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?

Where Questions Never End

One of my esteemed colleagues, Spalding Professor of Chemistry Herbert J. Sipe, Jr., invariably introduces himself not as a chemistry professor but rather as one who studies chemistry. In a sense all professors are students, as we spend our days reading, writing, speaking, and indeed learning about our disciplines. But the notion of scholar as student is particularly apt in science, where we are acutely aware that the ultimate authority lies with empirical data rather than any “expert” academic. Ideas flow not from disputation and pronouncement but from scrutiny of evidence. At heart, science is a systematic process of logical, evidence-based reasoning. What could be more important for college graduates to learn?

My background as a scientist has made me a firm believer in, and true practitioner of, the liberal arts. It has taught me that everything is connected, that history is important (nothing pops up de novo), and that the search for knowledge is a provisional, never-ending process of fits and starts, wrong turns and dead ends. Science is less a body of facts than a way of seeing the world; students must learn that people filter knowledge (as of evolution or climate change) through existing ideologies. As Darwin wrote, in explaining why he would not get bogged down in religious debates, “Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science.”

Professor Werth received his Bachelor of Science degree from Duke University, and his Master’s and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He came to the College in 1992 and was promoted to Elliott Professor of Biology in 2005. At Commencement in the spring of 2006, he received a John Brooks Fuqua Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2005-06 Werth received a Fulbright grant for his sabbatical leave, about which he writes here.

Science gives us information, but society decides how to use it. Even as scientists project authority and credibility to the general public, they are spurred by uncertainty and think of their work as approximating rather than revealing truth. This is why we teach and do research, and why my favorite students are the ones who question everything, not necessarily doubting what I say (although I don’t discourage that), but wondering how such knowledge was gained in the first place and how reliable it is. Inquiring students learn to think for themselves rather than absorbing others’ half-digested thoughts. Getting people to think, not merely memorize and recall information, is ever more important in combating our pervasive infotainment media culture, where we daily drown in a sea of information but thirst to know what it all means.

Posing the Right Questions

Students generally think the teacher is the person in class with all the right answers, but it’s equally important for instructors to have all the right questions. Education depends upon free inquiry, with no queries out of bounds. The same applies to the vaunted principle of academic freedom that professors enjoy in their research. We keep asking questions, though what we discover depends on how we frame them. This is why the phrase “teaching versus research” grates on me, as if these endeavors square off in an adversarial relationship. Properly done, they dance a graceful pas de deux. It is not an either-or proposition in theory or practice. “Teaching versus research” is a false dichotomy. Both processes involve seeking and sharing discoveries: pursuing new ideas and information and disseminating them to an informed audience. Both depend on asking questions and telling stories. Sadly, this sublime interdependence is seldom recognized, let alone fostered. As with any dance, balance must be maintained. It’s easy to do so in this vibrant community of active scholars, where we daily interact with researchers from a variety of disciplines outside our own and teach interdisciplinary courses such as Western Culture, Rhetoric, and Honors.

Unlike many institutions of higher education, Hampden-Sydney keeps its focus squarely on education. At many colleges professors spend most of their time conducting research, with teaching duties largely handled by graduate students. Most H-SC faculty hold the Ph.D. or another research degree, not a teaching degree: we are trained as expert scholars, but we are here because we enjoy teaching and thrive on contact with students. To stay fresh we remain active academics. We attend conferences, write and referee journal articles, serve on panels that dispense grants, and serve as officers of research societies, among many other duties. We are not mere history or economics or physics teachers; we are professional historians, economists, and physicists, and there’s a crucial difference.

Though we do not devote as much time or other resources to research as our colleagues at bigger schools, we remain on the front lines, contributing to the advancement of knowledge, and we have a fresher outlook given the sincere yet naïve questions we field daily in class. I cherish the opportunity to see the world through eager, unsullied freshman eyes each semester and to communicate my discipline not merely to high-level colleagues but to young students, many of whom will not major in my field. I have to explain, in simple words, why what I do is relevant and important.

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BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty