

In science, one can never prove a theory wholly right. But one can prove a theory wrong, and move on to new theories from these discoveries. John Ruscio, Associate Professor of Psychology at Elizabethtown College, and author of Critical Thinking in Psychology, writes: "There is a certain order to the information that reaches each of us, and our actions produce somewhat predictable results. This is what helps us make decisions and plan for the future, and the lack of an external reality would produce an existence utterly devoid of direction." Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, describe postmodernism as "an intellectual current characterized by.a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a 'narration', a 'myth' or a social construction among many others."

We subtly fight this epistemological battle on campus as we struggle to define our academic focuses. More than a fight between art and science, it is one between subjectivity and objectivity, interpretation and memorization, the fantasy of poetry and the reality of biology. When we pick classes, buy course books, talk about what we've learned, we do it through a philosophical lens that may mean more than we realize.

Delillo Or Descartes?

An interesting debate has sprung up this month in the Opinions pages of the Brown Daily Herald. Adrien Muniz B'07 ("How Brown let the outside world get to us" Sept. 13, 2005) posited that Brown's student body image is that of "a bunch of pot-smoking Democrats who don't study the sciences." Some of us are those liberal arts students Muniz refers to, but others, such as Nate Brower B'07, are more interdisciplinary in their approach. In his response to Muniz ("Science tours are a good fit for Brown" Sept. 19, 2005), Brower defines himself as a "chemistry major.who likes to spout off MCM-style." He is a hard science man who also quotes Sartre.

The newsprint rhetoric here is all about image, both of students' individually and the student body's in sum. Based on the ideas expressed in the paper, but also from conversations I've had or overheard over the past two years, we can parse the image debate down to this: the arts, with all their paradoxes of perspective, connote sophistication and open-mindedness; the sciences, though just as complex, present truths with a matter-of-factness that makes them seem, to some, to be philosophically simpleminded. The postmodern twang of the arts—their room for ambiguity, their demand for multiple versions of the same text—is high culture compared to the nerdiness of hard number-crunching.

I'm reminded of this split in perspective whenever I see a student sit down at a desk and unload a backpack. If a single paperback book and a pen reach the wooden surface, one might see the next two hours of work as sophisticated criticism and agnostic interpretation. The other option requires a heavy hard-covered textbook, a calculator, perhaps photocopies of graphs accompanied by small chains of numbers. The burdensome load of these items symbolizes the misconception of science's image: that it is so grounded in reality it weighs us down to some unsophisticated plane.

The argument works well in reverse, too, though one will less often hear it on a liberal arts campus such as Brown's. Jacob Schuman B'08 delineates a common perspective of the arts' image in a BDH Opinions column: "Ask any Modern Culture and Media student and they'll tell you how arbitrary meaning is—how it can be manipulated, transformed, and interpreted as easily as ... the average MCM paper!" ("Reclaim the name" Sept. 22, 2005) Important studies of literature, history, and culture, in this way, become nothing more than useless ephemeralities, their airy words drifting upward toward nothingness.

In the end, we are forced, when we adopt a concentration, to also inherit a worldview. But these philosophies, pervasive as they are in our coursework, are not all-defining. Nor are they binding. Just as one might choose a career unrelated to his concentration, one might very well choose to forego a past schema in favor of a new one. For those four years in academia, though, the ghost of epistemology—revealed in the elusive academic image we each must bear—remains inescapable. It is a small price to pay, I think, for the knowledge and insight we gain in that same time.

Josh Lerner B'07 concentrates. Hard.

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