Vision and Philosophy
The Department provides service to the college and to its
students in several areas:
1) Courses and enrichment for students majoring in
mathematics and science;
2) Support courses for students majoring in health
sciences;
3) Core courses in science, mathematics and computer
science for all students;
4) Research opportunities in the sciences for all students;
5) Remedial courses and services in the sciences for
at-risk students;
6) Professional advisement, preparation and support for
students intending to pursue post graduate education in
science, medicine, dentistry and other related fields.
While the demands of these disparate obligations require
targeted responses, the department maintains a coherent set
of core values and a clear vision of the relation of its
activities to the larger issues that face our society which
inform and direct its conduct of all its affairs.
The department seeks to educate scientifically and
mathematically literate members of society. We want our
students to be able both to apply the education they
receive to their own careers, and to utilize it as
constructive members of their community and participants in
our democratic society. Accordingly, we provide the
scientific underpinnings for majors in science, technology,
and the health professions. But we also provide a component
of education that does not depend on a student’s
major so that they can contribute intelligently to the
discussions and decision making that characterize our
scientific and technological age. We strive to provide this
component in a manner that equips our students, regardless
of the venue in which we interact with them, with the
scientific and analytical tools they need to continue to
develop in a world of rapid technological change.
To this end we embrace the following principles:
Ideas have primacy over information.
Education has primacy over training.
An appreciation of the scientific process has primacy over
the mere accumulation of factual knowledge.
Freedom of inquiry is the core value that makes it possible
for us to understand our world and have a positive impact
upon our society.
Our ideas about science should be communicated to others.
Science is integrative: nature does not respect the
divisions between academic disciplines, and the scientific
habit of thought influences our relationship with areas of
knowledge outside the sciences.
To further these principles, we engage in concrete and
directed practices.
We teach our courses using curricula and methods that
emphasize core scientific ideas. We teach science as though
it were a liberal art, routinely examining the interplay
between science, mathematics and society; and we review in
our courses the historical interplay of people and ideas
that has led to the worldwide spread of the scientific
model.
Our pedagogy is devoted to how best introduce students to
ideas rather than to a particular technology or set of
competencies. We educate our students in a way that
liberates them from a dependence on narrow technological or
procedural rules, and provides them with independent habits
of thought, so that they can expand their knowledge to
accommodate the changing landscape of scientific knowledge
that will shape the world they encounter in the future.
Our classes, laboratories and research efforts are
constructed to foster a brave and experimental attitude in
our students. We insist that students experience the
process by which scientific knowledge is advanced, and, to
the extent that this is possible in undergraduate
education, we incorporate this kind of experience into our
courses, labs, and research efforts.
We encourage our students to rationally critique what they
learn. We subscribe to the maxims that, in science, there
is no final authority, and that the debate over scientific
truth never ends. Although all of our educational
experiences are laden with content, we recognize and
communicate to our students the core insight that this
content is continuously under review. Consequently, we
encourage and expect skepticism and intellectual honesty in
the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and in the
confrontation with, and evaluation of all claims to
scientific truth.
We require written and oral self-expression in all our
educational activities and we teach our students to express
themselves and defend their positions with rational,
organized and civil argumentation.
Our vision of a well educated graduate of our school is a
person who has an integrated view of science, who
understands the interrelationship between content and
process in science, and who has a clear vision of the
relationship between science and the ethical, political,
and philosophical universe in which he or she lives out his
or her life.
