The Obama administration’s new call for universities to increase diversity on campus is probably a welcome one for many schools. After years of court battles over state university admissions policies, centered on the University of Michigan, colleges and universities now have greater clarity about which levers they’re allowed to pull to attract a more ethnically diverse pool of applicants. But what happens when those more diverse classes get to campus?

Much research has been done on the benefits of being in school with a more diverse group of peers. For example, a recent study discussed in the book How College Affects Students notes that exposure to fellow students of diverse backgrounds is one of the key factors influencing whether freshmen return for their sophomore year and whether their experience improves their critical thinking skills. Think about that: more diverse classmates and dorm-mates leads to a more positive, successful undergrad experience.

And our own research for highly selective universities and grad schools has shown that prospects value diversity and take it into consideration when deciding which schools to apply to. When it comes to attracting underrepresented minorities, it certainly helps when they see people who look like them on campus, ideally both students and professors.

That research is echoed in the new guidelines, which were issued jointly by attorney general Eric Holder and education secretary Arne Duncan. "Diverse learning environments," says Holder in the accompanying press release, “promote development of analytical skills, dismantle stereotypes, and prepare students to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world.”

All true. I’m as strong a believer as anyone that greater diversity along all kinds of dimensions — racial, gender, socio-economic, geographic, attitudinal — in higher education is a good thing. What schools need to realize, though, is that with that greater diversity comes a greater need for support for those new members of the student body. Some of our research has shown that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as those who are the first generation in their family to attend college, struggle with the demands and format of postsecondary education more than other students do. They’re more likely to have jobs, work more hours, and be less involved in co-curricular activities. In one study, we found that they needed more help from their advisors that other students did — but were less likely to seek out that help. These diverse newcomers can benefit from greater support, whether academic, co-curricular or social, to help them navigate the unfamiliar landscape.

Yet many schools don’t invest in such support programs, in part because they are not aware of those needs and in part because they don’t want to stereotype their new arrivals or treat them differently on the basis of ethnicity. The ideal is a melting pot, whether or not it actually exists.

Of course, those support programs are also an additional expense for the schools. So that well-intentioned reluctance to engage in anything like profiling may also mask a reluctance to spend more on student-life and academic counseling.

Whatever its causes, that reluctance is a shame. If a school embraces increased diversity as a strategic goal, it ought to carry that strategy through to the  students it affects, by acknowledging and meeting their unique needs. It’s also a good long-term decision: supporting underrepresented minorities and first-generation students would likely contribute to higher retention and graduation rates, and that means stronger rankings and better applicant pools. It may be an additional expense, but it makes both ethical and academic sense.

Does your institution support diversity just at the admissions stage, or throughout the student experience?
 

A new grant solicitation from the NSF has me thinking about how and why scientists communicate with laypeople like us, and how and why some laypeople get excited about it. I’ve blogged before about what makes that connection work, but I don’t think there’s been a national conversation about it. Maybe it’s time.

After all, the proliferation of new science content — much of it of a kind you wouldn’t have seen even five or ten years ago — is remarkable. From podcasts like Radiolab and StarTalk and live series like the scrappy Story Collider or the star-studded TED Talks, to new approaches in old-media outlets like Scientific American and PBS, not to mention all those books for the “general reader” that scientists and science journalists are writing, there’s a new energy and a new flavor around science communication. Human narrative is becoming more central, as is humor. Personality and subjectivity are breaking in. The limits of science, and its blurry boundaries with mystery and speculation, are coming out of the closet.

And the whole thing feels less like “science education” than like...well, a cultural phenomenon. Creative intellectual expression meets audience enjoyment. Science as song.

The nature of this change is fascinating to me, and it seems to be largely unexamined. We should be talking about what impulses drive it, what its historical antecedents and social influences are, and especially what it hopes to achieve.

Enter that grant program from the National Science Foundation, which invites proposals for research into innovative evaluation methods in formal or informal STEM education. Don’t worry, it took me a few seconds to sort out the self-referentiality there, too. When I got my head around it, and especially when I saw that there was a grant category for organizing a conference, I realized that this could be an opportunity to bring the best minds in the field together to discuss both sides of the coin:

What is good public science? / What good is public science?

In other words, what does engaging, energizing public science look and sound like? How does it differ from its implicit opposite, professional or inward science, and from the traditional ideals of classroom-based or museum-based STEM learning? How does it relate to other domains of cultural production and engagement?

And the flip side: what is public science meant to achieve, and for whom? What kinds of social, civic, or individual goods are at stake? Most relevant to the NSF grant guidelines, how can we tell if it’s working? We could use this dream conference to come up with new evaluation metrics—or, to use that trendy term, a framework—sensitive to these new forms that science is taking all around us. ...

I’m not the target audience, and neither are you. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s weekly radio show and podcast, StarTalk Radio, is aimed at people with a high-school education who listen to commercial talk radio call-in shows — the “blue collar intellectual” segment, according to a grant summary from the National Science Foundation, which supports the show. But there are big lessons here for us white-collar intellectuals who work in museums and the arts.

I didn’t know anything about StarTalk when I stumbled on it a few days ago on iTunes. But I’ve been watching Tyson’s public science persona evolve for years and have read several of his books, so I downloaded a few episodes and played them in the car during a family Thanksgiving drive. I was immediately struck by the commercial sound of the show. Fast pace. Voices bantering and interrupting and laughing. Comedians and celebrities mixing it up with Tyson and his scientific guests. Rock and Motown hits pumping us in and out of the segments. And Tyson’s voice, more animated and...well, slicker than I’d ever heard it.

So I was excited but not surprised to read that StarTalk was created to “bridge the intersection between pop culture and pop science” and that it bills itself as the “first and only popular commercial radio program devoted to all things space.” In other words, it’s content you might expect from public radio or public television (and Tyson has put in plenty of time on those media), but repackaged in a commercial format for people who’ve never heard of Radiolab or Story Collider and don’t watch NOVA.

Which proves that innovation in public science — and by extension other social and cultural domains that are too important to leave to the experts — doesn’t have to be geared to the educated, urban, young creatives who stream Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! and the Slate Political Gabfest on their smartphones, nor to the older, affluent generation that’s still watching PBS and attending lunchtime lectures at their local university. It can meet a different (larger?) demographic on its own turf. And that, for anyone who cares about reaching underserved audiences and getting the arts and sciences out of their 20th-century temples, is good news. ...

A few days ago, Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser, two high-octane Croatian musicians known as 2Cellos, played at Le Poisson Rouge in New York. I wish I’d been in town to see them live, because their viral YouTube videos display all the qualities I’ve been saying classical music needs more of: rawness, energy, impoliteness, spontaneity, ego. If you haven’t watched them in action, you’re missing something.

The two young cellists are both classically trained: both attended royal conservatories in the UK and one of them (Hauser) was a student of the late cello legend Mstislav Rostropovich. Both were doing well on the competition circuit and were playing internationally at all the right venues. 

Apparently they avoided the indoctrination that usually comes with that kind of training — the traditional ideals that still shape the careers of many classical prodigies. They’re working outside of the culture of classical music, making other uses of their prodigious talent and rigorous training. For one thing, they’re playing rock, or at least that’s what they got famous for, almost overnight on YouTube: propulsive, virtuosic renditions Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” and Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”

But it’s not just what they play, it’s how: fiercely, almost animalistically, twisting with energy, stamping their feet, and beating up their instruments. Their bows literally shred during the performance. In other words, they embody the subversive energy of rock and roll, the Dionysian upwelling that felt, to the establishment in rock’s early days, so aggressive and sexual and threatening.

The response they’ve been getting is more enthusiastic and more genuinely human than any classical audience reaction I’ve seen. No wonder Elton John asked them to tour with him this summer and fall (see photo with Sir Elton).

The classical realm (if that’s where we are) hasn’t seen anything like it since Nicolo Paganini, who was something like the Eddie Van Halen of his day. Classical music people often bring up Paganini to show that classical music can have the rabid crowds and almost-destabilizing force of popular music. But that begs the question of what has happened in the 170 years between Paganini and, say, Lang Lang, who’s a major star by classical standards but about as subversive as a Harry Potter sequel.

Sulic and Hauser are answering that question by example. They’re also demonstrating that conservatory training can pay off in ways that look very different from the traditional picture of success. Not long ago they might have been considered apostates, but given the conversation that’s going on at arts colleges (at least in the US) about creativity, innovation, and the changing role of musicians and artists in society, I’ll bet those two handsome cellists become poster children for the new era.

What do you think? Is it classical? Does it matter? And what (if anything) does it mean for classical music’s relationship to the broader culture?