Jorge Werthein

An Infusion of Science Where

the Arts Reign:science literacy

By LISA W. FODERARO

Published: January 21, 2011

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — Liza Batkin, a first-year student at Bard College, is a dancer whose academic interests run to philosophy and literature. But here she was in a laboratory on a snowy day in January — while many of her peers across the country were still on winter break — inserting a piece of DNA into bacteria with a micropipette.

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Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

Freshmen at Bard College spent part of their winter break in the laboratory, participating in a mandatory new science course.

At least she had company. In an intensive new program, she and every other freshman at Bard, a campus with a decidedly arty bent, have had to spend six hours a day over the past two and a half weeks learning about science through the prism of infectious disease.
The 480 students have studied under two dozen scientists recruited from across the country for the program. Using lab equipment, computer modeling and classroom discussions, they have explored all aspects of disease, including detecting germs and managing pandemics.
“There are mixed opinions, from total apathy — ‘Why am I here? This isn’t why I came to Bard’ — to total enthusiasm,” Ms. Batkin said of her classmates. “I decided to take it 100 percent seriously; otherwise I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of it. I definitely find myself becoming more critical of the science articles I read.”
Called Citizen Science, the new program is the brainchild of Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, who is himself an artist — the music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. Dr. Botstein has accused colleges of shirking their responsibility to create a well-rounded citizenry.
“The most terrifying problem in American university education is the profound lack of scientific literacy for the people we give diplomas to who are not scientists or engineers,” he said. “The hidden Achilles’ heel is that while we’ve found ways to educate scientists in the humanities, the reverse has never really happened. Everybody knows this, but nobody wants to do anything about it.”
Bard already has general-education requirements that include a semester of science, and the college has come up with some clever, though still rigorous, science courses for the nonmajor. There is one on color and light that appeals to artists, and another on acoustics for musicians.
But Dr. Botstein set out last year to do more. He consulted several scientists, including his brother, David Botstein, a renowned geneticist at Princeton University, on the notion of a brief, hands-on immersion that eventually became the Citizen Science program.
“I asked, ‘Can you make a real dent in the understanding of the layperson in three weeks, intensively every day?’ ” Dr. Botstein recalled. “And to a person, they all said, ‘Yes.’ ”
Groups that promote American competitiveness have long warned that the United States is slipping in all areas of science. The National Academy of Sciences, in an update of its landmark 2005 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” said last fall that the United States faced a future of economic decline if it failed to make significant investments in research in and teaching of science and mathematics.
The update, subtitled “Rapidly Approaching Category 5,” noted that 16 percent of American college students received undergraduate degrees in natural sciences or engineering in 2006, the most recent year for which data was available. That compared with 47 percent in China, 38 percent in South Korea and 27 percent in France. The original report called for the creation of 25,000 undergraduate scholarships a year in math, engineering and science. The updated report said Congress had taken some steps to implement that recommendation.
Jay B. Labov, a senior adviser for education and communication at the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, said that most colleges required some science instruction, but that the course work did not always have a lab component.
“Being lectured at is just fine for some students, but data shows that they retain about 10 percent of that,” Dr. Labov said. “Bard and a number of other places are recognizing that if you engage students early in their careers, you can get them hooked on science.”
Still, the Bard sessions, which ended on Friday, featured several lectures, including one from David Botstein on “the fruits of the genome sequences for society,” and an open debate on vaccinations. Future programs may focus on climate change or energy.
To promote learning for learning’s sake, students will receive neither course credits nor grades.
“This way they are not constantly worried that ‘I’m not going to do well and that it will bring down my G.P.A.,’ ” said Brooke Jude, an assistant professor of biology and the director of Citizen Science. “I think we can motivate them for something other than an A.”
Lauren Cain, 19, of Memphis, who plans to major in film and music, approached the program somewhat grudgingly. “I was pretty frustrated about losing two and a half weeks of my break,” she said. “Since I’m not a science person, I was a bit intimidated by the fact that we were going to be doing science, science, science.”
But she fell under the spell of her instructor, Stephanie B. Stockwell, a microbiologist from James Madison University, and found herself fascinated by the antimicrobial substances she handled.
While there is no final grade, there is a final project, and Ms. Batkin and six classmates came up with an idea that is pure Bard: a dance performance that illustrates how an influenza vaccine works. Students assumed the roles of the antigen, B cell, T cell and antibodies.
“We’re using rubber bands and bubbles to show the B cell alerting the T cell that there’s a foreign invader,” Ms. Batkin said. “I’m narrating the process, but I am also the antibody at the end.”