Asking Questions, Telling Stories

DR. ALEXANDER J. WERTH, ELLIOTT PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY

THE T-SHIRT WAS NEON GREEN, but it was the printed slogan that caught my eye: “I Have a Degree from a Liberal Arts College.” Then, in much smaller print below, “Would You Like Fries With That?”

The stale punch line, designed to elicit a cheap laugh, did not have that effect on me (I’d heard it before); in fact, it made me smile. After all, I had spotted it on a street in Maldives, a tiny country in the Indian Ocean where few adults read English, let alone know what a liberal-arts college (or a French fry) is, and I could only assume that boatloads of the shirts were returned to Asia after they didn’t sell in America. Therefore, I figured no harm would be done by this sophomoric knock on liberal-arts education. The green shirt undoubtedly appeared meaningless to most Maldivians, just as Thana and Arabic script looked like nonsense scribbles to me when I saw them all over Maldives, an archipelago of a thousand little coral reef islands where I spent my recent Fulbright sabbatical.

But how do folks on the street back home in America feel about liberal-arts education? How would my year spent studying marine life of the Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans inform my teaching at a small liberal-arts college? What’s the connection between my research and teaching? How do these dual facets of my job not only intersect but depend on each other? Full Story...