Poet Pen to Bunsen Burner?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Whittier’s New Science and Learning Center
By Keeanna Garcia and Melissa Perez
If you are cruising up Earlham Drive or walking around the Upper Quad, you get a perfect view of what looks like a four-story, hollow honeycomb. Inside, construction workers with white helmets and neon-orange vests buzz around as they demolish wooden structures and tiled floors. They will soon begin to place glass walls around the structure. Once finished, the glass walls will offer a view into a beehive of activity as students perform chemical reactions, dissect fetal pigs, and do the kind of research you’d expect to be conducted in the new The Science and Learning Center.
Whittier College, established in 1887, is a small, quaint liberal arts college, with an enviable student-to-faculty ratio, and a long, proud tradition of humanities-based education. Despite that, Whittier recently announced that the $46 million Science and Learning Center will be completed in the fall of 2016 — the largest single capital-improvement project since the Bonnie Bell Wardman Library.
Students who pass by the construction site on a daily basis seem to be excited about the building’s prospects. “I expect to see better upgrades in terms of organization of the building as a whole, improved lab facilities and materials, and overall just an update to better flooring and utilities,” said Ruben Solorza, a third-year Environmental Science and Psychology double major, while sorting through data for his Research Methods course. “They have put a lot of money into this, so expectations are high.”
Whittier College Administration stresses that this building will look entirely modern with open space and state-of-the-art technology. Clearly, Whittier is breaking away from the past aesthetics and striving towards the future which, at least in terms of capital improvements, is science. Still, despite whatever symbolic baggage the new building may hold Whittier College is still heavily invested in the humanities. Of its more than 30 majors, about seven stem from the math or science departments. Furthermore, according to U.S. News and World Report, approximately seven percent of Whittier students majored in biology in 2014,and only 11 percent major in psychology.
Some speculate that while Whittier may not be ready to trade in its pens for Bunsen burners, it is trying to attract more students who are interested in the applied sciences. For third-year student Solorza, this is not a bad thing at all. “Overall, it’s exciting for science majors because we can be proud of our new building and hopefully attract future students who may wants to attend Whittier and pursue a science major,” said Solarza.
The huge investment in the new Science and Learning Center is consistent with nationwide trends toward STEM-based curricula: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. “I think students really need and want to have more access, not just to technology, but to tools that they can use to do work that will prepare them for the future,” said Professor Anne Cong-Huyen, Digital Scholar and co-coordinator of the Digital Liberal Arts program.
Not everyone, though, is 100 percent sold on the idea.
In a small office on the first floor of Hoover, where a bookshelf is filled with novels by authors such as J.G. Ballard and James Joyce, Professor of English dAvid pAddy questions not so much the merits of the school’s big investment, but what it represents on a philosophical level. “On one hand, it can lessen the value of humanities and social sciences, but it also can put a really horrible weight on them,” said pAddy, referring to how humanities and social sciences departments might feel pressure to justify investment based on perceived returns on that investment in the after-college job market. Similarly, students could end up feeling pressure to study science based less on passion than “because it’s somehow more marketable.” In either case, letting job market trends determine the value of either a science or humanities-based education diminishes both, says pAddy.
As with pAddy, third-year student Andrew Lemus is interested in whether the new Science and Learning Center represents at least a philosophical shift from Whittier’s humanities tradition. “Our main focus is the liberal arts, and we don’t even issue Bachelor of Science degrees to science majors. They are issued a Bachelor of the Arts in everything,” said Lemus, a History major minoring in English, who was busy writing a paper on the Vietnam War for his Revolutions of the 1960s class. “However, both are equally important. Both disciplines are contingent upon each other… I hope our school will invest in the humanities as well, because, like the sciences, we could use new facilities to study and create intelligent discussions within our disciplines.”
Lori Camparo, Associate Professor of Psychology and past member of the Science Building Committee, does not believe that the college intends, or has ever intended, to separate humanities and science. Being a liberal arts college, Camparo stresses that Whittier’s entire purpose is to provide students with an interdisciplinary education: “Having been an English major, having worked in the social sciences and also thinking of myself as a scientist, I really do see the interconnection between [the disciplines].”
Cong-Huyen also stressed the need to blend sciences with humanities on the liberal arts campus. “A lot of these disciplines are no longer completely silo-ed. There’s a lot of bleeding between different disciplines. I think what we want to see [is] the resources that are available for one department to be available to all other departments, and more collaboration and more discussion between different disciplines and faculty in those disciplines. And also between students because we don’t want science students to only be working with other science students. So, I think that’s something that would be great to have on this campus.”
“It’s just a matter of architecture. It’s we who are dichotomizing the humanities versus the sciences.”
James Camparo, husband of Lori Camparo and Assistant Professor of Physics, who works for The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California, affirmed the need for interdisciplinary education. Even scientists, he claims, need argumentative skills and the ability to write. “Let’s say the Air Force wants to fly a certain kind of satellite, and let’s say they’re going to have an amplifier for a signal in the satellite, and the Air Force doesn’t exactly know what tests they want. But the people who are building the amplifier say, ‘We should do Test A and B.’ And as an expert, I say, ‘Well you should do Test A, B, C, and D.’ Well, I have to create an argument. I have to put that argument in writing, and I have to use rhetoric to convince not only the contractors, but also the Air Force,” explained Camparo.
The reconstruction is on schedule, and should be completed by fall 2016. This glistening, modern citadel will likely be the centerpiece of this almost 130-year-old campus for years to come. However, Doctor Lori Camparo says that nobody should get too hung up on the name or the building. After all, everyone is welcome there, just like they are welcome in every other building on campus. “It’s just a matter of architecture,” said Camparo. “It’s we who are dichotomizing the humanities versus the sciences.”