Word People: Teaching Humanities to Harvard Scientists
What I Learned Working Across the Disciplines
I carry a picture with me everywhere I go—not because I like it but because I need it. In the picture, I look happy, and in fact I was happy. I was also hot. It was in the mid-nineties on that early September day in 2000, and my forehead was shining. One side of my hair was shorter than the other because I had given myself a back-to-school haircut to save money.
I found the result funny. I would say, “Look at my bad haircut,” in case anybody else was already thinking that. The situation seemed temporary; it wasn’t. I have to look at that haircut all the time because I still use that same ID to enter certain buildings. I could have a new picture taken, but I haven’t.
I still go into some of the same Georgian, Neoclassical, and collegiate-Gothic buildings I frequented as a student. But more often these days I go into a set of buildings that I would never have imagined entering: the buildings where the scientists work, including the Science and Engineering Complex, the hydroformed steel lattice façade of which glistens in the sun if you look over towards Allston while driving along the Charles River en route to Cambridge.
That building did not exist back in 2000. When Harvard announced plans to build a new Allston campus back in 2007, it was described as a “framework for the University’s future physical and academic growth [that] includes potential locations for new spaces for science, professional schools, arts and culture, and housing.” A new building for the humanities did not figure into this vision.
At the time, I was apathetic. Didn’t they already have a lot of buildings for the sciences in Cambridge? I thought of Henry James’ description of Divinity Hall in The Bostonians—“that queer little barrack at the end of Divinity Avenue”—in contrast to the gleaming palace of science to be built with a mixture of glumness and the dubious sense of comfort that the posture of picturesque marginality confers.
The proposed spatial configuration seemed like a geographical confirmation of the intellectual hegemony of the sciences. Lectures on literary criticism or the study of religion in the age of fill-in-the-blank scientific advancements (these days, it would be AI—for a while it was neuroscience) abounded, but no one was talking about scientific advances in the age of the humanities. Meanwhile, humanists kept giving talks with titles like “The Study of Religion Matters.” The question was, to whom?
To me, very much, but plainly much less so to undergraduate students, who were already beginning to flee en masse to computer science and the like. I remember being at a meeting about how to attract undergraduate students to a program in the humanities. Someone suggested offering the students pizza.
“We can’t just offer them pizza,” one administrator said wearily. It sounded like the voice of someone who had found out the limitations of pizza the hard way.
An Unexpected Destination
Back in 2000, such matters were not on my mind. I would have had no reason to go into the Science and Engineering Complex even if it had existed. At the time, I was engaged in the study of the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern history, comparative religion, and ancient philosophy. What I planned to do with all of this was not clear to anyone, including me.
A candid friend occasioned no offense on my part when he observed, “You’re just making yourself more and more unemployable.” I knew I would end up somewhere unexpected. And, as it turned out, that path ended up leading me to becoming a lecturer in engineering sciences.
In that capacity, I teach scientists a way of reading that sometimes ends up changing the way that they write. The course in question, which was designed in 2017 by a group containing a senior faculty member, an administrator and lecturer, several doctoral students, and me, and later added to by yet another senior faculty member, is Harvard’s first, for-credit, professional writing course for scientists and engineers. It exists because of the two senior faculty members who pushed for it to exist, the deans who listened to them and worked to bring my role into being, and the administrators and other faculty members in the sciences who supported the effort.
If asked to define what I do, I would say that I teach applied arts with humanistic intent in the context of the sciences. Most semesters I have co-taught the class with a biophysicist or a physicist, so that students will get multiple perspectives; this past year I taught it by myself.
I would never have made the leap into working exclusively with students in the sciences if scientists themselves had not taken an interest in my humanities-based work.
My path into the sciences led through working with students in all disciplines on their writing. The tools I developed in that context were wholly derived from the humanities—particularly from my study of and love for the ancient world. But I would never have made the leap into working exclusively with students in the sciences if scientists themselves had not taken an interest in my humanities-based work and fought to carve out a way for me to teach and work with their students. Indeed, I would not be at Harvard—or likely even academe—if not for the hospitality, creativity, and open-mindedness of scientists.
My view of the sciences, which had first been shaped by studying early modern Anglophone scientific culture, with its Royal Society-style antipathy towards rhetoric and more general suspicion about words, has changed dramatically. But before talking about the work I now do with students in the sciences and what role the humanities play in that context, I will explain how I got to where I am.
Realizing One Overarching Problem
On Bad Haircut Picture Day, when the then dean of Harvard Divinity School had given a speech welcoming us, he had told the truth: most of you will never make too much money. I hadn’t felt insulted or deterred by his words. I was not independently wealthy, and I knew that I would need to earn money, but I also knew how to work, and I never doubted I would be able to find some kind of a job. And indeed I found many of them.
I served as a chauffeur for a family in which no one had the time to drive the teenager to his orthodontist appointments. They let me live in their basement. I tutored students for their math and verbal SATs. One of the families let me live in their attic, which was helpful. I advised students on how to write papers. I advised CEOs how to write annual report letters, and I wrote some of them myself. I worked with senior citizens who wanted to write memoirs or novels. I served as the carpool driver for my niece’s nursery school. And then in the summer of 2006, I got a job as a twelve-dollar-an-hour temp receptionist in the administrative dean’s office of what was then the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
The deans all knew that I was a word person. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted in between saying “Good Morning, GSAS” (from 9 a.m.–12 p.m.) or “Good Afternoon, GSAS” (from 1–5 p.m.) as needed and jotting down messages for the one dean who did not use voicemail. When I wasn’t on the phone, I read, and read, and read.
I remember in particular reading Christianity and Classical Culture by Charles Cochrane and some book about the translation of the King James Version of the Bible, the title of which I forget. At the time I was pursuing years-long research project on a cryptic seventeenth-century utopian text featuring a labyrinthine network of textual references, and I was reading everything I could think of in the process of figuring it out.
This being 2006, there was a fax machine in the office that people actually used. One afternoon it started to beep. A letter was coming in from the person who was then the graduate writing tutor. She was resigning, effective immediately. Weeks passed. Students started calling, asking who was going to help with their writing. At some point, a group of deans approached my desk.
“Suzanne,” one of them (long since retired) said, “we know that you love writing and reading. This is a terrible job—you would have to read student papers and dissertations all the time. Are you interested?” I was. And so I was elevated from answering the phone to being in charge of helping thousands of graduate students in all disciplines with their writing.
Often, their “writing problems” boiled down to reading problems, and reading problems led to difficulty in thinking about and reaping the intellectual benefits of their own research.
The first student who came to see me on my first day of the job, the windowless “office” for which doubled as a storage closet for music stands used by the graduate school’s orchestra, was a physicist. I had taken physics as an undergraduate, and I wasn’t too scared. I thought I would be able to understand what he was doing. I was wrong.
I did see two words that I recognized—and and the—so that was a start. But I couldn’t get very far at all into the content, and I didn’t recognize the structure. I couldn’t hear any distinctive “voice” in the writing. It felt like there was something missing. I had the sense that the writing was trying to nail things down rather than open them up for argument and reflection. I realized that I did not know how to read in that context.
As the first few months and then years of advising students went by, I increasingly found that I needed a new approach. By that point, I had read so many dissertations and papers in every field that I had lost the capacity to distinguish between papers based on content or discipline. I could only see the writing.
It was always easier for me to read five to ten papers on one topic (for the other papers I would consult the references) because then I could see which ones “worked” and which “didn’t work,” with “working” in this context meaning that the authors had somehow managed to break through the insuperable wall of ignorance in my head concerning the content in question, and to tell a coherent story that I could understand functionally apart from content.
I started to see recurrent patterns and formulas emerging within and across disciplines and I could perceive the extent to which conventions of thought, approach, structure, and trends were governing what was being written. I gradually came to see one overarching problem emerging across disciplines: students were not reading their own work enough.
Often, their “writing problems” boiled down to reading problems, and reading problems led to difficulty in thinking about and reaping the intellectual benefits of their own research, and in understanding, much less articulating, their own contributions to their fields.
Students were often so immersed in their topics or experiments or models that the words they had used when they first started writing invariably fell short with respect to conveying the depth of their evolving thinking. Having resigned themselves to the lack of fit between the perfect dissertation in their head and its imperfect realization in words, they had lowered their expectations to the point they would not go beyond required spot fixes. They weren’t re-encountering their own words enough via repeated readings to spark new thinking. The words were becoming “just words”—severed from thinking and reading.
To make matters worse, a notion was afoot that while reading and thinking and studying and experimenting are intellectually valuable, writing somehow is not. Students sometimes felt that they were engaged in something in between a dramatic Sisyphean struggle and a meaningless chore. They would say, “I can’t even look at it,” as they gestured in the direction of their pile of paper.
Three Big Ideas
At some point in the mid-2010s, I became friends with a biophysicist. We used to eat lunch—often hamburgers or sandwiches—at the same place in Harvard Square. I quickly found that we had shared interests, despite our different backgrounds in the sciences and the humanities.
In the 1960s, Clark Kerr, then president of the University of California, said, “The university is a series of individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance about parking.” At Harvard, however, that’s not true. Thankfully, there is an adequate number of garages and parking lots. Here, what holds faculty members together is a common concern about writing. Dan and I tried to think through the roots of the problems, and to think about what we could do about it. Eventually, we came up with the idea of teaching together.
The approach I had cobbled together to work with graduate students (and to teach, with some adjustments, undergraduates) was inspired by three main sources.
1. Writing as a Technology
My rudimentary research on the Ancient Near East, and my readings on orality and literacy in that context had shown me the extent to which writing could function as a technology. I experimented with moving away from the “figure out what you want to write and then write it” model towards the idea of using writing as
a tool to amass and survey what one already knows relative to what other people have reported that they know;
a means of getting a glimmer of what you might want to know but don’t yet; and
a medium in which to find what is worth developing in one’s thoughts with a view towards acquiring new knowledge.
I began working with students on how to use writing throughout the research process, rather than just at the end of it. As novelist Don DeLillo says, “I write to find out how much I know. The act of writing for me is a concentrated form of thought. If I don’t enter that particular level of concentration, the chances are that certain ideas never reach any level of fruition.”
2. Reading Up before Writing Down
Reading Aristotle had suggested to me ways of making use of the inherently social nature of inquiry and specifically the value of consulting (via listening or reading) reputable accounts of a given topic or project before figuring out something to say or do in whatever space has been opened up or left ignored by others.
In the sciences, as chemist George Whitesides remarks, “if somebody else is working on something, don’t work on it. There’s an old saying in chemistry that if somebody else has developed something and you work on it, you are working for them. If you produce an idea and someone else works on it, they’re working for you.”
Yet students in the sciences are rarely trained in reading practices, despite the fact that what they theorize about or experiment upon, and then write about, is determined to a large extent by what others have done and not done, and the determinative information about such matters comes through reading. This is an area in which humanists can work with scientists; it is one reason why the class I teach is based on reading.
3. Learning the Context
The concept of “context” was developed in the ancient and late antique world as a hermeneutic device for scriptural interpretation. A rhetorically-oriented treatment of context can be found in Cicero, but for a full-blown concept of hermeneutical context, one may look to Augustine.
Context in the sense of a figurative or conceptual “space” in which justice may be done to the things considered therein begins with biblical interpretation. As Kathy Eden notes in her discussion of Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, he “prescribes the concept of context—not only textual but also historical—as a remedy against scriptural obscurity.”
To read something (not just a text) “in context” in the modern sense is to read it with reference to time, space, economic and political conditions, and so on, in an effort to avoid the distortion that may come from looking at a given phenomenon in isolation. Context, however, is a poorly understood concept, and it’s often not clear where it should begin or end.
“Context” becomes important for understanding the relationship between the sciences and the humanities in post-WWII American higher education in the 1945 Harvard report, General Education in a Free Society, the so-called Red Book.
“The scientist has been habituated to deal with properties which can be abstracted from their total background and with variables which are few and well defined,” it says. The Red Book sees this as a problem and argues for contextual thinking, which it defines as follows: “In coping with complex and fluid situations we need thinking which is relational and which searches for cross bearings between areas; this is thinking in a context.”
As a side note, the notion of thinking that searches for “cross bearings” is borrowed without credit from a 1944 book by then dean of the Harvard Business School, Wallace B. Donham, who mentions it in the context of the problem of dealing with HBS students who can’t make “wide judgments” and grasp “human problems.” Donham sees not the humanities but rather “effective training in human relations” as the solution to this problem.
The conceptual and institutional “space” in the sciences for the cross-disciplinary type of thinking in which I tend to engage, then, was opened up early on by the Red Book, which some humanists, ironically, reject with fervor. One “takeaway” from the Red Book is that concerns already existed in the mid-forties about the effect upon the university as a whole of the ascendant hegemony of the sciences. Teaching and learning “in context” was identified at that point as a way to change the sciences so as to open them up to influence, at least at the level of general education for undergraduates, from the humanities.
The notions of writing as a technology and an element in a social process that begins with consulting the work of others, as well as the notion that a (historicist and textualist) habit of “thinking in context” is a humanistic practice from which some scientists might derive benefit helped me to develop a reading-based, context-informed, “technological” approach to writing that enabled me to work with scientists.
‘A Sculpture with Words’
The class that I teach has as its founding assumption a notion developed in the humanities to which I have already alluded. As Walter J. Ong, S.J., notes, “writing is a technology that restructures thought.” This sentence, which has been featured on the posters advertising the class each semester, means, among other things, that writing is not merely a transparent delivery vehicle for content or merely a storage device.
Writing isn’t going anywhere, and everyone has to do it. But because students have been told that it is just a hassle, they are going to try and find ways to avoid it and outsource it.
One could conceivably try outsourcing the writing of an eighth-grade level paper to AI, given that such papers don’t go too far beyond summary, with the only harm being done that the student who did so would not learn anything and would ultimately be rendered incapable of progressing beyond junior high-school levels of writing.
As far as doctoral-level research goes, AI is good at regurgitating consensus views, but it is no compliment to a graduate student to say that their work neatly replicates existing views. And if you don’t actually read the papers that comprise your literature review, it is going to change the quality of your own research. Beyond that, AI can’t juggle multiple contexts well. Plus, it has a little hallucination problem that causes it to make stuff up from time to time; the people studying AI are aware of the hallucination problem, and they are working on it.
A senior faculty member in physics visits my class each year and shows students two pieces of writing: one of his own and then a second piece of his own, the style of which has been rendered into aggressively bland AI-speak. We then have the students guess which is which and we sort through the losses associated with AI prose.
If you don’t actually read the papers that comprise your literature review, it is going to change the quality of your own research.
More broadly, I aim to show students how the technology of writing works, largely via the introduction of reading practices derived from the humanities, and to encourage them to apply that knowledge to their own work. They develop a paper or proposal of their choosing throughout the course, but there are no writing exercises. They do nothing but read published papers and real proposals for weeks and then we turn to apply their newly acquired reading-based knowledge about how writing works (with a view toward the rhetorical, conceptual, structural, and stylistic choices that the authors made in light of other choices that might have been made, relative to the genre) to their own papers.
We also feature discussions by practicing scientists, who have shown themselves willing to talk about their own writing with reference to such topics as voice, genre, originality, rhetoric, and the norms of objectivity that are assumed and depended upon in the sciences, but rarely discussed as topics in and of themselves.
Among other things, humanistic modes of reading can help STEM students to become conscious of the choices that they are already making about how to think, read, and write, and how to make better ones.
For example, if, as an introductory exercise, you give students a copy of Einstein's 1905 article on Brownian motion from Annalen der Physik, and ask them how it differs from the sort of papers they usually read, it takes them about five minutes to suggest that one major difference is that it is in German rather than global scientific English. It takes about five minutes more for them to notice the lack of stated credentials and the use of “A. Einstein” instead of a full name.
If you add an English translation to the exercise and give them ten more minutes, they notice the lack of a literature review, and his minimalistic treatment of related work. For example, Einstein remarks, “It is possible that the movements to be discussed [in his paper] are identical with the so-called ‘Brownian molecular motion,’ however, the information available to me regarding the latter is so lacking in precision that I can form no judgment in the matter.”
This exercise invites attentiveness to basic historicism—that is, change over time relative to place, and attentiveness to style, structure, rhetoric, and voice, not topics generally covered in science courses. If you then invite them to shift back to a contemporary paper, they are newly equipped to see its historically-inflected and structurally distinctive nature. They can begin, in other words, to think about a given set of writing choices made in 1905 relative to the kinds of choices scientists tend to make today.
They can think about the relationship between the science in question and the conventions dictating how it is being conveyed, and begin to think about how to work with conventions in the context of particular genres. Ideally, this conscious attentiveness to words in context makes them better readers and writers of their own work. One of my students generously said this past year that the course made him see writing “like less of a chore and more like molding a sculpture with words.”
Humanistic modes of reading can help STEM students to become conscious of the choices that they are already making about how to think, read, and write, and how to make better ones.
Reappraisal
I’m embarrassed to say that I used to think contemporary science was in one respect (not all) like the science mocked by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels in its worry about the capacity of rhetoric to distort meaning and obscure truth. I now know that many scientists don’t like the standard aversion to voice and rhetoric and that they are working to open up scientific English to allow for a greater range of creative expression. One obstacle is that scientific papers need to be accessible to non-native speakers, which often dictates having recourse to a quasi-bureaucratic style—which, frankly, I find obfuscatory in and of itself, as do students.
Before this assignment, I couldn’t understand why scientific papers were always shaped around problems and solutions. Where were the open-ended questions? In scientific papers, it is usually not hard to see what the perceived gap or problem or “challenge” is. The same is true to a lesser extent for the social scientists.
When it came to the humanists, however, it is often harder to see the “problem” for which a particular paper or chapter is a “solution” or even an explanation of the problem. This, to me, is not a problem in and of itself. Papers characterized by depth, expertise, mastery of scholarly craft, and excellence often do not fit within a “problem-solution” relationship. I do not see that as a bad thing, probably because I do not believe that the humanities should primarily aim to tackle, solve, or intervene in contemporary social, political, or economic problems, variously defined. That is not the sole determinant of the value of research.
I am generalizing here, but humanistic inquiry tends to posit questions and to generate arguments, understood as contestable claims, about important topics relative to human life (with “importance” being understood relative to the concerns of other scholars working on similar topics) that are supported by reasoning and or evidence, the latter often derived from texts. These questions may possibly but not necessarily touch upon a so-called “real world” problem. As a humanist myself, I appreciate work that aims to ask questions pertaining to human beings, ideas, or works of art that will likely never be “tackled” to the point of being mastered but might yield new insights on a given question.
Since the earliest visions of institutionalized, applied science back in the seventeenth century, scientific progress has been framed as a social good, but the critical consideration of questions—as distinguished from prior moral convictions—about how various social goods figure in the scientific enterprise has not yet made its way into scientific curricula at the graduate level.
Scientific progress has been framed as a social good, but the critical consideration of questions—as distinguished from prior moral convictions—about how various social goods figure in the scientific enterprise has not yet made its way into scientific curricula at the graduate level.
Because one must account for the “social impacts” of one’s research in order to receive funding from the National Science Foundation, the understanding of what such impacts mean and what their relationship is to intellectual merit is of immediate concern to students, and this too is another area in which humanists and scientists might work together.
The current interest in the infusion of social context into science is not a departure from the mission of science, as it has been understood historically from the early modern period onward, but a variation on an established theme. It is also worth noting that the first vision of a proto-scientific intellectual community as a model of fraternal affection dates from the seventeenth-century; models of scientific sociability are yet another area of practical as well as historical interest to scientists and humanists.
Still a Word Person
Given the notion of writing as technology that restructures thought, we work on detaching the process of reading papers to glean data and findings from the process of reading papers as pieces of writing, meaning that we have students read papers in fields about which they may know nothing. We want to explore why it is that even when one can’t “get at” the content, one can mysteriously get a sense that one paper is more effective than another.
We talk a lot about how to read scientific literature and how to write literature reviews within papers and review essays, which summarize the state of the art with respect to particular topics. Reviews do not report upon novel findings, and they necessitate generalizations, interpretation, selective summary, and comparison. We try to identify and evaluate different modes of engaging with scientific literature. This is the unit of the class that most closely evokes a humanities seminar and draws upon standard techniques of close reading and interpretation via discussion of texts.
I’m still a word person, but I have extended my interest in and love for words to include words as they are used in the sciences. And now when I read scientific papers I can see the beauty and clarity where they exist, and delight in it.
What it means to be a word person has changed since 2000. If one accepts—as I do not—the notion promulgated by some humanists that words are violence, and that truth is merely an effect produced by the most powerful narrative amongst the cacophonous din of clashing narratives at any given moment, then the idea that the future belongs to the word people is a nightmare. If, however, one wishes to counter that notion, the means by which to do so is arguably more words, thoughtfully wielded and deployed toward better ends.
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Great article. I come from a physics background, and eventually my career path led to teaching academic writing to STEM students in China. I used to focus a lot on form - using the right grammar for each part of a scientific paper and so on. However, my approach to teaching writing changed significantly when I started working with a colleague from a humanities background who introduced American-style rhetorical analysis, teaching students how to think more clearly about their ideas and what they wanted to say. Students’ writing improved markedly.
Yes, I agree. This is a great article. As someone who entered academia relatively late in life, and as someone whose research crosses disciplines, I have attempted to read many papers written in unintelligible academic speak. We definitely need STEA(rts)M rather than STEM