Interaction

Winter 2007

Science, technology and society

L.A. Cicero

STS majors Sofia Lombera, left, and Sarah Falck, both working on their honors theses, say the program has provided them with a unique opportunity to design a path of study combining many of their interests.

Life can be interesting in an interdisciplinary program at Stanford. One minute you’re on the brink of extinction, and the next minute you’re increasing enrollments, getting course development grants, sending honors students off to great jobs and, in the words of at least one alumnus, saving lives. Interesting lives can be a curse, but in academia few would trade them for anything else.

Science, Technology and Society (STS) was born in the early 1970s, a pioneer followed by similar programs at universities around the country. It integrates the studies of science, technology, humanities and the social sciences to better understand the impact of science and technology on society. The notion that a complex world required an inter- and multidisciplinary approach has not lost currency in the intervening three decades.

“I feel like I am getting a liberal arts education for the 21st century,” said honors student Sarah Falck in her letter of support for the program’s most recent self-study. “I am learning about a wide range of issues, but the refreshing thing is that all of those issues are so relevant and immediate. I often feel that my courses and their subject matter are unfolding in real time and that I can read about my major in the New York Times.”

Robert McGinn

The program, which offers BA and BS degrees, is organized around a core of classes supplemented by a course of study designed by students in conjunction with advisers. The very act of creating a course of study teaches them about the inter-relatedness of things.

Interviews with students and a look at graduates’ letters of support show that, for many, STS was a welcome surprise arrived at after several quarters of trying to coexist with majors that were not the right fit.

Many said they loved science but didn’t want to be scientists. Others loved engineering but didn’t want to be engineers. They loved tech but couldn’t envision four years of quantitative work. They loved English but couldn’t let go of their fascination with numbers.

“I agonized over the course bulletin at the beginning of every quarter. Finding STS was a complete relief,” one graduate said.

Program Director Robert McGinn says he is hopeful that STS’s degree-granting authority will be renewed this year for an extended time period. But the story of STS is in many ways a parable for interdisciplinary programs at Stanford in general. They provide innovative cross-cutting thinking that can be extremely valuable to students yet difficult to fit into an existing structure based on discipline-based knowledge.

In 1996, the School of Engineering declined to support the program’s renewal, citing an insufficient number of senior Academic Council members among its faculty. Students and some faculty members immediately protested STS’s imminent demise. Some 2,500 signatures were gathered, and the program was given a one-year reprieve in the School of Humanities and Sciences with additional resources, including funding for a senior program director. Although that search foundered, historian of science Paula Findlen assumed leadership, and she and McGinn managed to right the listing boat. The subsequent program review in 1999 earned the program the maximum eight years of new life.

Since 2003, McGinn, professor (teaching) of management science and engineering as well as of STS, has been sole director. (His course Ethics and Public Policy is cited by student after student as one of the most memorable classes of their undergraduate career.) The average number of graduates of the program since 2000 has been 24, about double the number in the 1990s. Students go on to get degrees in law, business or medicine; they work in science, policy or teaching; they start new companies or, disproportionately, work for Google.

This success aside, the troubles in the 1990s point to the chief vulnerability of any interdisciplinary program, which is the lack of faculty appointments. McGinn, who has a doctorate in philosophy and a master’s degree in mathematics, both from Stanford, devotes most of his time to the program. But the roughly 20 faculty members regularly associated with the program do not. Their first obligation is to their departments.

A 1998 grant from the Harris Foundation has permitted STS to offer faculty grants for developing new STS courses, as a result of which 10 new courses have been offered, McGinn said. STS also sponsors a seminar series, whose December 2006 session, a jam-packed affair, drew faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates and visitors from economics, engineering, classics, ecology, communications and history.

“Every Thanksgiving I have to re-explain my major to my parents, but the joke’s on them because I’m applying for jobs now, and there are lots of opportunities,” said Falck. “I’m looking everywhere. The major allows that. I shouted down my parents, but now they think it’s cool. They’re lawyers, so I could argue with them.”

Junior Noah Weiss agrees that hunting for jobs or internships does not seem to suffer because of the major.

“STS is great for interviews because most people don’t know what it is, and they’re interested in finding out more,” he said. “The one downside is some jobs are looking for specific majors, like computer science, and even though my skill set could match the job, my major can act as a prohibitive factor.”

Falck chose to design her own concentration, which is unusual. The existing concentrations for the BA degree are aesthetics, development, history and philosophy, information and society, public policy, social change, and work and organizations.

Falck put together a concentration in symbolic systems that she felt combined the best of STS with the existing Program in Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary program focusing on the relationship between natural and artificial systems that represent, process and act on information. (Weiss also had considered majoring in symbolic systems.)

Her friend and fellow honors student Sofia Lombera is earning a BS in STS, which requires what the program calls “technical depth” in a particular field. In her case, the field is biology.

“I’m interested in the implications of science on society, so the program is a great fit,” she said. Lombera is from Mexico, where university degrees are very career-oriented, she said, so she often gets puzzled stares when she tells people what she is studying. It was her sister, who also went to Stanford, who first alerted her to the existence of STS.

“It’s flexible yet rigorous; it lets you decide what you like and lets you run with it,” she said.

Lombera, who is especially interested in technology transfer, is writing an honors thesis on the international dimensions of neuroethics and is applying to Stanford co-terminal degree programs in management science and engineering and in sociology.

Though the STS program’s existence outside traditional departmental boundaries can make things challenging at times, its location amid a matrix of scientific, quantitative, humanistic and social concerns seems exactly where it belongs.

“Most of my classes have a broad range of majors in them,” said Weiss, who would like one day to work at the intersection of technology, business and program design, either as a manager at a large company or running his own firm.

“Honestly, I don’t put much weight on what major someone is,” said Weiss. “If they’re smart and get things done, then they are a great teammate.”