Trials and errors: Yale's scientific method

SHAWN CHENG/YH

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH

A view from the top of Science Hill (above), the heir to the Sheffield Scientific School, which was named after benefactor Joseph Sheffield (below).

COURTESY YALE UNIVERSITY

In the hard sciences, one would think, the numbers don't lie.

Yale is tied for fourth over the past five years in recruitment of Intel—formerly Westinghouse—Science Talent Search (STS) winners, behind only Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and free ride-awarding New York University. In 1998, Yale cracked the top 10 in the Institute for Scientific Information's "relative impact" (citations per paper) index in, among other fields, mathematics, engineering, and physics. And just last week, two Yale electrical engineering professors were awarded a $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the nature of intelligence—the second largest such grant awarded by the NSF this year.

But then consider these numbers. Yale has been outdistanced 53-14 by Harvard in the race for matriculating STS winners over the past five years. Yale's graduate schools ranked 13th in physics, 14th in computer science, 31st in electrical engineering, and did not even place in the top 50 in mechanical engineering by the National Research Council. And of course, the Big One: Yale tied for fourth in the U.S. News and World Report university rankings, behind rival Harvard and tech powers MIT and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Clearly, in a field where numbers should speak louder than words, the digits on the display of the Yale science calculator add up to next to nothing. When assessing Yale's sciences, the temptation is to reduce it all to a numbers game: student-faculty ratio, grant money, and rankings of every shape and size—all of which invariably confound rather than enlighten.

But the confusion within Yale's sciences extend far deeper than clashing statistics. "On the West Coast, there's always been a happy coexistence between social sciences and science," geology and geophysics professor Mark Brandon said. "At Yale, there's been a long struggle to try to determine whether the sciences are really an appropriate matter of scholarship."

The struggle is twofold, composed of subtle biases against science in general, and a more entrenched neglect of the hard and applied sciences. Rather than trying to divine truth in statistical tea leaves, answers about Yale's relationship with the sciences can only come in an examination of the culture and history of Yale science itself.

Separated at birth

"Yale has a long and honorable tradition in the sciences," molecular biophysics and biochemistry professor and history lecturer William Summers said. "We gave the first science Ph.D. in America; Benjamin Silliman [Class of 1796], the famous geologist; J. Willard Gibbs [Class of 1858, GRD 1863, one of the fathers of thermodynamics]."

But in 1852, with the founding of the Sheffield Scientific School (SSS), a school that contained within its bounds Yale's applied chemistry, philosophy, engineering, and other scientific programs, a fundamental schism opened up between the sciences and the humanities. According to Summers, SSS was based in present-day Silliman College and extended up Hillhouse Avenue. "That was the area that divided sciences and non-sciences," he said. "Around the turn of the century, students at Yale College couldn't take things like geography and math, because that was Sheffield, and Yale was Latin, Greek, and theology. That was the school tradition." Eventually, in 1920, Yale instituted a "Common Freshman Year" and overlapping curricula for both schools, and in 1945 the University abolished SSS as an separate undergraduate institution altogether.

According to history of art professor emeritus Vincent Scully, JE '40, GRD '49, SSS drew a line in the sand that has remained in the form of Science Hill. "There was a plan by John Russell Pope in 1919, which would have continued Hillhouse Avenue across Grove Street to a new entrance on Temple Street," he explained. But that was too radical for Yale, and Grove remained intact. "If that Pope plan had been put into operation, the campus would have been equidistant in all directions to the end of the Old Campus and to the top of Science Hill," Scully said. "The plan would have worked toward unifying Sheffield Scientific School with Yale College." But to this day, Science Hill remains a world unto itself.

The industrial devolution

At the end of World War II, despite the geographic disjunction between the humanities and the sciences, "science and engineering at Yale were at the very top," Stanley Eisenstat, director of undergraduate studies (DUS) in computer science, said. But according to Summers, "The breaking point was after the war. Because of the atomic bomb, the federal government saw that supporting research and development was a good thing. Yale had a very conservative attitude—federal money meant federal control. Harvard and other schools were taking money from the government, but Yale was reluctant."

The engineering department was hit hardest by Yale's hesistation. After the war, enrollment in engineering plummeted, from a peak of 20.6 percent of undergraduates in 1947-48 to 8.3 in 1960-61—when the School of Engineering was shut down to bring Yale's engineers back into the liberal arts fold—to 2.3 in 1998-99. Now it will be difficult for Yale engineering to compete with other departments many times its size. "Compared to what it's done over the last 10 years, Yale's putting an large amount of resources into engineering," Eisenstat said. "But even if they hired six additional faculty [as the political science department plans to do], it would still be a drop in the bucket."

Moreover, it has become harder than ever to play catch-up. "After the Cold War, there was a tremendous contraction in the amount available for basic research," Mark Barrett, the DUS of physics, said. "It really looked like a very scary situation for science, maybe a year or two before I came here [five years ago]. The environment for seeking out the funding to go in a new direction is not as gentle as it used to be."

It hasn't helped that New Haven is no Silicon Valley or Cambridge, lacking grass roots research to supplement Yale-centered science. Yale's so far ill-fated solution to the Elm City's lack of independent research facilities has been Science Park, a 17-year-old, multi-million dollar project intended to grow local science from the top down. "Science Park is a problem," electrical engineering professor Richard Barker, TC '50, GRD '55, said. "It's not an exercise in what to do about engineering or anything like that. They patch things up after it's gone bad, and then they wait for it to go bad again."

Self-fulfilling prophecy

The perception of decades of technical atrophy has hit Yale where it hurts most—in admissions. "I don't know squat about Yale's computer science department, nor, frankly, about Yale's engineering," Sunny Greene, a guidance counselor at Virginia's statewide magnet school, the Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, said. "The kind of kid that's into project-oriented engineering, as opposed to a theoretical approach—and that's most of the techie kids here—is probably going to be looking at the Caltechs and MITs for engineering."

Over the past four years, five of the 12 graduating high school seniors on the American Math Olympiad team have attended Harvard; none have come to Yale. Harvard's dominance in attracting STS winners is similarly undisputed. "Everybody came to Harvard or MIT," Harvard freshman Kirsten Graham Wickelgren, an STS finalist and last year's New York City math team captain, said about the STS finalists. "Well, not everybody, but an enormous number—they're all up here." Why? "I don't know. We never actually said why, we just all sort of...It's funny, I don't think I ever asked them," she said.

In this climate, anecdote and rumor quickly solidify into truth. "Actually, my mother [a Columbia psychologist] told me not to go to Yale for math," Wickelgren continued. "I don't think she said it was bad, I think she just meant they didn't concentrate in it."

Richard Beals, PC '60, GRD '64, the DUS of the mathematics department, concurred—to a point. "Harvard's reputation feeds on itself, because people who are into math competition become aware of that, and they go there," he said. "It's as though you were a high school football player, and there were only three schools in the United States that had a reputation in football.

"We have a smaller number of majors, some of whom are on a caliber with any of Harvard's," Beals explained. "Yale's is a highly ranked department that's smaller than almost all of its competitors." Those within academia, Beals maintained, see through the vagaries of reputation.

"I never thought of Yale as being second-string," Ken Libbrecht, executive officer of physics at Caltech, said. He ascribed the main differences between the schools to their respective cultures. "Caltech is not right for everyone, or even [for] the mainstream of the bright segment of the population," he said. "The social culture here is quite different; it's more science-oriented. [At Yale] you might have lots of very interesting discussions on political science at the dinner table. Here, we'll have less."

For many prospective students, it's precisely this difference in worldview that makes Yale less attractive. Connie Ing, DC '00, an applied math major and STS finalist, almost chose MIT over Yale because "MIT has a very `just-do-it,' positive atmosphere for learning science," before she decided in favor of Yale for its focus on the liberal arts.

Others choose schools that emphasize application over theory. "My general impression was that Yale was strong in pure science and pure math," STS finalist Ming Tam, Stanford '00, said. "I went into my college search thinking I would be doing something in engineering."

Even Harvard, despite having a liberal arts focus similar to Yale's, seems to place more of an emphasis on hard science. The percentage of students currently majoring in physics, math, computer science, and engineering at Harvard is twice that of the members of the Yale Class of 1999. "If they're truly techies, they'll probably be looking at MIT instead of Harvard," Greene said. "But the `Big H' is the `Big H.'" And the Y, one might safely assume, is just a tad smaller.

A golden time?

According to many professors, though, Yale's liberal arts and theoretical emphasis is a benefit, not a drawback. "That kind of thing is attractive to many employers," Barrett said. "I was just talking to Andersen Consulting, and that's the one thing they said they are looking for—people who can communicate well, and know how to think in a particular analytic way. The rest they can learn on the job." Eisenstat concurred. "What we're trying to do is educate students five to 10 to 20 years out, not for immediately after graduation," he said.

With a 20-year, $400 million plan announced earlier this year to renovate science buildings and to re-landscape Science Hill, it should become easier for Yale to get the word out. Engineering may benefit most of all. Tentative plans include hiring additional engineering faculty once new lab space is built.

But even new money won't quell some complaints that Yale sometimes just doesn't get it. "I really don't like Yale sciences," STS finalist Kimberly Walker, MC '02, said. "I plan to be an art history major, and in those classes, the professors seem to want you to know why they dedicated their lives to studying it. [Science] professors don't seem excited about what they're teaching." Other undergraduates singled out the lack of female engineering majors and the lack of community in small majors as areas in need of improvement.

Nevertheless, Brandon sees the present state of Yale science as "a bit of a golden time." The faculty agreed that, despite the small sizes of many departments, most professors are at the top of their fields, and the students who choose to major in science are excellent. As Summers said, "It's not like we have a cadre of brilliant humanists and dullard scientists."

Yet without more help from the Administration, such sunny perspectives could fall by the wayside. Despite the stock market's largess, budgetary concerns still make a degree of inertia unavoidable. The phrase "selective excellence" may be rarely invoked by administrators these days, but according to Deputy Provost Charles Long, "Those are themes which haven't gone away. We're building on strengths, and we can't be at the top in everything." To bring engineering up into the top 10, he claims, is "so far away that it isn't feasible."

Few short-term solutions are in sight. "In practice we are restricted, because of the overall cap on the number of faculty. The physics department has a long-range plan to put more faculty in new areas: astrophysics, atomic physics, and condensed matter experiment," Barrett said. "External advisory committees have come in and said, `If you want the department to be much better off you should move into these areas.' But we can only do that one retirement at a time."

Facts and fantasy

"There may be a myth surrounding what students are doing at Yale," Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Richard Shaw said. "A lot of them are in the sciences. If you put Caltech and MIT at the top of the U.S. News and World Report list, our sense is that kids who are quantitative really take a hard look at that. It's a challenge."

Does Yale do itself a disservice if it panders to the urge to quantify what can't be quantified? Is that what's required to save Yale science from its own image? "Rankings are a bit mystical," retired physics professor Frank Firk said. Indeed, some of Yale's efforts seem like counterspells in a high school fantasy game, throwing magic powders around until a fairy comes to take a problematic history away. "The non-sciences are too large a part of Yale's program," Barker said. "We haven't learned yet to strengthen the sciences." Bit by bit, the statistical spooks are becoming a little less frightening, and Yale's sciences are becoming a little more real. But until Yale fully commits to exorcising the ghosts of its past, the potential of its sciences will remain only a will o' the wisp.

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