Editorial
This issue, "101," surveys the contemporary status of basic knowledge. Through an examination of new faculty initiatives at Princeton, which aim to integrate knowledge and provide a basis for understanding the world, we diagnose and anatomize a changing understanding of basic knowledge and its uses. Within the academy, both the natural sciences and humanities lack a consensus about what constitutes basic knowledge. We disagree on how to deal with an acknowledged partiality of authority (no longer does anyone know the "whole" field) and we are uncertain how to recognize excellence or breakthrough contributions. We debate how to measure success (or failure) in any introductory sequence or in teaching generally, and question the efficacy of accumulating knowledge.
From outside the academy, there is an actual assault on knowledge, which is paradoxically twofold: objective knowledge in the natural sciences is undermined by proponents of a new "scientific relativism" (as in debates on global warming and Intelligent Design), while knowledge in the humanities is mocked for the indeterminacy and openness of its interpretations. Social sciences, situated between (and sometimes among) these two disciplinary poles, find themselves with declining enrollment (in disciplines like sociology), along with a general lack of enthusiasm for explanation, and a popular turn to belief and conviction over a rigorous evaluation of evidence.
Such uncertainty affects how we teach. We are forced to rethink how students should be introduced into particular fields of knowledge and what, exactly, they should be taught. Our encounters with students have changed, too. The academic imperative to question one's own bases of knowledge encounters, in the classroom, an increasing popular and political appeal of dogmatic claims to know. We live in a time of systematic political assault on knowledge that is critical of governmental or religious authorities, and of competition from the proliferation of extra-academic institutions that represent themselves as alternatives to the universities. Such developments have undermined our authority with students.
Additionally, there are a growing number of "helicopter parents" hovering just behind their children, who see themselves as customers of the university and view professors as suppliers of quantifiable services for their children. In this climate, the pursuit of critical knowledge and a broad liberal education become, for many, secondary goals. The accumulation and propagation of knowledge is subordinated to the other demands placed on the university: for specific services or specialized vocational training, network facilitation, job placement, and the reproduction of business and political elites. The university itself is not innocent of these pressures--faculty are expected to help generate the positive publicity needed for fundraising and to sustain the institution itself. The instrumentalization of knowledge and its propagation is a society-wide phenomenon.
This said, Princeton faculty and visitors have taken many initiatives to respond to these challenges, some of which we present in this issue. For about thirty years now, interdisciplinarity has been both a buzzword and a promise of future innovation through cross-disciplinary fertilization. Yet more often than not, the outcome has been, at best, judicious borrowing and, at its worst, decontextualized and fashionable scavenging. In Inventions, Innovations, Ideas, we present several experiments at Princeton, where an accelerated division and integration of alternative disciplinary perspectives--for example, among and between computer science, genetics, and biology--requires a new form of introduction to science and a rigorous consideration of new objects of study. We also give voice to two scholars who are exploring new objects of study and new opportunities for knowledge professionals through interviews with Chibli Mallat, a law professor and human rights lawyer who has recently declared his candidacy for the Presidency of Lebanon, and Miguel Centeno, a Princeton sociologist who is at the forefront of globalization research.
In Comptes Rendus we inaugurate two new features: the Weather Report on climate change and its effects in different parts of the world; and Graduate Initiation, Undergraduate Recruitment, a collective contribution from the editors about introductory knowledge at Princeton, with commentary from scholars in other education systems. Translations reports on the overarching theme of this issue, 101, with an interview on Princeton's new Hindi language program. In Revisit, we return to the topic of our first issue with a report on the recent, indecisive, German elections.
In our Interview with Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman, she reflects on the role and scope of new initiatives in teaching at Princeton, as well as on the effects of dogmatism and the politicization of knowledge on the university.
The Forum features Princeton Professors Hildred Geertz and George Kateb, both Emeritus, who draw on their long experience of teaching to discuss the relation of character to pedagogy, controversies surrounding academic fads and experiments, and the special relation of an elite institution to the world.
4Q & 4A asks four Princeton faculty about their participation in the information super highway.
It is clear that some students come to Princeton for broad-based liberal knowledge while others want marketable skills or access to the networks that promise successful careers. Even if professors succeed in identifying and transmitting something they consider "basic knowledge," it may be largely serendipitous when students agree that that is "what they came for." But the needs of the students, the imperatives of scholarly knowledge, and the larger contemporary socio-political context collide most obviously in the classrooms where "101" courses are taught.