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November-December 2007
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Concentration Complications
Of all the difficult decisions one confronts as an undergraduate, the selection of concentration is perhaps the hardest. Fortunately, it is also a choice I’ve never actually had to make. Well, sort of: It’s true that pesky administrators and peskier bureaucratic documents frequently demand that I declare a field of study. But I reveled in indecision my freshman year: scrawling “UNDECIDED in big, bold letters whenever prompted for my concentration; dismissing with bravado such phrases as “coherent course of study” and “academic plan.” I was an incorrigible flirt at concentration fairs; I was at once a devoted economist, historian, and physicist when applying to popular seminars that gave preference to concentrators; I was a bona-fide, multihued chameleon when it came time to write my summer fellowship applications. To my delight, I found that I could extend this limbo well past the end of first year. When I was officially forced to choose, I drifted from physics to philosophy, then to English, before spending an enjoyable sophomore fall semester in social studies. I spent a glorious two months my sophomore spring “between concentrations,” feverishly adding and dropping classes far beyond the already generous deadline until my study card somehow emerged: four courses in the pure sciences and a fifth in the history of science. For one reason or another, I had ended up in high science mode, and before the semester was through I became a chemical and physical biology concentrator. Only after I decided on my final concentration did I realize how easy Harvard has recently made things for students with a surfeit of interest in everything—in short, for the chronically indecisive. Core curriculum and introductory courses are being rewritten with an eye to integration over specialization; cross-departmental research initiatives are bringing together faculty—and, with them, undergraduates—from across the University; study-abroad opportunities now meld basic science with social science, anthropology, and cultural studies. There is a world of interdisciplinary work here, one that I have spent two years approximating by jumping from concentration to concentration. “We’re addicted to connections,” says Robert Lue, professor of the practice of molecular and cellular biology and director of the undergraduate Life Sciences Education program, before rattling off his list of favorite cross-departmental collaborations and initiatives. “And because of that…Harvard is one of the most forward-looking [institutions] in terms of interdisciplinary work—not just in the sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences as well.” But historically, Harvard was not the best of schools for the “concentration-challenged.” Interdepartmental mobility was never a true priority at an institution famous for the hyperspecialization of its faculty members and the autonomy of its departments. “When I started here as a graduate student,” says Everett Mendelsohn, research professor of the history of science, who joined the faculty in 1960, “there was one department of biology [that] encompassed everything from biochemistry and biophysics to zoology, botany, and systematics. In the last 30 or 40 years, there’s just been a proliferation of fields, in particular a proliferation of a variety of biologies.” At the height of the molecular revolution following the groundbreaking work on the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick, the “traditional” biology of taxonomy, ecology, and systematics found its supremacy challenged by molecular biology. Watson, the titular leader of the molecularists, dismissed the traditionalists as “the stamp collectors of fauna and flora,” recalls Mendelsohn, while Ernst Mayr, traditional biology embodied, said the molecular biologists were simply “practitioners of the ‘natural history of the molecule.’” As biology fragmented along molecular, cellular, developmental, and organismic lines, chemistry charted its own course. Meanwhile, throughout the humanities and social sciences, a score of other emerging disciplines saw themselves—and themselves alone—as properly equipped to confront their chosen intellectual challenges. The last decades of the twentieth century were a time of regrouping, at the very least—of redrawing the disciplinary boundary lines that separated distinct intellectual foci and methodologies from one another. In many ways, particularly in terms of funding and research, such a move toward disciplinary autonomy made sense. “Intellectual focus and methodology were certainly the reasons for some of these regroupings,” says Mendelsohn, “but professors also wanted their own recognition.” Senseless or not, the fission-like process that fragmented biology continued unabated through the University, and before too long, boundary lines became departmental walls. 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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