When I began my education
at ASU (well, restarted actually, I had made a previous attempt that ended
badly) in 2001, the school was, as many other schools still are, a traditional
university. I received a traditional
undergraduate BS in political science, and worked entirely within the
discipline during that time. However, I
knew I wanted to get my PhD, and I had met several professors at ASU who is
work I respected, and who I wanted to continue to work with in my graduate research. I decided, despite the rather unreasonable
prejudice against scholars holding all three degrees from the same institution,
to stay.
It was at that point that Mike
Crow and David Guston changed everything.
Mike arrived at the university and began kicking down walls. He grabbed the old bulls by their old horns,
and forced them to talk to each other or perish. The idea was, as I understand it, that the
old model of the university, where scholars did scholarly things entirely
within disciplinary silos, was no longer serving society’s needs
adequately. This was a problem I had
spotted myself during my undergraduate studies, when I realized that many of
the professors around me were studying the same minutiae that had been analyzed
by political scientists since Machiavelli, and that they were making
incremental progress that could only be measured at the nanoscale, if at
all. Mike brought with him a cadre of
interdisciplinary scholars to found new centers for research that would examine
the old problems in decidedly new ways.
He demanded that the university serve the needs of society by harnessing
as many disciplines as necessary, simultaneously, to solve a particular
problem, and if a unit proved incapable of changing to meet this new model, it
would have to go.
One of the new research
centers was the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO), followed
closely by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. I was having difficulty maintaining funding
within my department, which had not yet yielded to Mike’s increasing pressure
to change, and so I applied for a research position with CSPO. Five years later, I completed and
successfully defended a dissertation that merged political theory, science and
technology studies, science policy, history, philosophy, survey research, and
neuroscience in a single effort to examine the implications of emerging
cognitive enhancement technologies on liberal democracies. This is something I never would have been
able to do under the old university model, and, at first, we weren’t even
certain I’d be able to pull it off here, given the level of resistance to
Mike’s requirements for change. I did
pull it off, with a tremendous amount of help from CSPO, CNS, and a couple of
sympathetic professors within my department (which HAS now, partially, yielded
to Mike’s pressure). Now I face a
dilemma, and it is this, where do I go?
While Mike has managed to
turn the largest public university in the country, with one of the largest
research portfolios in the country, into an interdisciplinary Mecca, while
maintaining an open admissions policy, the rest of the academic universe is
turning at a much slower rate. I have
this fantastic array of education and research experience, allowing me to bring
to bear a wide variety of methods and schools of thought on a subject, but most
universities are still looking for the staid, old school variety of political
scientist. Someone to teach ancient and
modern political philosophy in the same way its been taught for centuries, not
someone who wants to use Second Life
as a heuristic for teaching about how the philosophical underpinnings of our
modern political institutions become inadequate within radically altered
technological environments. They are
looking for someone to publish the next incremental improvement upon
contemporary democratic theory, or the latest microanalysis of some ephemera
within Rousseau’s corpus, not someone who wants to reorient political theory in
its entirety, so that it focuses on the implications of technological change
for modern democracy. The post-doctor’s
dilemma at The New American
university is, how does one market a new and better way of thinking and solving
problems in an academic universe that has not yet caught up? Again, where do I go?
About the Author: Sean Hays is a postdoctoral
research associate at CSPO/CNS-ASU.
