Winter 2003

Science, Mathematics and the Liberal Arts

We have embarked on the design of new and renovated facilities for science and mathematics at St. Lawrence, with a maximum total project budget not to exceed $60 million, to be completed (capital available) over a six-to-eight-year time frame (fro some specifics, see page 24). We believe construction on the first phase will begin in the 2004 construction season. It will be the largest facilities project in the history of the University.
Why, some might ask, is a liberal arts college investing so much in science and mathematics? While everyone knows that liberal arts colleges teach those fields, aren’t they primarily about the humanities, the arts and the social sciences?
In my many years as chair of Project Kaleidoscope, a government and private foundation-funded national initiative to improve undergraduate science and mathematics education, I encountered those questions often when talking with people outside higher education. Within higher education, almost everyone knows that the nation’s selective liberal arts colleges graduate majors in science and mathematics at a rate 1.6 times that of America’s research universities and 2.3 times that of any other kind of American college or university, and that these graduates go on to achieve doctorates in science or mathematics also at disproportionate rates. Typically, selective liberal arts colleges graduate 25-25% of their seniors with a major in science or mathematics. We are on the low end of that range, partly due to our facilities constraints. As our project moves toward completion, I believe an even higher percentage of St. Lawrence students will major in science or mathematics.
In addition, while several selective women’s colleges graduate substantial numbers of science and mathematics majors, most do not. It is the selective coeducational liberal arts colleges that also produce disproportionate numbers of women in science and mathematics majors, who then go on to achieve doctorates at disproportionate rates. At St. Lawrence, from 1996 through 2002, women graduates were only 5% less likely to have majored in science or mathematics than men. We see a strong showing for women in biology, mathematics and chemistry, but we have a ways to go in the other fields. Nationally, women would be even more underrepresented in science and mathematics were it not for the nation’s selective liberal arts colleges.
Analyses of course registration data also show that science and mathematics majors at St. Lawrence (and, I believe, other selective liberal arts colleges) are more broadly and deeply engaged in disciplines outside of the sciences and mathematics than is the reverse. Because mathematics is the language of much of science, and because many students even at selective liberal arts colleges have low mathematics self-confidence and/or aptitude, it is a barrier for students in the humanities, arts and social sciences who might otherwise devote more of their academic program to science. Each year there are always a number of students who, having intended to major in science or mathematics, discover that their academic love is really elsewhere in the curriculum. It is rare that a student will switch to a science or mathematics major having come to college intended to majoring the humanities, arts or social sciences.
These are many reasons intrinsic to the beauty of the ideas in science and mathematics that would attract students to those fields, and eminently practical reasons also abound, having to do with careers in an increasingly technological society. But there are also practical reason why liberal arts college graduates of all kinds should achieve a certain minimum science and mathematics literacy to live and contribute in an America and a world where science and technology touch nearly everything. A typical front page of The New York Times will have stories on such concerns as global warming, stem cell research, the environmental impact of natural and man-made disasters, food and agriculture in the developing world, and the technology of searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How can we be players in such a world without the science and mathematics understanding necessary to form a reasoned view?
We do science and mathematics education really well at St. Lawrence. The investments we have been making, and are about to make, will ensure that we stay at the forefront among liberal arts colleges in those fields. Our capacity to involve undergraduates in the actual “doing” of science – collaboration with faculty members in research, and conducting independent research – will expand significantly as a result of the facilities expansion of the faculty. And the opportunities for all students to reach toward science literacy will also increase substantially. I am truly pleased to be tackling these issues on my watch.