My trip to sun-drenched Palo Alto gave a wonderful chance to meet with some of the leaders in STEM education at Stanford University. I had a great set of meetings that included discussions about science education with Carl Wieman, Physics Nobel laureate from 1997, Drew Endy, a leading “synthetic biologist” and Robyn Wright Dunbar, Director of Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning.  I also gave a talk to Robyn’s group at CTL that included experts in humanities education, international education, psychology, and course design. It was a great chance to connect with Stanford – my alma mater – and see the amazing range of programs, brilliant new ideas, and beautiful new buildings.

From my discussion with Drew Endy I was able to think further about the future of science and technology as it relates to the revolution in biology. The “Moore’s Law” of computer science is now being experienced in biology, with genetic sequencing, and designer organisms easier to produce and exponentially cheaper. Drew describes how Wayne Gretsky’s quote about “skating to where the puck will be” has to be reformulated in this time to imagine a puck “with a rocket on it” to illustrate the ways in which change is non-linear, and accelerating!  This has massive implications for education, and we had a great discussion about the implications for students, and for our planet.

The education work at Stanford is truly inspiring, and I was amazed at the depth and range of programs that Robyn and her CTL group are working on, alongside Carl Wieman with his ambitious suite of STEM education activities. Clearly Stanford University is a force to be reckoned with – its future-oriented approach and fantastic people make me feel very confident that solutions in education, science and technology are at hand!

One example of this is the Shriram center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering, where Drew has his office. Within that building is a dazzling array of instructional spaces for undergraduates, adopted from the best facilities of their kind from across the country. MIT provided the inspiration for some of the interaction spaces, while Reed College provided the idea of a multi-level lab bench (to prevent electronics from getting flooded). The building is filled with natural light, and lines of sight to connect people in “interaction and mixing columns” that combine starwells with water, restrooms and casual discussion spaces. The building is just one part of the mix – the relationship between the spaces and the way the mixing is encouraged by a careful study of flow within the building make it really inspiring.  Below are some photos of the Shriram center, and some of the other buildings that replaced the industrial ugliness that used to be located behind Varian Physics when I was an undergrad at Stanford in the 1980s!

On June 11, I had the honor and privilege of attending the graduation of my first-born daughter Shanti from Carleton College. I ordinarily do not try to post family events on this site, but the phenomenon of attending a graduation as a parent – instead of as a professor – was an amazing event. It provided a lot of insights worth noting and remembering.  At Pomona College, I have attended about 19 graduation ceremonies as a professor in Physics and Astronomy. The experience was one we professors looked forward to – with the usual dread about sitting on stage in a hot medieval costume while 400 names were read, and listening to the long and sometimes rambling speeches by students and faculty. The joy of the students, the hope of the parents, and the celebration of our collective future is uplifting, even after 19 ceremonies.

The professors also get to meet the parents. This is a fun part – and our department would set up the appetizers, and wait for the arrival of parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins and even a few random alumni who would drop by. It was always fun to try to match parents to students even before introductions were made and when students were somewhere else. Both personality and appearances gave them away. The interactions between the generations and siblings were really interesting to observe, and often revealed a lot about the family dynamics which were consistent with the social habits of our students. We professors are naturally proud of our students, and we gladly tell glowing stories to the relatives about how insightful, hard-working and fun their kids were to teach. We recognized on an intellectual level that they were proud and we shared their pride – but I realize now that I was completely unaware of the intensity of the emotions of graduation day.

What is different about attending as a parent is that it is your child that is graduating. Putting aside the $250,000 that some of us have paid for a college education, it is the labor of love that went into raising that child that comes to mind for a parent. On graduation day, all the events of that child’s life flash before your eyes. You remember them as pre-schoolers (even with a pre-school graduation ceremony!), you remember them at AYSO soccer, at 5th grade astronomy camp, as marching band members, water polo players, and growing high school kids. You see their whole life flash before your eyes, and there right in front of you is a graduate – an adult – who has learned to think for herself, to explore the world with new intellectual powers, and to be a fully realized person. The pride, the emotions, the sense of your own inevitable march toward grandparent status all are overwhelming. Parents, as much as their children, are graduating. They are graduating from their roles as parents, and becoming something else. It is an emotion-laden time – for us it was as laden with emotion as the Minnesota sky trying to deliver its afternoon thunderstorm!

A note is also worth taking about Carleton College. Despite the enormous costs, we feel fully satisfied that Carleton delivered value for our money. I told the Carleton President, Steve Poskanzer, that I admired Carleton’s integrity and quality. They know how to educate their students with difficult standards, and less grade inflation than most places. They have formed a strong sense of identity as an institution and provide a warm and friendly intellectual community for the students. Our daughter Shanti has thrived there, and there can be no better testament to an institution’s quality than parents who feel proud and grateful for the education, and a child who is equipped with new intellectual passions, intercultural awareness, and a strong sense of their identity. It is tangible to us that Shanti has grown – and we are proud to see her emerge from graduation, as a realized person!

During the June Yale meeting we designed the time so that it was split into two stages. The first stage was the Symposium, on June 6-7, which was two days of thought-provoking speeches and panels with some good questions afterwards. The second stage, from June 8-9, was what we called the Workshop – and in this phase we constructed six working groups to tackle some of the most urgent questions facing higher education.

These questions were written by Charles Bailyn, Yale-NUS Dean, after a series of meetings in which he and I brainstormed and narrowed down the questions. The questions that emerged formed the basis for two days of in-depth discussions. Each working group had 6-8 members, and we met for several hours in the rooms of Betts House and the Greenberg Center at Yale University. These rooms were the same ones used for designing the Yale-NUS curriculum in our original workshops from 2012-13. For those of us in the “inaugural faculty” revisiting this site and conducting the same types of discussion was very nostalgic!

It was also a very nice feature of the Yale Conference to have both they Symposium and Workshop. This second stage was extremely interesting and interactive, and allowed for free-ranging conversation and discussion that brought out many exciting new ideas. The working groups also formed stronger relationships and outlined proposals that can provide long-lasting impacts after the June Yale Conference.

My working group was discussing experiential learning. Our group consisted of these members:

• Susan Jackson (Boston University)
• James Ketterer (Bard)
• Richard Kraince (Antioch College)
• Bert Lott (Vassar)
• Laura Marcus (Stanford + Arete Project)
• Jacob Park (Green Mountain)
• Bryan Penprase (Yale-NUS)
• Neelima Shukla-Bhatt (Wellesley)
• Jennifer Sheridan (Yale-NUS)

An excerpt from our report from the workshop is below, and the complete set of questions posed to each of the working groups is also below.

Excerpt from our Experiential Learning working group:

Each of the educators described their efforts in developing and implementing experiential learning as well as the context of experiential learning in their institutions. These institutions represent the complete range of durations of experiential learning in liberal arts settings, ranging from the 1-week “Week 7” experiential learning course at Yale-NUS College, to Deep Springs College where its 26 students live together for two years in a remote cattle range. Other options within the group include a range of urban, domestic and international experiential learning settings, all with various degrees of articulation within the liberal arts curriculum.

Our group also identified that many of their programs were either under development or lacked sufficient structure for preparing students for the experience, or integrating the experience of the students back into the curriculum after the experience. For this discussion we also referred to the Kolb Experiential Learning Cycle (Kolb, 1984, Kolb and Kolb, 2005), which provides a useful framework for structuring experiential learning into phases of abstraction, hypothesis testing, experience, and reflection.

Figure 1 – Illustration of the Kolb Experiential Learning Cycle from Taylor and Hamdy (2013)

After discussing the Kolb Cycle, it was recognized that various of the efforts in experiential learning had reached some but not all of the four stages of the cycle. Some also noted that additional elements beyond the Kolb Cycle might facilitate learning. This included an initial “deep immersion” – which can induce confusion in students, which perhaps is helpful in both pushing them outside their comfort zones, and causing a strong incentive to regain orientation through learning. It also included the necessity in many experiential learning contexts to negotiate tasks, and to create something like a self-government among the students within the experiential learning environment. The group felt that these elements were important parts of the experience, and should somehow be established within the design of an experiential learning exercise.

…

Proposal – Developing an Experiential Learning Curriculum and “Boot Camp”

Our solution to these problems is to create an experiential learning curriculum that gives a solid foundation into all aspects of working with students in field settings. The curriculum would include the following elements:

• Reintegration into Home Campus
• Facilitation/Conflict Resolution
• Reflection/Syllabus Planning
• Discipline Based Content and Inquiry
• Developing Learning Goals/Outcomes
• Evaluation/Assessment of Student Learning
• Managing Student Diversity
• Sex, Drugs and Alcohol
• Student Leadership/Mentorship Development

These elements could be conveyed to faculty in the form of an Experiential Learning “boot camp” that could be a 4-5 day immersion into experiential education. The faculty themselves would be formed into teams and placed in an unfamiliar environment, and in grappling with the issues that students face in such settings would gain profound insights into the process they are going to be leading. After 1-2 days of immersion, the faculty participating in the “boot camp” would have a chance to debrief and then launch into a discussion with the instructors of the theory and background elements for a successful experiential learning program or project. The basic structure of our “boot camp” is shown below in Figure 3.

Complete set of Questions and Goals for Working Groups at the GLA Workshop, June 8-9, Yale University 

• What are the most promising directions for a globalized humanities curriculum in the United States? Two traditional approaches to the humanities curriculum in liberal arts settings have been “western civ” core curricula on the one hand, and a purely distributional system with no specific requirements on the other hand. The recent rise of liberal arts colleges in Asia has prompted exploration of centralized curricula that include works from around the globe in a structured manner, while there are calls in the US for “ethnic studies” requirements that are in many cases focused primarily on the American experience. There are also more general pedagogical questions of how reading and studying of complex texts from many cultures should be taught and studied. This working group will consider the structure and pedagogy of introductory humanities curricula, and how global elements can most effectively be introduced in an American context.

• What is the role of the creative arts in a liberal arts curriculum? Creative writing and the visual and performing arts are a mainstay of life in residential liberal arts colleges. But the arts are often practiced by students in an extra-curricular context that is disconnected from the curriculum, and while history and criticism of art has a strong the place in the curriculum, the status of courses in the practice of art varies considerably between institutions. This working group will explore the connections between extra-curricular and curricular arts opportunities, and the place of courses in the practice and production of the arts within the context of liberal arts colleges.

• Should discipline-based introductory courses be supplemented or replaced by “problem-based” or interdisciplinary courses? Discipline-based introductory surveys are the mainstays of introductory instruction in the social and natural sciences in many liberal arts settings. Introductions to such disciplines as Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Physics, Political Science and Psychology are among the most popular courses on many campuses. But this approach tends toward disciplinary silos, and privileges the theoretical underpinnings of the disciplines over the consideration of complex interdisciplinary problems that are of great practical and intellectual importance, and that are exciting to many students. There has thus arisen considerable interest in courses or course exercises based on addressing problems that arise in contemporary life and in research from the perspective of a variety of disciplines. This working group will explore the possibilities and challenges in using interdisciplinary and problem-based instruction at introductory and intermediate level.

• What skills should all 21^st century college graduates have, and how can we ensure that they have them? The skill set that a well-educated citizen should have in the 21^st century is dauntingly extensive. To cope with the daunting challenges of contemporary life, our graduates need to be adept in written, oral and visual communication; quantitative reasoning and coding; rhetoric and argumentation. All these and more will be needed to empower graduates to be responsive and effective citizens and leaders.   These skills can be taught in courses designed specifically for training in one or two skills, or can be integrated into a sequence of multiple courses across many disciplines. There are also serious issues that arise from the large range of preparation students bring with them from their previous education. This working group will consider how best to identify, teach and assess the most important 21st century skills in a contemporary liberal arts curriculum.

• What can and should “experiential learning” contribute to a liberal arts education? Off-campus experiential learning experiences can provide a critically important component of a liberal arts education. They can inspire both students and faculty, bring together students and faculty with the local and global community, and provide critical contacts for future student internships and employment. However such experiences can be difficult to organize, and are sometimes thought to lack intellectual rigor. This working group will study how to create and sustain positive, intellectually rigorous experiential learning for students, and to align these experiences with academic learning outcomes and the on-campus curriculum.

• What are the best approaches to the challenges and opportunities presented by an increasingly diverse multi-national faculty and student body? One of the crucial concerns at any residential colleges in the 21^st century is using the increasing levels of student and faculty diversity (along many axes) in positive ways. The increasing socioeconomic and racial diversity on campuses provides many exciting new opportunities for learning, but several challenges as well; especially in cases where students have diverse preparation for academic work. One important aspect of diversity in the College and University campus is the increasing presence of international students. While “diversity” is defined differently in different national and cultural settings, the challenges are often surprisingly familiar. This working group will explore the challenges and opportunities presented by increasingly diverse cohorts of students, including the rising numbers of international students on residential college campuses, and how to ensure that this diversity is a source of inspiration and learning, rather than a source of conflict for our communities. 

• How can best practices of “active learning” and classroom technology be spread among the faculty? Over the past few decades there has been considerable scholarly work documenting the gains in student learning from active learning. This work has caused many instructors to significantly change their teaching strategies. In some cases new technologies are being deployed to increase engagement and active learning in the classroom, or to create hybrid and “flipped” classrooms with online tutorials, quizzes and lectures. But active learning techniques can be challenging to implement, and are sometimes resisted by faculty members who either lack the skills or the time to implement these techniques effectively, or who are suspicious of new pedagogies and technologies.  This working group will consider the most promising routes toward helping faculty members adopt and successfully use promising new pedagogical approaches in active learning.

On June 6-7, we had our Yale-NUS Symposium on Globalizing the Liberal Arts at Yale University. The event included talks from a number of leaders in higher education today – and was a major project for me over the past two years. I was able to help Yale-NUS College get funding from the Teagle and Luce Foundations for the conference, and worked closely with the Yale-NUS College President, Pericles Lewis, and the Yale-NUS College Dean, Charles Bailyn, to design the sessions and program. Jenifer Raver and Kel Ginsberg did the hard work of bundling together the documents and program and organizing the logistics. In the end the event turned out wonderfully and I am very grateful to all for their hard work on the project!

The symposium, on June 6–7, included keynote presentations by:

• Andrew Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies, Columbia University
• William Deresiewicz, author, Excellent Sheep;
• Catharine Bond Hill, President, Vassar College;
• Pericles Lewis, President, Yale-NUS College;
• Michael Roth, President, Wesleyan University; and
• Carol Geary Schneider, President, Association of American Colleges and Universities.

More information can be found on our web site at this location: http://gla.yale-nus.edu.sg/.

The meeting opened with remarks from Jonathan Hollaway, Dean of Yale College, and Pericles Lewis, the President of Yale-NUS College. Then Andy Delbanco gave a very interesting talk to open the Symposium and discussed many of the broad goals of a liberal arts education, which includes “developing the capacity to think in informed ways about the enduring questions for our life.” He noted that most of the biggest questions cut across disciplines and need to draw deeply from liberal arts and humanities. Within his talk he also noted the need for reflection which he called the “gift of interval” as central for developing thoughtful students. Another interesting point was that a common curriculum can help provide a leveling effect and perhaps lessen the discord which is so prevalent on American campuses these days.

Panel discussions featured Yale-NUS and Yale faculty who developed the Yale-NUS Curriculum, discussing both the prospective and retrospective views of the project. My talk was on the second day and featured a view of how differently the Yale-NUS College looked when we were writing our Curriculum Document in 2013, and now after three years of implementation. I made a point that TS Eliot points out that “between the idea and the reality.. falls the shadow” – but also that Goethe pointed out that “There is a strong shadow where there is much light.”  In our case, I think the curriculum we designed was innovative, creative and exciting. But it is also vital to recognize that students need to be involved in discussing this curriculum, and as it turned out have been close collaborators as we have assessed and improved the curriculum. We were surprised at how our teaching teams became like research groups in educational innovating, making Yale-NUS College more like a laboratory of innovation than an experiment. Each of the courses itself is an experiment with a team of educators united in their interest in making the curriculum succeed and to advance the learning of our students. This common interest has transcended disciplinary differences and created a really unique environment at Yale-NUS.

The Symposium included further talks by Bill Deresiewicz, Carol Schneider, Cappy Hill, and Michael Roth. All of the speeches were excellent and thought provoking. Several interesting books were recommended – including The Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, by St. Johns professor  Eva Brann (https://www.amazon.com/Paradoxes-Education-Republic-Eva-Brann/dp/0226071367), Universities Inc. (https://www.amazon.com/University-Inc-Corporate-Corruption-Education/dp/0465090516/), and A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future (https://www.aacu.org/crucible). A very memorable event, and our group included over 80 participants from more than 30 universities and colleges!

And here are some shots of the beautiful Yale University campus, known affectionately at Yale-NUS College as the “mother ship!” It is really a beautiful place, and inspires high-minded thoughts and serenity.

NYU is the home to the World Science Festival, a spectacular presentation of the current state of science – with panels featuring Nobel laureates, recent authors and TED speakers. The World Science Festival was founded by Brian Greene, and provides one component of education that is complementary to his World Science University.  I was eager to attend some of the talks at the Festival, and registered for the day-long sessions on Gravity, Waves, and an evening panel on Gravitational Waves.

The first session I attended was on the Triumphs and Mysteries of Gravity, and included a mix of presenters spanning theory and experiment. The session included hour-long talks with a chance to ask questions and an opportunity to meet some of the leading people in this field. Admittedly I knew (and had taught!) a lot of the material in this session, but my interests included seeing how this format works for informal education of interested public science aficianados, and a chance to learn a few tricks about how I might present some of these topics in coming days. I was also extremely excited to meet Rainer Weiss, who led the LIGO effort from MIT, and Barry Barish, who the Caltech counterpart leading the Advanced LIGO effort in the past decade. LIGO was one project I was offered by Rainer Weiss back when I was a graduate student thinking of attending MIT. It is great to see how well the project turned out – but I am not sure if I would have been patient enough to wait for results for 30 years!

The talks began with Justin Khoury from University of Pennsylvania. He talked about Dark Matter as a superfluid, and indicated that many of its properties can be explained in an analogy with the behaviour of liquid Helium – the most familiar superfluid. This includes its tendency to retain its shape after collision with another blob of superfluids – and he showed an amazing simulation of two colliding blobs of superfluid, that during the collision create interference patterns, and afterwards retain their exact shape. This behaviour is consistent with the look of the blobs of dark matter from the Bullet Cluster. He also did a brief rundown of MOND gravity theory, and explained that it phenomenologically works to explain rotation curves of galaxies, even though it breaks down in the context of the CMBR and for the cosmic web. This led him to speculate that if the dark matter of the universe is superfluid, there could be two types – one that would be below critical temperature in galaxies (explaining rotation curves) and another just above critical temperature in the larger expanses of space and the early universe. His talk was very thought provoking and engaging – and with the videos of liquid Helium made for an exemplary popular presentation on the topic.

The following talks were by Rainier Weiss, who did a great overview of the LIGO experiment, including its history and evolution over the past few decades. The use of higher intensity lasers (100 watts) and the amplification of the signal through extra mirrors to create a resonant cavity were very interesting, along with the presentation of how they detect the beat signal from moving mirrors using a form of spectral analysis of the light, was interesting. The detection at h=10-21 deformation is astounding – with the 4 mile length of the LIGO path, this amounts to 10-18 m resolution or 1/1000 of the width of a proton!  The detection of two 30 solar mass black holes merging and colliding at over one billion light years of distance sends chills down one’s spine!  Barry Barrish rounded off the morning with a discussion about particle detectors, and his plans for a new 11 TeV linear electron accelerator, which might be built in China. He explained how an electron positron collider provided a cleaner signal than the CERN LHC, which only can use one in a billion events since most of them are “glancing blows” between protons. The new accelerator he proposes will gather cleaner information than the LHC, and even though it probes the same energy range has a good potential for discovery.

During the second day I attended a fascinating day of discussions on the interface between biology, computer science, and physics entitled Chasing Waves from the Brain to Deep Space. This session featured speakers such as Sylvia Earle (oceanographer), Drew Endy (Stanford University synthetic biology expert), Nergis Mavalvala (MIT LIGO team member), Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University biomedical expert on neural implants), and Harold Varmus (Nobel laureate, and Cancer researcher). Their talks were very much like the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” set of topics – and raised urgent questions about the impacts of exploding technology, merging of science and engineering disciplines, and the consequences of science and technology on society and the environment.

I was especially interested in Drew Endy’s talk – he mentioned a number of fascinating features of the current biology that I was not aware of.  To motivate this new form of biological revolution – he urged that we not think of it as another “industrial age” but instead invoked the concept of citizenship as an alternative to consumerism. This was heightened by the video “Growing is Forever” – which shows some of the range of life on Earth, and his examples of living bridges in India, a company called Far West Fungi in Monterey that can build “bioblocks” full of living creatures that can be used to make living buildings, furniture, etc, and an amazing new student competition known as iGEM, where students build competing life forms using standardized parts of molecular biology to rearrange life for useful purposes.

First the expansion of technology, and speed and extent of DNA sequencing, which follows the Moore’s Law in its exponential growth. He provided evidence on the costs of sequencing genes, which follows Moore’s Law, and has fallen by a factor of 100 in just the past 10-15 years. He extrapolated this to indicate that by 2025 gene sequencing, encoding of vast amounts of information within DNA, and even biological computing could be routine and less expensive than we can imagine. He gave examples of biological computing in which genes can be switched on and off with nanowires, and then bacteria cells can be turned into glowing or not glowing cells at will.

I could write a lot more about this session alone – but should wrap up and also mention that the talks during the rest of the day featured an overview of coral reef bleaching and fish stock depletion by Sylvia Earle, an account by Miguel Nicolelis of using neural implants in monkees and rats to enable these animals to play video games with their brains, to operate robot arms and to sense infrared light directly with brainwaves. Miguel is also famous for training a paralyzed young man to kick a soccer ball, by inventing a technological prosthesis that included a brain wave monitoring device, and a set of sensors and tactile feedback devices so that the paralyzed can feel as they walk with the prosthesis. His work is showing that brain activity works in complex swarms, and that groups of neurons are needed to activate even simple motions in the body. But this complexity is a form of robustness, as the brain is capable of rewiring itself and configuring the sensory and cognitive neurons to adapt to brain implants as if they were natural organs. This work raises intriguing prospects for “enhanced” humans, avatar type experiences from remote mechanical bodies, and effective ways of enabling paralyzed people to rewire their brains and relearn how to walk. The final talk of the session was  by Nobel laureate Howard Varmus about the current state of Cancer Research and the potential to develop customized gene therapies to defeat cancer based on its individual genetic code. An amazing couple of days that really got me excited about the future!

The last night was a panel discussion on the new era of gravity waves, entitled Gravitational Waves: A New Era of Astronomy Begins . This evening featured Brian Greene himself, as the host and moderator of a discussion among the top people in the field – including . He did a great job setting up the talk and reviewed General Relativity very effectively before interviewing the panel about their recent discovery. In between questions he had slick videos that played to highlight concepts and to show parts of the LIGO experiment. These videos in part came from a documentary being produced about LIGO, but also featured beautifully done visualizations of gravity waves, and animations of the Einstein Field equations in a good amount of detail. They also included a demonstration of interferometry on the stage – much like Brian Greene had done in his TV appearance with Stephen Colbert. All in all it was an amazing and very effective evening of science and I left feeling inspired and lucky to be involved in astrophysics research at a time when it looks like we are entering a new era!  Our Caltech ZTF project has great potential to discover optical counterparts of some of the gravity wave sources soon to be discovered, and I hope to be part of this research!

Some of my pictures from the World Science Festival at NYU:

More information on the sessions I attended is below:

WORLD SCIENCE U FOR A DAY: Triumphs and Mysteries of Gravity

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/programs/world-science-u-day-triumphs-mysteries-gravity/

WORLD SCIENCE U FOR A DAY: Chasing Waves from the Brain to Deep Space

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/programs/world-science-u-day-making-waves-brain-deep-space/

Gravitational Waves: A New Era of Astronomy Begins 

http://livestream.com/WorldScienceFestival/events/5415976

As part of my education about New York City, I rode my Brompton bike all the way to the top of Manhattan, along the beautiful Hudson River bike trail. At the end of the trail is the Met Cloisters museum, which is an amazing time capsule where you can immerse yourself in Medieval Europe in the heart of New York. The building is constructed as a medieval cloister, and includes authentic building elements – columns, decorations, alcoves – that were imported directly from France, Italy and Spain. Within this ancient architecture are a dazzling array of Medieval artifacts of all sorts – tapestries of unicorns, icons featuring saints and other Christian icons, and entire chapels imported from Europe.

Along the way I had a chance to visit Columbia University. Despite being in higher education for 23 years, I had not visited Columbia until now. I have known David Helfand for many years, and have sent students to Columbia from Pomona for decades. I also had a series of great discussions with Kathy Takayama at NUS about teaching and learning, and all of this reminded me of my need to visit Columbia. The occasion of being in NYC and having dinner with David Helfand that evening made it imperative to visit Columbia, and its liberal arts college Barnard.

Like many visitors to Columbia, I was taken by some of its monumental architecture. I was surprised at how densely packed the buildings were. It featured a small quadrangle but for the most part the buildings are connected and adjacent, presenting what could be the densest space for any of the Ivy League campuses. Being a physics and astronomy guy, I had to visit the famous Pupin Laboratory, and rode the elevator to the astronomy floor. There I saw a poster that featured a memorial to Arlin Crotts, a fellow astronomer with whom I shared a few adventures in Chile as Chile transitioned into democracy (he and I were caught in the middle of a riot that included the infamous Chilean water cannon and tear gas back in 1989).

The Columbia buildings were impressive, and it was great to see how this campus was connected to Barnard, which is just across the street. Like both the Claremont Colleges and Yale-NUS and NUS, Barnard and Columbia share a symbiotic relationship. Students at Barnard, Yale-NUS and the Claremont Colleges can take classes at their neighboring campuses, and benefit from the much larger scope of the compound campus. These larger groupings are a recipe for success for all three institutions – it gives a much stronger critical mass in many subjects, gives a much wider range of courses for students, and provides a larger and more dynamic intellectual community. Barnard, like Yale-NUS, also has faculty who are tenured both at their home liberal arts college and at the larger university – Columbia in the case of Barnard and NUS in the case of Yale-NUS. I have heard from Barnard students and from our visiting teams from Yale-NUS that this arrangement provides for a more active research environment in the liberal arts college than most of its peers.

The highlight of the day was a dinner with David Helfand. He updated me on his transition from being the founding President of Quest University to his return as a faculty member at Columbia again. Before founding Quest, David worked hard while at Columbia to introduce one course to Columbia’s core in science. As he puts it, this was a “27 year quest” to insert one class in the 100 year old Common Curriculum. After that quest, his work at Quest University was able to provide a very innovative new form of higher education with an entirely new University, with a 3-week block schedule, a unique form of common curriculum, graduates who are required to have an experiential block, and to formulate an independent research question early in their education that culminates in a capstone research project. David discussed his active role in the American Astronomical Society and his new work at Columbia after Quest, and many other very interesting new projects. I will look forward to keeping in touch with him, as we both have a great deal of interest (and more experience every day!) with founding new colleges and universities.

Interviews and background on David Helfand:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/david-helfands-new-quest.html (David Helfand and his work at Quest from a 2012 interview)

http://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/david-helfand-reflects-back-on-a-decade-at-the-head-of-quest-university/  (David Helfand reflects on his work at Quest  – from 2016 interview)

On June 2, I had a wonderful visit to NYU, after exploring Manhattan a bit with my folding Brompton bike. I had heard a lot about NYU but had never been there, after many conversations with faculty at NYU Abu Dhabi and  NYU Shanghai about “The Square” (as NYU is called). It was great to see the campus and I was really impressed by the central location of NYU in the city, and the way in which Washington Square provided a gathering place for all kinds of people, with a tangible vitality and diversity.

During my visit to NYU I met with Linda Mills, the NYU Vice President who directs the NYU Global Network, and her Global Programs team that included Josh Taylor, Associate Vice Chancellor, Tyra Liebmann, Associate Vice Provost, and Janet Alperstein, Assistant Vice President on Academics. We had a great discussion about NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai and Yale-NUS College. During this meeting it was clear that these institutions shared a lot and have a number of exciting possibilities for future collaboration. Yale-NUS College is the same age as NYU Shanghai, and the three campuses are all “start-ups” with many similar issues and concerns.

NYU Global Programs office web site:

https://www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-university-administration/office-of-the-president/office-of-the-provost/global-programs/OfficeOfGlobalPrograms.html

All of our new campuses, Yale-NUS, NYU Shanghai and NYU Abu Dhabi, are learning a lot about how to work in these rich and exciting international contexts – which give new meaning to diversity, as the NYU campuses and the Yale-NUS Campus all feature students from over 50 countries, and a mix of international students that ranges from 40-85%, compared to the 10-15% typical on US campuses.  I look forward to future collaborations, as our campuses have a lot to learn from each other, and a lot to offer to the US institutions in managing intercultural issues, and providing examples of successful start-up campuses.

On May 19, the NUS Teaching Academy had its Awards Banquet, where it added its seven new members (including me!) and featured a guest from the University of Hong Kong, Prof Rick Glofcheski, who has won the Hong Kong wide best educator award, as well as the University of Hong Kong best teacher award.  Rick teaches law, and is an expert on authentic learning and in creating real-world examples for his tort law students based on their own reading of Hong Kong’s several newspapers. He presented a lively talk before the banquet that described his approach to teaching, and gave some great examples of how his students began the process of reading newspapers and ended up becoming life-long readers and observers of how the law applies in the world around them. Key to the success of his approach is to have students create a log of their reading, so it is spread out over the semester and starts early. This reading log is verified by an online system and enables the students to have the time to reflect on how their reading changes during the semester as they can begin to fit some of the pieces of the class into their observations of tort law all around them. Rick also has an assignment where students become photo-essayists, and they submit a few photos that illustrate a potential case in tort law.  The examples of student photos included many “lawsuits in waiting” – such as worker in Hong Kong suspended high above the ground on rickety bamboo scaffolds, people sitting on a Hong Kong bus with none of them wearing seatbelts and with a slippery metal floor, and dangerous intersections.

During the banquet, NUS President Tan Chor Chuan provided opening remarks, and the NUS Teaching Academy director Kumaralingam Amirthalingam (Kumar) gave a wonderful opening address, and provided a nice metaphor between the excellent wines available during the banquet, and the mixing of disciplines represented by the Teaching Academy. I am delighted to be part of the Teaching Academy, and at every turn am happily surprised by the energy and intellect of the group, which includes representatives from every corner of NUS – in law, medicine, public health, pharmacy, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.

At the banquet I had a nice talk with Marine Biology professor Peter Todd, and being a SCUBA and oceanography buff, enjoyed talking with him about the best locations within our region to find unbleached corals, the effects of global warming on coral and marine biology, and local field trip sites near Singapore that might be of interest for our students and our Foundations of Science class.

Rick was an exciting and engaging speaker, and we enjoyed talking with him both about empowering students to find examples of their course material in the world around them, but also in handing over more of the course to these students so their learning becomes self driven. This is the key element for students both to learn the material and to build life-long habits that extend their learning, according to Rick. He presented a day-long workshop at NUS afterwards on May 20 on “Authentic Learning and Task-Based Self-Directed Learning” – the slides from that workshop are below.

Workshop_slides 1 – slides from Rick Glofcheski workshop on Authentic Learning (part 1)

Workshop_slides 2 – slides from Rick Glofcheski workshop on Authentic Learning (part 2)

Symbiosis University, and its School for Liberal Arts, hosted our third Future of Liberal Arts and Sciences in India conference from May 16-18. Anita Patankar, the Director of the Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts, was a wonderful host, and organized a superb meeting at Symbiosis University!  The meeting included a distinguished chief guest, Dr. Furqan Qamar, the Secretary General of the Association of Indian Universities, who was welcomed by the founder of the Symbiosis University, Dr.S.B. Mujumdar. The meeting also featured a wonderful keynote talk by noted author, member of Pariliment, and former Under-secretary of the UN, Shashi Tharoor (http://www.shashitharoor.in/).  

In addition to the dynamic and visionary set of ideas coming from the conference participants which drew from the best institutions in the region and beyond, there was a real sense of common purpose and a great energy to the meeting. The meeting included excellent speakers, and after just a few days had a strong sense of a common culture. The meeting web site describes the range of speakers and program of the meeting and is available at: http://ssla.edu.in/conference-2016/concept-and-themes

We are looking forward to our next Future of Liberal Arts in India meeting – probably hosted by Ashoka University in New Delhi, and it should be a wonderful chance to build upon the very strong foundation from our first three meetings.  More information on the Future of Liberal Arts in India project can also be found elsewhere on my site at this location: http://bryanpenprase.org/liberal-arts-in-india/

More information

Information about the meeting, Symbiosis University and the participants can be found at these links:

http://ssla.edu.in/conference-2016/schedule – Schedule for Symbiosis Liberal Arts Conference

http://www.shashitharoor.in/my-books.php – books by Shashi Tharoor (my favourite is the “Elephant Tiger and the Cell Phone).

http://www.aiu.ac.in/Professor%20Furqan%20Qamar-Profile.pdf – Information on Dr. Furqan Qamar

http://ssla.edu.in/welcome/ – Symbiosis School of the Liberal Arts information

http://www.siu.edu.in/ – Symbiosis University site

On April 25, we had our second Yale-NUS College Foundations of Science Grand Challenge poster fair. The students were asked to address a theme that addressed a Grand Challenge facing the Earth. These questions were in one of two themes – “Evolution” which refers to gradual change of organisms and communities, and “Revolution” which refers to sudden change through disruptive technologies or disasters. Students had completed two short courses of 5.5 weeks in one of the themes, and were assembled into teams of four to present a solution to a question posed to them. The poster fair took place on April 25 and our entire teaching team looked over the posters, and provided interviews of the student teams which constituted 20% of the grade for the Foundations of Science course.  The hope is that the Grand Challenge provides a form of authentic learning, where the assessments are geared toward real-world problems, and expose students to realistic scenarios in which the academic topics of the course can be applied. The results from this year’s Foundations of Science course are being researched as part of an educational project for our Centre of Teaching and Learning.

The Evolution theme had this set of short “disciplinary case studies” (5.5 week half courses) in these areas:

Vinod Saranathan –  “Extinctions and Speciation”–

Description: What is the evolutionary history of life on Earth? How did the observed patterns in the history of life arise? What are the evolutionary processes that likely generated these patterns? What is Pikaia and why should we care about the fact that it survived? What is a “species”? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this module. The understanding gained could be brought to bear on whether we are in the midst of another mass extinction event? And if so, what could we predict (if possible) about the future assemblage of species?

Jen Sheridan – “Biogeography” – 

Description:  Introduction to patterns of species distributions & diversity, and factors influencing such patterns. Course will introduce students to the field of biogeography so that they understand why organisms exist in the places they do, and what contributes to species distribution and diversity patterns. Additionally, students should be able to apply this knowledge to predict how these will change in the face of anthropogenic factors.

Stanislav Presolski – “Chemistry of Life”– 

Description: Life! From a chemist’s perspective. The fundamental building blocks of everything that surrounds us will be discussed, from simple gases, liquids and solids, through man-made dyes, drugs and plastics, all the way to the chemistry of living things. We will explore the interactions between matter and energy that constitute our everyday experiences and attempt to make sense of them all through just a few general concepts. Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.

Neil Clark – “Genome sequence information and editing: promise and perils”– 

Description: The first human genome (DNA) sequence was ‘completed’ about ten years ago at a cost of about US$3 billion. Since then the cost has gone down by more than 6 orders of magnitude.  The sequencing revolution has already profoundly changed our understanding of human evolution and migration. It will almost certainly have consequences for social behavior and policy.  As a science course, this unit will be focussed on human genetics, sequence variation and evolution, but it is expected that students will gain an appreciation for the potential uses and misuses, interpretations and misinterpretations, of genomic information.

The Revolution theme had a set of short “disciplinary case studies (5.5 week half courses) in these areas:

Alessandro Gomez (Yale University) – “Fossil Fuel Energy and the Environment” – alessandro.gomez@yale.edu

Description:  Despite much effort to promote carbon-free technologies, the majority of the energy supply through the middle of this century and beyond will stem inevitably from fossil fuels. As a result, combustion technologies, coupled with reactants/products treatment and, cost permitting, carbon capture and sequestration will remain central to energy consumption for several decades. The unit emphasis is on timeless fundamentals, beginning with key concepts of thermodynamics, the principle of conservation of energy, first and second laws. We will discuss traditional fossil-fuel power plants and engines that are currently involved in 85% of energy conversion worldwide. We will conclude with some considerations on energy policy and with the “big picture” on how to tackle future energy needs with a progressive transition to a carbon-free approach..

Bryan Penprase – “Global Warming, Energy, and Earth’s Planetary Environment“ – bryan.penprase@yale-nus.edu.sg 

Description: From a consideration of light and heat, black body radiation, and simple models of radiative heating and cooling, we will explore how our Earth is slowly warming through the accumulation of Carbon Dioxide and other anthropogenic gasses. The class will discuss why certain molecules are “greenhouse gasses” and how to accurately use computer models to predict what the effects of these gasses will be in the coming decades and centuries. Several case studies in energy generation will be discussed in class, including an examination of nuclear energy (and some of the resulting disasters), solar power (with an experiment with photovoltaics), and other alternative energy sources.

Maurice Cheung – “Networks” – maurice.cheung@yale-nus.edu.sg

Description: Everything in the world is interconnected, forming networks at many different scales – not only Facebook and Twitter, but also molecular networks, food webs, ecological networks, transport systems, the World Wide Web and more. This course will introduce you to network thinking and the science of networks, including concepts like graphs, path, hubs, clustering, centrality etc., which will enable you to have a conceptual understanding of the properties of networks, e.g. How do networks grow? What are the consequences of random failures or targeted attacks in networks? Along the way, we will pick up some maths, some biology, and maybe a bit of slime mold intelligence, epidemics, blackouts and Google.

More information on our two semesters of Foundations of Science with the “Grand Challenge” is below:

http://fos2jan2016.courses.yale-nus.edu.sg/  – Semester 2 2015-16 implementation

http://fos1aug2015.courses.yale-nus.edu.sg/ – Semester 1 2015-16 implementation.

Below are the questions for the Our two Foundations of Science themes.

Evolution:

(1) How would you use biogeographic theory to predict the course of a cataclysmic mass extinction event – that is, who would be the winners and who the losers?.   Make your predictions in the context of a particular cause of mass extinction.  How would the decimation, or loss of keystone ecological function due to ‘rarity’, affect future diversification?

 (2) The role of historical contingency is a familiar concept in thinking about the evolution of animal form and function of life, but it is also something to think about in the evolution of the most fundamental biochemical processes.   Was it inevitable that DNA (or RNA) would succeed as the replicable molecule that is the foundation of all biological evolution that we know about?   And that proteins, encoded by the DNA sequence, would be the agents of catalysis, movement and structure?   Is it possible that there is life on earth that is not based on DNA/RNA and proteins? How would you find it?  How would you find such life on other planets?

 (3) Given the plunging costs of DNA sequencing, and improvements in genetic engineering, propose a novel strategy for using one or both of these technologies in the service of conservation.

Revolution:

i). Assess the current status of one or more aspects of power generation and/or distribution in terms of efficiency and stability, and suggest one or more possible improvements to lessen impacts on global climate

 ii). How can network science be applied to monitor, assess or counter one of the consequences of climate change and/or global warming?

 iii). Propose a way to assess and enhance the energy efficiency of a large urban area or region, and the specific impacts this will have on power usage and global warming. 

Your teams have been assigned, and you should soon be receiving an email from the TeamMates program with more details about your team members.