multi 6 1 - stanford news · inter action issue 6 • spring ... design interdisciplinary classes,...

inter actionISSUE 6 • SPRING 2007 • STANFORD UNIVERSITY • MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

thinking globallyArea studies, one of the first interdisciplinary fields, has a new life in the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies, page 6

space for researchPlanners and faculty look to ensure that the intersection of architecture and research is a productive one,pages 2 and 3

new pedagogyThe Center for Teaching and Learning helps professors and graduate students design interdisciplinary classes, page 8

graduate studiesThe university’s first vice provost for graduate education pledges to promote cross-school opportunities for graduate students, page 12

see story, page 2

the genius of leland stanford’s plan for his new university was its expandability.

The structure of the Main Quad, with its east-west axis, lent itself to coherent growth

that could elaborate upon the original vision while respecting it. But the university lost its

architectural way soon after its founders died. Today, the university community is working

hard to recover the old vision and adapt it to a new world of exciting research.

2 SPRING 2007

inter action MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

The genius of Le-land Stanford’s plan for his new u n ive r s i t y was its expandability. The structure of the Main Quad, with its east-west

axis, lent itself to coherent growth that could elaborate upon the origi-nal vision while respecting it.

But the university seemed to lose its architectural way soon after its founders died. So did many other great universities in the 20th century; Harvard, for instance, was once de-scribed as “a loose confederation of departments held together by alle-giance to the central heating plant.”

At Stanford, buildings went up

where they shouldn’t. There were dis-putes over modern versus traditional architecture. There was no flow. There was little consultation with faculty or other users. “There are ar-eas with no ‘there there,’ no anchors,” campus architect David Lenox said, gesturing at a campus map.

His predecessor, David Neuman, also was concerned at how the uni-versity had gone astray.

“A disorderly campus affects ev-eryone, if only subliminally,” he told Stanford Today in 1996. “Without order, you’ve lost the physical oppor-tunity for chance encounters and the collegial atmosphere that encourages collaboration and creativity.”

Gerhard Casper recalled recently that when he became the university’s

president in 1992, he also was wor-ried. So he took a more active role in campus architecture and began presiding over open competitions for new buildings.

“SEQ is more accepted now, but at first it was controversial,” Casper said, referring to the Packard, Se-quoia, Moore and Hewlett build-ings in the Science and Engineering Quad, which went up on his watch.

“The landscape architect worked with the architect to create an infi-nitely lighter, more Mediterranean quad,” he said. “The new buildings picked up on the themes of the Main Quad even though [the Hewlett and Packard buildings] are point and counterpoint. Some people said, what is this atrium doing there? And

the Paul Allen Center is the very op-posite of the Gates building; it picks up on traditional themes but in very different ways.”

The SEQ1 buildings, except the Hewlett Teaching Center, are de-partmental. Today, as Stanford em-braces multidisciplinary approaches to research and teaching, campus architects’ tasks include ensuring not only that buildings make aesthetic sense but that they properly house and encourage new types of scientific and intellectual journeys. Flexible classrooms and break spaces, central workshops, open office space, mov-able equipment and furniture, op-portunities for spontaneous meetings or huddles—these are all elements of the new university.

SCHooL oF ENGINEERING CENTER:

From the Ground UpTalking about building academic buildings can take

as long as building them—longer, in fact. There are ar-duous conversations about research collaborations, links among disciplines, proximity to shared facilities such as workshops and libraries, likely areas of growth and the image of their field that scholars want to project.

The second building to go up in the second Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ2) will be the School of En-gineering Center (SoEC), whose planners are involved in precisely those sorts of conversations with faculty members.

The building has a hard act to follow: the Environ-ment and Energy Building (E+E), which will open its doors in october.

“We’re interested in the experience of a building,” said Sandy Meyer, director of facilities and planning for the School of Engineering and program representa-tive for SEQ2. “Instantly when you arrive at E+E, you understand what it’s about. We need the same to hap-

pen with this building.”The SoEC will house the Management Science and

Engineering Department (MS&E), the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) and the dean’s office. The adjacent rotunda, which the architects call “the signature building of the quad,” will house the library and a host of common areas, in-cluding exhibition space, classrooms, an auditorium (used principally by the Stanford Center for Profes-sional Development), a research gym, breakout rooms and a café.

This spring, planning entered the schematic phase. Members of the Portland, ore., architectural firm BooRA met with users and faculty members to figure out how they operate and move, where their research and teaching takes them in a building, how much space they need and how it should be distributed.

Beyond the needs of the individual units, planners grappled with the peculiar structure of the School of Engineering and SEQ2. The new building will contain just one of the school’s nine departments; some of the rest will be in other SEQ2 buildings (which will all be connected through their basements), but others will be

see froM the ground up, page 4

The faculty has amuch greater role in architectural planning today than in the past.

“It’s about vision,

not space”

SPRING 2007 3

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

Innovation can be expensive or inexpensive, cumbersome or un-complicated. “It’s about vision, not space,” said Margaret Dyer-Cham-berlain, director of the university’s Department of Capital Planning.

The Stanford Challenge fund-raising campaign includes new or redesigned buildings in the schools of Medicine, Engineering, Law and Business, as well as new dorms, an Arts Path and an expansion of the social science complex, including the Hoover Institution, the Stanford In-stitute for Economic Policy Research and Encina Hall. All the projects share common issues: space, park-ing, mission, linkages, sustainability, flexibility for an unknown future, architectural intelligibility.

What’s different now is that the process for working out these chal-lenges includes faculty and staff to a far greater degree than before. Now, not only are the buildings better, the excitement is shared.

“I’ve made three lab moves since I’ve been at Stanford, and each time I was told, you’re moving there,” said Channing Robertson, senior associ-ate dean in the School of Engineering. “The change has come because of more enlightened planners and also because of resistance from faculty.”

Dyer-Chamberlain calls what she does “space therapy.”

“We sit with departments to figure out how all the components trans-late into what they’ll need in the new building,” she said. “We ask people,

what works where you are now; what doesn’t? We talk about access, prox-imity, interaction, social engineering.

“often people say everything should be exactly the same in the new building. It’s really hard to en-vision anything different. So we say, what do you love about your current space? What don’t you like? And then they say, well, now that you mention it, there’s no space for… So where should that be? we ask. Closer? Far-ther? We try to get them to think dif-ferently about their space.”

Visibility today is more important than it was. Running into people is important. The ability to simultane-ously participate in more than one scientific undertaking and to convey that simultaneity to visitors entering

the building is important. Being able to work both alone and with col-leagues is important. Above all, flex-ibility is important.

“There’s no reason to bolt down lab equipment; we don’t do that in our own homes,” Robertson said. “Technology changes so rapidly, we can’t possibly project science 50 years down the line.”

This issue of Interaction takes a look at how the schools of Medi-cine and Engineering are balancing technology, function, aesthetics and finances, among other things, to cre-ate spaces for teaching and research that will adapt themselves to the requirements of future decades. If these walls ever talk, they will have a lot to say.

Maggie Saunders is project manager of

the Learning and Knowledge Center.

L. A. CiCERO

see gained in translation, page 5

LEARNING & KNoWLEDGE CENTER:

Gained in TranslationThe School of Medicine gets awards and honors for

just about everything. But not architectural planning. At least not yet.

“Right now, over there, there’s one of everything,” said campus architect David Lenox, including build-ings that date back to the school’s move from San Fran-cisco to the Farm nearly 50 years ago.

School and university officials had been talking about a redesign for years, but it was the arrival of Dean Philip Pizzo in 2001 that kicked the plans into gear. Many of the building projects on campus are at-tempts to revitalize Stanford’s original east-west quad arrangement. But given the potpourri of buildings at the medical school, another scheme had to be devised.

So the school will be at the intersection of two coher-ent walkways. The clinical, or “Discovery,” walk will link the school in one direction to the hospitals; in the other to the two science and engineering quads, SEQ1 and SEQ2. The research walk will run east-west from

the school buildings past the Clark Center to the biol-ogy and chemistry buildings. The paths will formally integrate the off-campus community with the schools of Medicine, Engineering, and Humanities and Sciences.

At the heart of all this—the nexus of research and education and health care—is the Learning and Knowledge Center (LKC), which will occupy the site of Fairchild Auditorium. Construction will start in late spring 2008. The project was designed by the architec-tural firm NBBJ. (The building’s website is http://lkc.stanford.edu/).

“The Discovery Walk underlies our mission of trans-lational medicine,” said the School of Medicine’s LKC project manager, Maggie Saunders. “This building is both the first and last step in the translation process, because without dialogue there is seldom innovation, and without teaching, there is no translation.”

‘A human process’The planning process for the LKC began with meet-

ings among all the players, including faculty members. one faculty member who from the start assumed a leading role was Dr. David Gaba, associate dean for

L. A. CiCERO

When the Clark Center was being planned, some people were skeptical about the space given to the cafeteria. It was too big, they said. Better to give the space over to labs.

No way, others said. Channing Robertson, in particu-lar, was adamant.

“I taught in Switzerland, where it was very common to have a large eating space,” he said recently. “People would leave their labs and socialize there. The same was true in Cambridge. In the United States, though, eating places often come after the fact. They’re not planned right, they don’t fit well, they’re in the worst pos-sible space and there’s no place to sit properly. So we

set aside a large piece of the footprint, and ultimately people bought into the idea.”

Robertson, senior associate dean, the Ruth G. and William K. Bowes Professor in the School of Engineering and a former member of the Bio-X executive committee, said then he wanted “a full-service restaurant to serve as a social magnet to enable the serendipity that often is associated with discovery.”

Fast forward to today: Food is still linked to thought. School of Medicine Dean Philip Pizzo has made it clear he wants food—lots of it—at the school’s new Learning and Knowledge Center (LKC).

“Food and drink will be everywhere,” said Maggie Saunders, the LKC project manager. “The classrooms will accommodate this. People are more willing to par-ticipate, they’re more open, if they can eat and drink.”

There will be three levels of food in the LKC: a downstairs café along the Discovery Walk, open during regular hours; an area with vending machines containing packaged food; and several kitchens (including one just for students) so people can cook 24/7.

Over in the future School of Engineering Center, meanwhile, the director of the Institute for Computation-al and Mathematical Engineering, Peter Glynn, envisions a kitchen “with a large table” right next to the lounge. That will be the hub, he said.

And at a meeting to discuss the future Arts Path, one participant suggested, only half in jest, that maybe 10 cafés along the way would create artistic buzz.

Although it’s hard to object to sharing ideas over food and drink, the mere presence of food and drink in no way guarantees the ideas, or even the fellowship,

4 SPRING 2007


elsewhere. Yet SoEC must be the hub for them all. So the planners’ task is to create a home for MS&E and ICME and a symbolic center for the whole school.

Their top priority is to “create an interdisciplinary community” that is sustainable, transparent and visu-ally descriptive of the history of innovation associated with the school.

And it has to be flexible. “When the Main Quad was built, they didn’t know what the university would be like in 100 years,” architect Jamie Sinz pointed out during a meeting with faculty. “When we say the SoEC is a 100-year building, it means it will adapt, but it will survive.”

Tomorrow’s librariesPossibly no component of any

university is undergoing more ad-aptations these days than its librar-ies. While ICME and MS&E must factor in space to grow, libraries expect negative growth in terms of space dedicated to stacks and less activity on the loading dock. The new engineer-ing library will occupy around 6,000 square feet in the rotunda.

“It’s open, glassy, transparent, the iconic center of the building,” said architect Isaac Campbell, “analo-gous to the church in the Main Quad.” With a nod toward the Clark Center, planners also want people outside to be able to see inside. “Windows on creativ-ity,” in fact, is one of the building’s themes.

one issue raised at a meeting in early March was how to create a sense of flow from the quad to the li-brary. Visibility from the outside is one thing; leading people inside is another. There were several potential entrances to the library, and the group discussed which was the most logical.

“I can’t envision the natural flow,” said Bob Street, professor emeritus in the Department of Civil and En-vironmental Engineering, pointing to the computerized

rendering of the new building. “It doesn’t feel obvious to me. Is there an obvious front door?”

And once you go through that front door, what do you find? How do you interact with librarians? Does checkout have to be where it always is?

The follow-up meeting in April was attended by University Librarian Michael Keller, whose enthusiasm must be every innovative architect’s dream.

By that time, Sinz had worked up a fairly detailed sketch of the library. Aided by Adobe Illustrator and an agile mouse, the architect dropped seating, shelves, couches, tables and offices in and out of the projected image and scooted the objects to one side or another depending on light, noise and use, all with the goal of saving space and maximizing functionality.

“That’s terrific!” Keller mur-mured.

“But do we really need a desk at the entrance?” he asked. “We’re in a new age now. Don’t we want a more collaborative feeling about how we treat our patrons? It’s the fence I’m objecting to. We need to get out of the fence mode. We need to be as flexible as possible.”

He was preaching to the choir. “We’d certainly be interested in thinking about that in another way,” Campbell said. “our goal is for the library to be as open as possible.”

The librarians at the meeting reported that the new San Mateo Public Library is experimenting with por-table reference pods that can be locked up in the eve-ning. Maybe, Keller said, the tabletop machinery also could be removed at night, leaving empty tables for all-night study sessions.

“Why not?” he asked. “Just think about it!”

A new communityICME director Peter Glynn, meanwhile, was think-

ing about community. His institute’s graduate students and directors are in the Durand Building, but faculty offices are scattered widely in around a dozen depart-

From the Ground Upcont inued from page 2

‘Windows on creativity’ is one of

the building’s themes.The architectural rendering, top, shows

the eastern approach toward the hexago-

nal rotunda of the School of Engineering

Center, which will contain the new Engi-

neering Library, a cafe and many shared

facilities.

Michael Keller

see froM the ground up, page 10

Food and Thought

one campus planner cautions.“Food can serve the purpose, but it’s not just about

food,” said Margaret Dyer-Chamberlain, director of Stanford’s Department of Capital Planning. “You have to think about linkages, seating, the surroundings.”

Seating was a particularly important issue at Clark. The original plan called for lots of outdoor tables, both on the lawn and on the sky bridges. The long tables in the cafeteria were inspired, again, by European eating customs.

“The problem with round tables is that one person sits down and no one sits down with them,” Robertson said. “With the long tables, there’s no ownership of the table.”

But they can make it difficult to talk in a small group, he admitted, adding that he was pleased the restaurant’s

new managers recently reconfigured them.“It looks less like Lompoc Prison than before,” he

said.The fortunes of eating establishments are somewhat

mysterious. Dyer-Chamberlain said one of the most suc-cessful eating gatherings on campus is at the Ginzton Laboratory, where faculty and students have coffee and donuts in a courtyard on a regular basis. Everyone comes. It won’t put Stanford on any culinary map, but it works.

She also noted that The 750, the pub in the Gradu-ate Community Center, has grown more popular with its themed events and musical performances.

At her previous job at Dartmouth, she and colleagues noticed there was one café that seemed to work better than the others. “It was a very interactive space in the

arts building, a de facto student center,” she said. “A bit funky, near open studio space, so people could watch artists at work, good food, near the student mailboxes and the central campus. It was a place where faculty and students would run into each other.” There’s no way you can deliberately create that mix.

So food would seem to be an essential but insuf-ficient ingredient for good chemistry. It—and a craving for caffeine—also draws people from a distance.

“Peet’s is on the third floor of the Clark Center for a good reason,” said Clark Center project director Mag-gie Burgett. You’ve got to go a ways to get that cup of coffee. On the one hand, that might be a disincentive; on the other, you’ll run into more people. And you’ve worked up an appetite by the time you arrive.

SPRING 2007 5


immersive and simulation-based learning.“The most important part of the process is bringing

together faculty from different parts of medical educa-tion,” Gaba said. “That was the secret.”

Gaba, an anesthesiologist, was on a similar build-ing committee at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Technology has changed since then; designers can por-tray things graphically far better than before. “But frankly,” he said, “the process is a human process, and that hasn’t changed.”

Gaba explains his interest in simulation-based learn-ing: “Anesthesia has always been at the forefront of mannequin-based simulation because it is dangerous and it is not therapeutic in and of itself,” he said. “An-esthesiologists are very worried about safety, very risk-averse, so they were the leaders of the patient-safety movement.”

Those concerns led him 20 years ago to adapt tech-niques used in cockpits by aviators, who also have to make split-second decisions that involve the safety of others.

Simulation-based learning will be one of the most outstanding pedagogical features of the LKC, accord-ing to the medical school. one common feature of all building planning processes is the fight over window space. Happily, that is not the case here, as virtual real-ity (VR) and simulation labs, along with operating and exam rooms, need controlled lighting. So the simula-tion component, the largest in the building, will be in the basement.

All in one placeThe simulation area will comprise several parts. The

school and hospitals today have three such labs, incor-porating all modalities of simulation: clinic rooms with standardized-patient actors or mannequins; VR labs; and rooms for task-trainer machines and what amount to movie sets, where clinical sites such as operating rooms or roadside accidents can be recreated. There

may also be hybrids between VR and physical simu-lation, along with high-resolution power-wall displays and telepresence capability.

“In a one-dimensional simulation—like an actor portraying someone in pain—students can’t very well practice treatment,” said Dr. Clarence Braddock, Ga-ba’s colleague in the planning process. “But in a mul-tidimensional situation, students can experience more complex scenarios. The simulations will be much more rich.”

The basement also will contain a large project class-room (the “wet-dry” room), with sinks and benches for messy exercises. Faculty members will be able to observe many of the activities with monitors or one-way mirrors. Actors will have an area for lockers and a break room.

The mannequins won’t have a break room, but they will have names. one of Gaba’s many virtues is that of being an unrepentant Deadhead, so the simulated patients have been honored with names from the song-list including Jack Straw, John B. Goode and August West.

“The exact design of the basement is still under con-sideration,” Gaba said. “We need space with flexibil-ity for the future. We know there will be new devel-opments out there, but nobody knows yet what they are.”

He envisions a role for Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies (SUMMIT), led by Parvati Dev, who holds a PhD in electrical engineer-ing from Stanford. SUMMIT develops and shares med-ical informatics, be they simulation devices for teach-ing surgical techniques, anatomical images broadcast around the world or virtual environments for teaching medical emergency management.

The group originally was focused on anatomy and curricular development, and many of its projects en-able medical students in distant places to follow along. But increasingly it has turned its attention to surgery and gaming, changing its emphasis as the imaging technology has advanced.

“What’s refreshing about Stanford is that every-

Gained in Translationcont inued from page 3

COuRtEsy Of BOORA

Top, medical residents “treat” a manne-

quin in one of the simulation laboratories;

middle, Dr. David Gaba, associate dean

for immersion and simulation-based learn-

ing; bottom, pediatric nurses at Lucile

Packard Children’s Hospital engage in

an exercise using a mannequin-based

simulator.

COuRtEsy Of dAvid gABA

see gained in translation, page 11

6 SPRING 2007

After World War II, U.S. scholars, lawmakers and diplomats agreed that knowledge about the rest of the world was essential if an-other such conflagration were to be avoided. Within a few years, the postwar desire for peace was overtaken by the Cold War, whose

premise also called for Americans to take seriously the challenge of understanding the rest of the world. “We” needed to learn about “them.”

As a result, in 1958, Title VI of the National De-fense Education Act (renamed the Higher Education Act in 1965) provided funding for research and train-ing in international and foreign language studies, and it has done so ever since.

In the private sector, meanwhile, after the death of Henry Ford in 1947, the Ford Foundation also under-went a dramatic shift toward international concerns, and in the following decades it plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into block grants for international research at leading universities, Stanford among them. The Ford Foundation played a critical role in the devel-opment of what would become known as area studies.

“When I was an undergraduate [at Swarthmore],” said Stanford political scientist David Laitin, “the only course on Africa was The British Empire.”

In response to that dearth, universities nationwide established centers and/or programs devoted to Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The criteria for determining that these were areas, though Europe and North America apparently were not, was problem-atic, as was the question of where to draw boundaries and why.

Nonetheless, social scientists and humanists at these centers studied cultures, languages, economic devel-opment, social movements and state formation. They were, veterans say, the first interdisciplinarians. As the former president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Kenneth Prewitt, wrote in 1996, the development of area studies was “the most success-ful, large-scale interdisciplinary project ever in the hu-manities and the social sciences.” (The SSRC, created in 1923 by the Rockefeller Foundation, together with the American Council of Learned Societies ended up managing many of the Ford Foundation grants until the mid-1990s.)

The oldest of the area studies programs at Stanford are the Center for East Asian Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies, formed in the early 1960s, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eur-asian Studies, founded in 1969.

Today those three plus a collection of other regional and religious concentrations are grouped together in the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) of the School of Humanities and Sci-ences. Depending on the center or program, they of-fer master’s and undergraduate degrees, undergradu-ate honors and minor programs, postdoctoral research opportunities, speaker series, and a physical and in-tellectual space for an array of Stanford and visiting scholars who share an interest in and love for a specific geographic area, however defined.

For, what is an area, anyway? If the commonality between, say, Argentina and Honduras appeared ob-vious to Latin Americanists in the 1960s, the same is not true today. Scholars are far more critical than they were about terms such as “culture” or “development.” Explaining why a region should be studied as such is no longer easy. Lines on a map are not the most signifi-cant way of defining a region; where, exactly, does the Middle East begin or end? Which region does Central Asia belong to? Is a Texas county whose population is 90 percent immigrant any less “Latin” than the state across the Mexican border?

Disciplines and regionsChief among the commonality of Argentina and

Honduras, of course, was their language, and the lan-guage and literature scholars (along with anthropolo-gists) early on took the lead role in area studies.

“The social scientists ignored area studies,” remem-bered historian Herb Klein, director of Stanford’s Cen-ter for Latin American Studies. “People complained that they didn’t speak foreign languages; they just crunched numbers.”

According to Stephen Haber, professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, “at the extreme ends you had people who had models and data sets but who had never been to Mexico. or, you had area studies people who didn’t know which way a demand curve sloped. People who know both are rare. They can solve models and they know about Thailand. That’s not easy.”

one Stanford scholar who does both (though not on


Judith Goldstein, director of the Division of

International, Comparative and Area Stud-

ies, in Encina Commons, which she hopes

can be the new home for all her division’s

programs and centers.

L.A. CiCERO

Stephen Haber

David Laitin

The New World of Area Studies

SPRING 2007 �

Thailand) is sociologist Andrew Walder, an expert on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, who is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). In his opinion, it might take more time to find people who work at both ends, but it’s worth it.

“The problem with some scholars, both in the hu-manities and the social sciences, is that they’re not in-terested in anything other than their country. That’s a boring intellectual attitude, if you ask me. If you think your country is important, then you want nonspecial-ists to know about it. You have to figure out how to talk to people who aren’t specialists, who are theorists, and talk to them in their language.”

In the years since area studies programs were estab-lished, universities have witnessed a transformation of the world economy, the so-called culture wars and fierce government cutbacks for research. When there was enough money to go around, there was room for differences. Today, after some 20 years of debate, the social scientists (many of whom broadened out and learned languages) have become central to area studies.

Social scientists at Stanford are eager to occupy that difficult place Haber pointed to, expert in both their discipline and a region. Judith Goldstein, a political scientist and the director of ICA, says area studies was neglected for years.

“The deep knowledge lost out,” she said, what with the social scientists crunching numbers and the human-ists studying languages and cultures. “Now we need to use ICA as a resource to help departments hire people who can do both area studies and their discipline. We need to reintegrate area studies back into the social sci-ences.”

Laitin, Goldstein’s departmental colleague, shares that view.

“When I got here, research based on fieldwork was re-emerging,” he said. “Up until then, we had no idea if our research models were working; we couldn’t ex-pand our theories. I said, this is the moment to rebuild area studies on a somewhat different foundation.”

But, he added, Stanford needed “to restock the so-cial sciences” with people skilled in both their disci-pline and in regional studies.

Faculty billetsSo ICA was given a small number of billets that,

instead of going to departments, would be regional in nature and open to one of a series of competing depart-ments. History, Sociology, Political Science, Economics and Anthropology would be asked if they were inter-ested in hiring, say, a Middle Eastern scholar. If they were, each would announce an opening in their respec-tive discipline, and the ICA standing committee on hir-ing reviewed all the candidates.

Their dossiers, said Laitin, the committee chairman, “are a joy to read.”

“I’ve learned a great deal,” he said, “seeing how different scholars are all asking, how do we know if things are typical or not? We all deal with the same sort of problems. It’s really spectacular work.”

Goldstein says ICA is “a resource to help depart-ments hire people who can do both area studies and disciplines.” It is not a hub-and-spokes arrangement, she insisted; “it’s more like the grease that keeps the faculty going.” Klein, too, part of the ICA leadership (he is in Santiago de Chile this quarter), sees the cen-ters as “providing services to departments.”

The hiring method, however, has its challenges. For one thing, it’s very complicated, with money coming from private sources, FSI and the School of Humanities and Sciences. Klein himself pointed out that “there’s no free money,” and that despite the line coming to them from above, departments might worry that it could be counted against their billet pool in the future. Some people have questioned its transparency. Members of the History Department worried aloud that the compli-cated origin of the billets (among the dean, the donor, ICA and the department) could compromise the jobs in the long run. And not every area studies program wants a social scientist or a scholar of the contempo-rary world.

“I don’t need a sociologist who does East Asia,” re-marked Carl Bielefeldt, a professor of religious studies and director of Stanford’s Center for Buddhist Stud-ies, which belongs to ICA. “I need a traditional China scholar who reads old books.”

What some people in ICA have been heard to refer to as “esoteric” is, to many people in the humanities, the essence of the matter, which is culture. Not all scholars, disciplinarians though they may be, share the same definition of “tools” or “area.”

“The relevant divisions are not only geographic, they’re cultural,” said Bielefeldt. “East Asian studies, for example, covers the Chinese cultural sphere, an area with shared traditions. There is significant resis-tance today to globalization based on multiple cultural traditions that need to be understood. Cultures are part of human resources. We must know how to in-corporate the genius of cultures into our larger human understanding.”

There also are differences within the social sciences,

between those devoted to just one region or country and those who are more theory-driven and comparative.

“Some people are so defensive about disciplinary standards they don’t want to look carefully at people who have the name of a country in their book title,” said Walder.

All in one placeToday, there are few universities that have not once

again identified the international arena as a priority, which might seem to make this the moment for bridg-ing divides. The need for “global literacy,” which the humanities naturally have a stake in, has become a commonplace as economies and markets become more interdependent and immigration patterns shift. Uni-versities are also aware that their peers are investing heavily in the global game, and no one wants to be left behind.

Goldstein thinks all the regional and religious pro-grams under the ICA umbrella should co-locate, ideally in Encina Commons. Though the connection among the groups may not be apparent, Goldstein says there is great potential for collaboration among them and for stressing breadth rather than depth.

As an example of seizing opportunities, ICA is plan-ning to launch a series of multidisciplinary projects next year focusing on the Silk Road in ancient and modern times, in which students will study the transfer of goods, ideas, languages and people along the 5,000-mile route linking East Asia and Europe.

But here, too, the regional specificity may get lost. “Globalization” cannot adequately address the past and present of, say, just Indonesia or just Kenya. Japa-nese historian Karen Wigen recalled the old Japanese studies center at the University of Michigan, where she earned her undergraduate degree. “You entered that building, filled with tatami mats, and you’d say, this is about Japan,” she said. But Michigan, Duke, Princ-eton, Chicago, Columbia and many other leading uni-versities over the past 20 years have grouped their area studies programs together.

In a friendly disagreement with Goldstein, Klein said, “Judy says us all being together would engender synergy. I don’t buy it.”

Sitting in his office on the second story of Bolívar House, he remembered back to his long-time home in New York. “I spent lots of time in that building at Co-lumbia. Across the hall you can see the Chinese, and you see each other in the coffee room, but there’s no joint anything.”

But, he added, there is an enormous benefit for the students, because they can meet lots more people and find out about so many more activities.

“That makes for a lively intellectual center,” he said. “But faculty will go their own way. We work with fac-ulty in other universities anyway.”

Wigen, who has a pronounced dedication to area studies—she teaches a graduate seminar called Direc-tions in Asian Studies—came to Stanford with her hus-band, historical geographer Martin Lewis, precisely because of Stanford’s traditional support for language and area training.

At Duke, the two were part of a pathbreaking proj-ect launched in response to the Ford Foundation’s “Crossing Borders” initiative, which set as a goal “stimulating communication across a pair of formi-dable boundaries: the geographic borders of traditional area studies and the disciplinary borders between the social sciences and the humanities.” The Duke project, called oceans Connect, reconceptualized ocean basins as areas. Wigen believes the spatial framework itself, not just what goes on within it, must be an object of analysis because it is so obviously a construction. “The Pacific,” after all, has not always been a logical unit of analysis. Neither, for that matter, has “Asia.”

A resilient cornerThe problems facing area studies today are not new

ones: a permanent shortage of funds, tension between the social sciences and the humanities, inadequate knowledge of languages, disagreement over the adop-tion of multidisciplinary approaches and a struggle to make academic structures respond to international, political and demographic ones. Universities also must identify priorities in their global coverage.

But it appears to be a resilient corner of academia. It survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and harsh criticism from conservatives in the 1990s for not being suffi-ciently “balanced.” While Title VI funding has plunged and major foundation support has ebbed, new donors appear at the university’s doorstep interested in fund-ing centers.

“Area studies has been engaged in a long conversa-tion, and it has undergone many permutations,” Wigen said. “It has its own journals, its own intellectual net-works and institutions—a precious legacy that we need to pass on.”

“Maybe area studies marginalizes some things,” Bielefeldt said. “But until cultures are equally repre-sented in the university, we need to foster these stud-ies.”


Programs and Centersin the division of international, Comparative & Area studies

• Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

• Asian Religions and Cultures

• Center for African Studies

• Center for East Asian Studies

• Center for Latin American Studies

• Center for Russian, East European

and Eurasian Studies

• Center for South Asia

• France-Stanford Center for

Interdisciplinary Studies

• International Policy Studies

• International Relations

• Mediterranean Studies Forum

• Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies

• Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies

• Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

‘I’ve learned a great deal seeing how different

scholars are all asking, how do we know if things are

typical or not?,’ Laitin said.

Carl Bielefeldt, director of the Center for

Buddhist Studies, was on a panel in 2005

with the Dalai Lama.

L.A. CiCERO

Stanford’s Academic Technology Specialists are scholars, often PhDs, who lead double lives as techies. Employees of the library system, they reside within aca-demic departments or centers, where their job is to help faculty and staff innovate in their research and teaching through the creative use of technology. As members of both the academic and the information technology communities, the dozen or so specialists are uniquely positioned to bridge different cultures and to facilitate a creative and mutual exchange.

One such ATS is Claudia Engel, who works with anthropologists, most recently on collaborative learning spaces and the use of spatial technologies like geographic information systems. She has degrees in anthropology, biology and education.

“Some of us work with programs where scholars come together, like Human Biology, but we also collaborate across disciplines, bringing departments together,” Engel said. “We look for opportunities to do that.”

They also can create possibilities for scholars to interact with people elsewhere, opening up

dialogues. Engel is collaborating with Lynn Meskell, a professor of cultural and social anthropology, to set up

a wiki devoted to Turkish figurines, and she taught John Rick, an associate professor of anthropological sciences, to use advanced digital imaging to display his archaeological data.

“There are faculty members who have never crossed the mountain, who never even consider what the person across the hall is doing,” said Carlos Seligo, a former teaching fellow in the Introduction to the

Humanities program who is now an ATS with Human

8 SPRING 2007

Research across disciplinary bound-aries comes naturally to many aca-demics, regardless of their field. The rewards are obvious. It’s chal-lenging, it’s fun and, increasingly, it’s necessary.

But interdisciplinary teaching, at least at first, is another matter.

It might entail team-teaching, which has all sorts of administrative, disciplinary and stylistic challenges. It might involve retraining oneself and writing new textbooks. It might entail dealing with teaching as-sistants from various fields who, in turn, have to com-municate to undergraduates that much of what they thought about the classification of knowledge needs adjustment.

There are examples throughout Stanford of profes-sors who are willing to go the extra mile; the team-taught autumn quarter of the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) program is one of the most prom-inent cases, though there are others. (IHUM courses in the autumn quarter must be co-taught by two faculty members from different disciplines.)

“Interdisciplinary teaching can be even harder than interdisciplinary research,” said Michele Marincovich, director of Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learn-

ing (CTL), “in part because many instructors do not know what the final product should look like.”

So the CTL helps them design courses by starting at the end. In workshops led by Robyn Wright Dunbar, the CTL’s senior associate director for sciences and en-gineering, and Mariatte Denman, associate director for the humanities, they start not with what the instructors will teach or assign, but with what they hope students will learn.

Team-teaching involves different methodological ap-proaches and skill sets, Dunbar and Marincovich said, which means the journey might have unexpected turns. So keeping the destination in mind is especially useful.

As an example, they pointed to a triple-listed course, The California Coast, taught by Ali Boehm of the De-partment of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Meg Caldwell and Debbie Sivas, both from the School of Law. The course was designed around outcomes. In their early meetings with the CTL team, the instructors wondered what level of technical expertise to expect of the students, who were likely to come from many disciplines. Each had different assumptions. once they settled on what they could reasonably expect from stu-dents and what the end point should be, they were able to develop exam criteria and reading and fieldwork re-

continued on next page

Connections in the classroom


L.A. CiCERO

The Center for Teaching and Learning helps

faculty members design collaborative and

innovative courses.

Interdisciplinary linkages

Claudia Engel

Biology. “We are interpreters, and interpreters hear both sides. Sometimes you’re translating, other times you’re convincing or selling.”

In the English Department, ATS Matthew Jockers developed a deep timeline of Shake-speariana to assist Professor David Riggs, who is writing a biography of the playwright. Rather than develop a simple concordance, which in any case exists, Jockers developed a sort of simultaneous concordance that delves into Shakespeare’s works as well as into a host of contextual texts.

“I have background in literature, but sometimes I’m

bringing another side to the table, like media or com-puter science,” Jockers said. “Sometimes we are the

outside discipline.” And, he said, “We have to teach some of them how to use a mouse.”

Jockers is currently a digital humanities research scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center, which has its own ATS, Nicole Cole-man, and which in recent years has shown particular interest in encouraging the digital humanities. Coleman has helped establish three “network projects” that form part

of the center’s Humanities Research Network, allow-ing humanists to work together over disciplinary and

geographic divides. She also has organized a series of events over the past three years called “New Directions in Humanities Research” that explores the use of cyber-infrastructure in the humanities.

“Sometimes interdisciplinary people don’t have the infrastructure they need, so they can’t get to the next step,” Seligo said, discussing how he and his colleagues can contribute to new research. “Sometimes there are bureaucratic obstacles; sometimes there are technical ones. You need better tools, but it’s not painless.

“And working on one thing, you solve problems you’d never have looked at otherwise. That’s the gravy.”

SPRING 2007 �

quirements.Team-teaching may be the most obvious way of get-

ting interdisciplinary instruction into the classroom. But team-teaching has sometimes been compared to parallel play, by which toddlers play nicely side-by-side in the sandbox but don’t exactly interact. others refer to “tag-teaching”: First, you lecture; then me.

Real team-teaching, advocates say, is about engage-ment.

“Students like to hear faculty bring multiple per-spectives,” said the current director of IHUM, Rus-sell Berman. “We should demonstrate to students that there is room for dispute around knowledge.”

The experts at CTL are all in favor, but they point out that freshmen might not be. Fresh out of high school, they want clear answers.

“Faculty love to deconstruct arguments, while students want to build,” Denman said. The trick is to show that those are not mutually exclusive prop-ositions.

Building blocksSome faculty members argue that the disciplines

must be the foundation of interdisciplinary research and teaching.

Penny Eckert, a linguist who is also director of the Program in Feminist Studies, spoke forcefully in favor of disciplinary training at a CTL panel last year on in-terdisciplinary teaching. The heart of her work is at the intersection of the psychological and cognitive sci-ences, she said.

“But interdisciplinary work is built on disciplines, which is where theory and methods and skills lie,” she said. She learned that the hard way, while a resident at a research institute with colleagues from many fields. Together, they fought their way through texts, each bringing their own analytical criteria.

“Good interdisciplinary education has to begin with good disciplinary education. Students are unclear on what disciplines even are; in feminist studies, students have to design majors, and they don’t know what the building blocks are. What is sociology? What is liter-ature? They know you read literature, but they don’t know what that practice means.” (To hear the panel discussion, go to http://ctl.stanford.edu/Faculty/work-shop/celebration_s06.html.)

other faculty members are more doubtful about those building blocks. “There are trade-offs with in-terdisciplinary team-teaching,” said Berman, a profes-sor of German studies (itself a far broader enterprise than just literature).

“If we are going to teach in a new way, maybe we have to ask ourselves if we still have to keep teaching the old way,” Berman said. “What we think of as the core of departments might turn out to be expendable, and we could take it out, like an appendectomy. So let’s do the new stuff, which is where the excitement is. Maybe we don’t need departments, or maybe we need a different sort of organization.”

Such pedagogical debates are naturally of great in-terest to graduate students. When they leave Stanford, they may well go on to be the founders of Berman’s new sort of organization. They, who have been trained by the best disciplinary scholars, may be the first gen-eration of interdisciplinary scholars. But while they are here, they have the task of translating different disci-plinary languages for undergraduates.

The CTL therefore, in addition to working with fac-ulty members, works with teaching assistants (TAs).

Graduate liaisons“Graduate students like interdisciplinary teaching,”

said Denman. “But there’s a lot more pressure on TAs if a team-taught class isn’t well integrated, because stu-dents complain to them.”

TAs may not be from the same field as the instruc-tor. or, TAs themselves may be drawn from interdis-

ciplinary graduate programs. or, in large classes, TAs may be from different fields.

To ensure that everybody gets what they need, the CTL sponsors teaching workshops and has graduate student liaisons in most departments and in programs that have TAs.

one of those liaisons is Jill Bible, a co-terminal mas-ter’s student in Earth Systems, a program that shows there are more ways to be interdisciplinary than just team-teaching. Earth systems students are trained to look at particular cases from a multitude of angles, the idea being that one cannot effectively think about or act upon the environment from a simple disciplinary perspective.

As Denman said, “You make the methodologies apparent to the students. You put on a sociologist’s glasses, a classicist’s glasses.”

In the case of Bible and her colleagues, the glasses belong to biologists, policymakers, lawyers, econo-mists and oceanographers, to name a few. Earth Sys-tems 10, Introduction to Earth Systems, has 22 schol-ars lecturing to undergraduate students. The TAs then sort it out in section.

“The TAs’ core responsibility is to make the con-nections,” she said. “The professors try, but it’s not always easy. So we use case studies, like incandescent light bulbs, for example. We look at energy issues, economic issues, recycling. We show the linkages. We teach different approaches to environmental problems, gathering all the different contexts. So the students learn a methodology of problem-solving.”

Devoted to the teaching of science, Bible last year took Dunbar’s class in science course design. When it was over, she told Dunbar she wanted to keep working with her, and the two launched a study project that culminated in a workshop for graduate students inter-ested in interdisciplinary teaching. Participants came from Earth Systems, Management Science and Engi-neering, Psychology, Statistics, Geological and Envi-ronmental Sciences, and Biological Sciences.

They discussed their learning and teaching styles in the context of interdisciplinary education, good and bad experiences, tools and barriers. Workshop par-ticipants were given “connection journals,” supplied by CTL, in which they were asked to jot down con-nections they made throughout their day, whether in their research, in class or with acquaintances. Later, they had meetings to discuss how connections happen. At the end of it all, Bible put together a lengthy, anno-tated bibliography about interdisciplinary teaching.

‘It should be a mission’A recent self-study of IHUM identifies some areas

where the program can be improved, but the directors are absolutely committed to continuing the interdis-ciplinary nature of the team-taught autumn course. In fact, they want more people from outside the core humanities to join in.

“In area studies you always had the social sciences and the humanities interacting, but what’s new now is that the humanities and the sciences—including medicine—are working together,” Marincovich said.

Dunbar, herself a scientist, noted however that the “critical apparatus is completely different between the humanities and the sciences, and faculty have to sort that out through their reading assignments.” They probably also will find that there are no appropriate textbooks—leading to the inevitable course readers.

For Berman, however, these are not serious obstacles.“It should be a mission” for the faculty, he said,

adding that he plans to make a formal appeal to the Academic Council for more participants. “I’d like to see courses on law, education, business, culture. … I want a humanistic Introduction to the Humanities in the spirit of Da Vinci. This is a pedagogical chal-lenge we can meet, turning the transition from high school to college into a multiperspectival approach to knowledge.”


Opposite page, Robyn Wright Dunbar,

left, and Jill Bible, a co-terminal student

in Earth Systems, worked together on a

workshop to help train graduate students

in interdisciplinary teaching; above, CTL

director Michele Marincovich acknowledg-

es that interdisciplinary teaching can be a

real challenge.

L.A. CiCEROcontinued from previous page

Matthew Jockers

Russell Berman

‘If we are going to teach in a new way, maybe we have to ask ourselves if we still have to keep teaching the

old way,’ Berman said.

10 SPRING 2007


ments. SoEC must become a home for them all.Because ICME faculty will still be dispersed, Glynn

said, the top priority is to have a lounge “to build com-munity spirit”—a place where they can all gather for colloquia and meetings. There has to be an adjacent kitchen with plenty of space for cooking, and—a nice touch—lots of whiteboards on wheels. Mathemati-cians need to show their ideas right away, he said, and if they’re standing around having muffins and coffee, they don’t want to wait.

In March, Glynn told the architects he’d prefer that his allotted 6,000 square feet be all on one floor. “The split floors in Terman are a disaster,” he said. “You can go weeks without seeing people.”

True, facilities director Meyer acknowledged, but if ICME occupied the entire basement (the only whole-floor option), the institute would lose access to a first-floor terrace. And, she pointed out, there are huge ad-vantages to being on adjacent floors.

“We could make two floors visible to each other by using a mezzanine, creating vertical connections with opened-up spaces. You could look up from downstairs and see colleagues above,” she suggested.

Glynn kept an open mind, and that was exactly the plan that was presented to ICME a month later. As in the E+E Building, BooRA is organizing academic units around vertical light towers, the result of atria that allow natural ventilation, visual communication and a more open feeling. Departments don’t have to huddle together on one floor; in fact, members will probably see more of each other if they are stacked.

At the second ICME meeting, the conversation dwelt mainly on how to ensure that first- and second-year graduate students could be in an open area with big tables allowing them to bond, while more advanced students could have privacy and quiet. Faculty mem-bers must be near their students, Glynn insisted, which led the conversation back to the creation of good verti-cal linkages and community.

How to occupy spaceMS&E was created in 2000 by fusing two depart-

ments that were themselves fusions: Industrial Engi-neering and Engineering Management, and Engineer-ing-Economic Systems and operations Research. As a result, MS&E has unique and challenging concerns. At an early meeting, Professor Steve Barley and his colleagues were perplexed with the space assigned to them—on three floors.

“We need to coalesce,” Barley told the architects and Meyer. “We’re the result of a merger, so we’re already interdisciplinary. We have to build our department.”

Various suggestions for how they could divide up their allocated 21,000 square feet were projected onto the wall. None was perfect.

“These are options like which of your kids do you want to hurt?” said Ross Shachter, an associate profes-sor. But he and his colleagues said they would take the

From the Ground Up

L.A. CiCERO

L.A. CiCEROThe Energy and Environment Building,

which should be up and running in Octo-

ber, is the product of many months of

meetings among planners, architects, fac-

ulty members and researchers to ensure

that the building’s physical design meshes

with its scientific objectives.

proposals to the rest of the faculty and continue the dialogue.

A month later, the decision had been made about which blocks of space MS&E would occupy, but the distribution of that space internally was still wide open. once again, the conversation returned to the department’s organization. It comprises some eight focus groups, whose members often overlap, making a hypothetical physical arrangement of offices also an academic one. It is also, clearly, a political one.

“There’s an important social engineering issue here,” said Barley, the department’s deputy chair. “This is the last hurdle in the merger that began seven years ago. The last thing we want is for this building to take us back in time.

“We have to involve all the faculty in these decisions or it’s going to blow up in our face,” he said.

Shachter agreed: “We need to give faculty a chance to choose up teams.” But the architects insisted they needed to get some sense right then of what the distri-bution might be. So the group tried, listing the mem-bers of the focus groups and the number of graduate students each has, working out logical affinities, won-dering if it made more sense to divide people by cor-

‘We have to involve all the faculty in these decisions or it’s going to blow up in

our face,’ Barley said.

Stephen Barley

cont inued from page 4

SPRING 2007 11


one has a keen curiosity and willingness to learn,” said Pat Youngblood, SUMMIT’s director for evaluation. Youngblood, who has PhD in education and has worked for two decades in educational technology, makes sure the technology actually helps medical students learn.

“People don’t wear blinders” at Stanford, she said. “They don’t say, no, that’s not my field. I work with sur-geons, and we share a common commitment to teach-ing and learning. Surgeons want to learn from me.”

The notion that medical education must be grounded in practice is fundamental to Pizzo’s vision for the school, Saunders said. “He knows that innovation hap-pens by doing.”

Flexible classroomsIf that is true in the basement, it will be true on the

LKC’s other floors as well. For instance, designers and faculty spent many months developing a prototype of the classroom of the future.

“Because the faculty are fundamentally supported by clinical and research dollars,” Saunders said, “there might be little incentive to innovate with teaching. So we have to supply spaces and opportunities so they can see the advantages. The building will be a step ahead of where the faculty are; it will support them to move forward in their teaching.”

Prototypes are “expensive but essential,” Saunders said. With a relatively small faculty, the medical school aims for a highly flexible studio classroom that can ac-commodate several small groups at a time. Renderings look a bit like a second-grade classroom at a Montes-sori school, with groups of students clustered around various large tables. Furniture and whiteboards will be on casters. Projection technology will be adaptable.

Braddock, who teaches general internal medicine and has won a long list of teaching awards, worked with architects and other faculty members in developing the space with team-based learning in mind.

“In health care, people are calling for interdisciplin-ary teamwork among physicians, nurses, pharmacists, etc. As an instructional method, this lets learners apply knowledge to real-life case studies and work effectively in high-performance teams,” he said. “The instructor’s role is to prepare students to enter into very active ap-plication exercises and work collaboratively.”

A second-floor conference center will enable the medical school to host important national and interna-tional gatherings and, Saunders said, “maintain a better conversation with the rest of the university.” Bereft of an adequate conference center, the school and hospitals today hold many of their major meetings off campus. Like the classroom space and lecture halls, the center will be highly flexible, allowing for tiered or flat seat-ing, small or large groups.

The dean’s office will be on the third floor. So, too, will a suite of classrooms, to ensure that the school’s administration, faculty and students have opportunities to bump into one another, as they do in the neighboring Clark Center, the pathbreaker in enlightened design on campus.

But you won’t bump into students on the fourth floor of the LKC, because you probably won’t be there. With the best view in the house, the top floor is dedicated to students only.

Medical students, PhD students and postdocs will have a study area, fitness center, computer labs and kitchen all to themselves. During the planning meetings, it became clear that medical students were not entirely happy with this mix, fearing they would not be able to have frank conversations about medical conditions if

COuRtEsy Of sCHOOL Of MEdiCiNE

Gained in Translationcont inued from page 5

Below, the Learning and Knowledge Cen-

ter, seen here in an artist’s rendering, will

form part of the School of Medicine’s new

“front door.”

there were researchers on the adjacent treadmills. So they will have a small place to themselves—a secure, clinical work space—and the recreation and study ar-eas, along with the kitchen, will be mixed.

Inspiration from the topScientific and pedagogical breakthroughs often have

a considerable price tag, of course. The estimated cost of the initial LKC building (there will be a second one) is around $90 million.

But in the minds of the school’s leaders, there is no other way, no better way, of training physicians and medical researchers. As Pizzo likes to say, the school must teach students not just what to think, but how to think.

“Looking ahead,” Gaba said, “immersive learning will be embedded in the fabric of what we do in pro-fessional education at every stage, in individual and group learning, throughout one’s whole career.”

As the project moves closer to groundbreaking day, the school is looking ahead with excitement and trepi-dation. “Controlled chaos” is on the agenda, the dean warned the school in a recent open letter, addressing a prospect that makes deans everywhere shudder in fear: fewer parking spaces. But innovation never comes easy.

“I’m not aware of any school that has gone as far in promoting team-based learning,” Braddock said. “our whole second-year curriculum is based on teams. We’re doing research on the method to see how it af-fects learner ratings and educational outcomes.”

“It starts at the top,” he added, asked to explain Stanford’s efforts. “Dean Pizzo has created an environ-ment where there’s more support for trying to enhance and seek excellence in education.”

“The dean has never wavered,” Saunders agreed. “He gives us inspired leadership.”

It’s been a long process, Braddock said. “I’ve accu-mulated lots of frequent flyer miles,” he said, referring to the planners’ road trips to leading medical schools around the country to see what works and how. “But this is a very important building for Stanford, and for it to work we need to have faculty input. So I felt the obligation to provide that. It’s really exciting now, looking at how it’s turning out.”

ridor or by floor.And who’s on first? That was easier to figure out.

The architects were gratified when department repre-sentatives drew up a list of the administrative personnel and offices that will greet people upon entering.

It’s a struggle, no doubt, to make reason-able organizational concerns and physical exigencies line up with academic aspirations. But when it works, it’s a model for progress.

ReinventionMS&E and ICME leaders are communi-

cating in two directions, bringing the plans to their colleagues as they also explain their needs to the architects. There is a delicate balance at this stage regarding the specificity of a given space’s purpose.

“once we give people a floor plan, we lose them, and they start seeing themselves in a particular office,” Meyer said. Better to keep options open and make them think, as it were, outside the box. Designing the E+E Building, in that regard, was “an inspirational experi-

ence,” BooRA Senior Principal Architect Stan Boles told an audience at a public lecture in April, because the occupants were willing to do just that.

Boles’ junior colleagues were as inspired as he. Point-ing to the example of the E+E building, architect Tom

Bauer told the MS&E group in April, “We’d like to look for opportunities to break the model.”

The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the various environmental units occupying the E+E building “took it as an opportunity to reinvent themselves,” Bauer said, to the extent that they formed entirely new affinity groups whose areas in the build-ing are color-coded.

“They made the leap,” architect Campbell said.

The schematic phase of the process for the SoEC should end in June, when the plans will be signed off. That’s when the stone and the steel have to be ordered, project manager Wayne Kelly said: “This train has left the station.”

Collaboration can take place as well from floor

to floor as it can if everyone is on the same

floor, planners say.

Stanley Boles

Philip Pizzo

‘The dean has never wavered,’ Saunders said.

‘He gives us inspired leadership.’

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B Y PAT R I C I A G U M P O R T

outstanding graduate programs are the hallmark of a great uni-versity. Stanford has reached in-ternational prominence in large measure because of the strength of its graduate programs at the master’s, professional, doctoral and postdoctoral levels, which

contribute to making Stanford a recognized center of intellectual innovation.

How should graduate education at Stanford be en-hanced in light of emerging opportunities and needs in the 21st century? In September 2004, President John Hennessy charged the Commission on Graduate Edu-cation with conducting an extensive institutional self-study to answer this question.

The commission worked for over a year and an-swered the president’s call with a bold vision: to be the place that attracts the best graduate students and pro-vides them with unparalleled education in preparation for their leadership roles in a complex, global society. The mission for those involved in graduate education is to foster interdisciplinary learning, educate a more diverse graduate student population and cultivate lead-ership potential so that our graduates will be able to bring their full talent to bear in solving the most vex-ing problems facing the world.

I find this vision compelling, as it encapsulates the central teaching and research roles of the university. When I was offered the opportunity to serve as the university’s first vice provost for graduate education (VPGE), I saw it as a unique opportunity to help bring these ideas to reality.

I also saw it as a chance to put my research into action. I study the challenges of academic restructur-ing, as universities seek to both forge and keep pace with knowledge change. These are defining moments that touch every dimension of teaching and research. I have learned that it is essential for a university to build on the best of its institutional legacies and distinctive strengths when reallocating resources and reshap-ing the structures that support intellectual activities. Stanford’s advantage is its depth of disciplinary exper-tise and demonstrated success in innovation. We must continue to support excellence and innovation in the wide range of disciplines that are the essential intellec-tual bedrock for the advancement of knowledge. I also respect the highly decentralized nature of graduate education that fosters educational experimentation. Moving forward together requires collaboration as we reflect on who we are as a university, what we do and

what we could do differently to achieve our goals.The VPGE staff opened our office in January, bol-

stered by encouragement from colleagues around the university. In just a few short months, we are well on our way, identifying short-term priorities against the backdrop of this long-term vision for graduate education.

A key arena of activity I’d like to highlight in this article is our interest in expanding initiatives to facili-tate cross-school interactions for graduate students. Working collaboratively with colleagues in depart-ments across the university, we are piloting a number of programs.

In 2006 the Stanford Graduate Summer Institute (http://sgsi.stanford.edu/) began offering intensive, team-taught interdisciplinary courses free to gradu-ate students. Most classes are scheduled between the end of summer quarter and the beginning of fall. En-thusiastic feedback from faculty and students who participated in the 2006 courses—Frontiers in Ge-netics, Adventures in Design Thinking and Intro-duction to Entrepreneurship—suggests that SGSI is an effective model for facilitating networking across the university.

Five classes, plus the very successful entrepre-neurship program (http://multi.stanford.edu/inter-action/1106/biz.html), will be offered in September 2007:

• Adventures in Design Thinking• Global Warming: Good Science or Bad Politics?• Managing Groups and Teams• Music and Human Behavior• Solving Complex Problems: Responding to Pandemics

We also aim to expand opportunities that cultivate leadership skills—another form of cross-school learn-ing—in pedagogy, communication and entrepreneur-ship. In this regard, my office is collaborating with offices across the university such as the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Graduate Life office and the Writing Center.

Taking courses outside one’s home department broadens students’ intellectual perspectives, but it is an organizational challenge, given Stanford’s decen-tralization. My office will help ensure that organiza-tional structures and policies support such efforts. For example, we encourage departments to create courses aimed at nonspecialists in other fields. In 2007-08, the Law School is offering several such courses, including Scientific Evidence and Expert Testimony, Interna-tional Human Rights and Health Law and Policy. We also want to persuade faculty to team-teach and create courses drawing from expertise in two or more disci-plines. Stanford’s new graduate joint-degree programs (see the May 2006 issue of Interaction) are a more for-mal effort in this direction.

Finally, we encourage faculty and students to form new groups to study emerging knowledge areas. To-ward this end, we have been working with the Stanford Humanities Center to expand some of its workshops. Three were selected this year: “Global Justice,” “Law and History” and “Visualizing Knowledge.” one idea for expanding this kind of group work is to establish an intensive seminar for a select group of graduate stu-dents who would meet with me monthly. Another is to select a cross-section of faculty, naming them as mem-bers of a Stanford Faculty Academy, to collaboratively study a specific question for a quarter.

It is a rare privilege to work with the finest young minds in the country and the world; Stanford gradu-ate students are emerging scholars and professionals whose curiosity, open minds and fresh perspectives will launch new ways of thinking and problem-solv-ing. If we all adopt a spirit of experimentation, col-laboration and unwavering commitment to push the frontiers of knowledge, we can help prepare them for the future. We in the office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education look forward to playing a key role in facilitating campus-wide conversations about the fu-ture of graduate education and providing resources to facilitate new patterns of intellectual interaction.

12 SPRING 2007

inter action

Graduate students will have an easier time taking classes in other schools

and departments.

Boosting graduate education

Vice Provost for Graduate Education and

Professor of Education Patricia Gumport

says she is looking forward to ensuring

that the Commission on Graduate Educa-

tion’s proposals are made reality.

L.A. CiCERO

CORRECTIONS:In the Winter 2007 issue of

Interaction, an article about the Institute for Computa-tional and Mathematical En-gineering stated erroneously that Charbel Farhat was the institute’s first director. Parviz Moin was the first director.

In the Fall 2006 issue, an article about the discipline of geography stated that there are just two members of the Stan-ford faculty with PhDs in geog-raphy. There are at least four.

multi 6 1 - stanford news · inter action issue 6 • spring ... design interdisciplinary classes,...

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