Hamilton College - Alumni Review - Spring 2008 - Teaching Moments and Lessons for Life 8

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Teaching by reaching across disciplines

It's one thing to dispense pearls of wisdom over coffee or loafing on the library steps; it's another to sit down with an advisee and sweat out a two- or three-year plan that includes provisions for a major, a minor, a semester abroad and a service-learning project, with time left for orchestra, choir or an intercollegiate sport. The absence of core requirements gives students remarkable freedom to plot their own academic paths, yet it also gives them enough uncharted territory to get lost in if they don't receive — and heed — good advice from their faculty advisors and others. "Maybe I'm anal," Cryer says, "but I believe in advising, and I believe an advisor can sometimes make or break a student's four years."

One difficulty in upholding that responsibility, Ambrose says, is
that advisors have "no coercive power"—they can coax, pressure and argue, but ultimately students have the right to opt for a "cafeteria style" course selection that circumvents the aims of a "broad, liberal education."Another difficulty, Ambrose and Bartle agree, is that the advising system lacks consistency; some advisors are more "check list oriented" than others, Bartle says. Nevertheless, he says, "Students pretty much uniformly tell me [the open curriculum] is one of the main reasons they came here," and he believes that very few students actually limit their course selection to one or two departments. "We're extremely privileged at Hamilton—students and faculty—and we're given a lot of freedom to carry out our projects and ideas," Bartle says. "…I think we have to live with the system we've created."

What they preach, ultimately, is interdisciplinary thinking — in
Guttman's phrase, "the ability to connect ideas" across conventional
academic, scientific and artistic boundaries, which she notes is "fundamental to intellectual growth and even to technical innovation." One means toward that end is to teach the subject itself by opening the door to other fields. For example, Latrell points out that "theatre is almost interdisciplinary" in that it draws on psychology, history, art, communications, sociology, anthropology. To teach theatre effectively, he says, one must "be conversant with all these disciplines." But many also note that Hamilton itself is a kind of interdisciplinary laboratory in which exchanges among faculty members enrich the academic conversation and distinguish the College. "One of the joys of being here is the interdisciplinarity of the liberal arts setting," says biologist McCormick. "I really do like the fact that I can pester my colleagues in Chemistry and Physics. I can shuttle between floors [of the Science Center] and ask questions to the Geosciences Department…. There's a freedom to ask questions and explore ideas in a setting like this."

That sense of collaboration and community, among faculty members and between teachers and students, remains at the heart of Hamilton's identity and mission even as it continues to be refined and updated. Yao points out that students at liberal arts colleges now make up less than 5 percent of the national college-going population. "I think it's going to become more and more valuable as it becomes rarer and rarer," he says. "The workforce absolutely needs people who can do a lot of different things."

A number of teachers, seeking to account for the value of a liberal arts education, invoke the left brain/right brain analogy — integrating our capacity for logic, analysis and calculation with our more subjective and creative faculties. "We all know it's more complicated than that," says Buchman, but the metaphor holds: "Creativity is more and more important in the business world, in the economy, in living in general," she says. "As rules and paradigms keep changing, we need to be able to think on our feet in order to direct our lives with creativity and imagination."

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