CRTF continues...

As the work of the Curriculum Review Task Force carries on, now well into its second year, I ask all of my colleagues, students, and friends to consider the parts they all play as citizens of the world...and the roles they all play in helping themselves and others fulfill those parts.

Someday (next summer, maybe, when the REU's direction is no longer chiefly my responsibility?) I hope to write at length about the curriculum review, for it's been a sometimes-trying, sometime-exhilarating, but ever-rich-and-rewarding experience. So much to say about it, so much to say.

And so much to say about my ever-changing perception of my part in it...and about my part in the school more broadly, and in society and humanity more broadly still. The reading I've done in the past month alone (Joseph Weizenbaum, Antonio Damasio, William McDonogh & Michael Braungart, and Martha Nussbaum, all tempered by the poetry of Marge Piercy, Ted Hughes, and Adrienne Rich) convinces me more solidly than ever before that we folks in the "hard" sciences constrain our roles too tightly: we tend to dive dangerously deeply into our disciplines. From our depths we lose sight of the stars.

More soon...