Tag Archives: Stanford

What Dinosaurs Teach Us About Approaching Stanford

My wife, Libra Hilde, and I are resident fellows in a freshman dorm at Stanford. The RF residences are, shall we say, not quite as grand as the masters' residences at Harvard (which have been know to get named in Top Five Lists of Apartments in Boston), but we fill a similar ceremonial role for our students that the masters at Harvard do. This means giving speeches to parents when students arrive and for important occasions like Parents' Weekend.

Every year, the house staff (RFs and student staff) pick a theme and then decorate the dorm in anticipation of freshman arrivals. The standard Stanford gag is to pick a theme that somehow plays off the name of the house. These themes can be hilariously tenuous -- that's actually part of the gag -- and some house names are easier to work with than others. I'm afraid we're saddled with a particularly difficult name to play off of. We are Arroyo House. Our themes over the past few years have been: "Where the Wild Things Arroyo" (as in the classic Maurice Sendak book), "ATROYO" (an ancient Greek theme), and "Arroyosemite" (as in the National Park). After a long debate at our staff retreat, we finally decided on this year's theme of "Dinosarroyo." Lots of great decorating opportunities, as you can see from this picture of our common room.

Arroyo House LoungeA little game I play with myself in my ceremonial role of Arroyo House Resident Fellow is to welcome the parents with a brief speech on how our house theme relates to their kids' careers at Stanford and beyond. Now bear in mind, we choose the theme on the basis of (1) how good a pun it makes with our house name (and we don’t have a lot to work with on that front!) and (2) the decoration possibilities it entails. How that theme fits into our larger vision is, frankly, pretty low on the list. This is what makes the game fun! After giving it a bit of thought, it occurred to me that Dinosarroyo actually has a lot to teach us. There are three big themes:

(1) College is about the spirit of discovery. Romantic tales of the expeditions of paleontologists such as Edward Drinker Cope or Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History have inspired the early careers of countless scientists. Students’ experience at Stanford should inspire them to explore the boundaries of knowledge, whether they are future scientists, educators, lawyers, entrepreneurs, or whatever. Stanford students excel most when they eschew the easy path. This is a research university. Our students should take advantage of this and make new discoveries about the world. Embrace the spirt of discovery embodied by those romantic vertebrate paleontologists.

(2) The Dinosauria first appeared on Earth during the Triassic period and were the dominant form of animal life for over 135 million years. The age of the dinosaurs came to an abrupt end at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary, about 65 million years ago. This 135 million years that dinosaurs dominated is approximately 100 times longer than anything recognizably human has been on the planet. In fact, what appears to us to be a geological ‘instant’ where the dinosaurs went extinct at the K-Pg boundary was, in fact, probably longer than humans have been in existence. That this mighty and diverse lineage of animals managed to die out in the blink of an evolutionary eye suggests to me that we should have some humility about our own dominion. Crucially, at this moment in human history we are faced with many enormous challenges, some of which are potentially existential. We should use the incredible opportunities that are afforded to us by our association with this incredible institution to address these challenges. Our society has given us so much to allow us to be here at this remarkable point in history. Let’s make the most of it!

(3) Those synapsid ancestors of mammals who managed to survive when all the (non-bird) dinosaurs went extinct give us a clue as to what our comparative advantage in this universe is. We are adaptable. We are opportunistic. Most remarkably of all, our particular lineage is blessed with the capacity for planning and foresight. We need to encourage our students to take advantage of the opportunities given them by this university to become adaptable lifelong learners. I can’t predict what the job market will look like in 10 years (and anyone who tells you they can is either fooling themselves or trying to sell you something). What I can say, is that it will be different than it is today. And the job market ten years beyond that will be even more different. This means that learning to be flexible, adaptable, and to never stop learning is probably the greatest ‘skill’ our students can learn.

 

Jennifer Burney Lecture

I've spent the better part of the day editing web pages as I prepare to teach two courses this spring. Given that I've more-or-less wasted the day with necessary but not especially intellectually rewarding tasks, I thought that I would take a moment to post something really important and scientifically interesting. Jennifer Burney, of Stanford's Program in Food Security and the Environment, gave a talk entitled "Food's Footprint: Agriculture and Climate Change" at Oregon State's Food for Thought Series. We've known Jen for a long time now.  If memory serves me correctly, she was in my wife Libra's section of the American Civil War at Harvard in Fall of 1995. Later she was a student in Mather House, where we were resident tutors from 1997-2001. She went on to do a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford and then moved into a post-doctoral fellowship at FSE.

Jen and all the folks at FSE are doing great and fundamental work.  In this talk, she presents results that may seem somewhat counter-intuitive. Namely, she shows that the agricultural intensification attendant to the Green Revolution has been good for global carbon budgets -- and feeding hungry people.  It's all about counterfactuals. I am looking forward to reading this work since some of these counterfactuals depend critically on demographic assumptions.

As she says in the talk, just because the results suggest that intensive agriculture is good from a global warming perspective, doesn't take Big Agriculture off the hook. There are items that their models don't incorporate (but could in principle) and they don't consider anything other than carbon budgets.  It would be nice to think of a way of uniting all the costs and benefits of intensification in a single framework.

This is very important stuff and the work highlights the complexities of population, environment, and food production. I look forward to seeing more work from Jen and her collaborators at FSE.

The Requirements for an Ecological Anthropology Curriculum

A question was posted today on the ecological anthropology listserv: What are the basic requirements for an ecological anthropology graduate program? I don't claim to be qualified to say what these are for the field as a whole, but I am qualified to say what we have decided on in setting up our new ecological and environmental anthropology Ph.D. program at Stanford. Here I include an edited version of the reply I sent to the thread.

At the risk of essentializing, there are, broadly speaking, two general classes of ecological anthropologists: (1) those who use human relationships with the environment as a lens through which to study problems in cultural anthropology (e.g., agency, social structure, the construction of meaning, etc.), and (2) ecologists who study humans as their primary organism. The majority of practitioners currently falling under the latter category are probably human behavioral ecologists, though I can think of some notable exceptions to this. This is the approach our program emphasizes.

In addition to departmental requirements, EE students are required to take the following:

  • Evolutionary Theory
  • Research Methods in Ecological Anthropology
  • Data Analysis in the Anthropological Sciences

All students need to know how to integrate theory, method, and application, but the specific nature of the courses in which they learn that doesn't matter that much. Therefore, we require three courses from a list of theory-driven graduate classes, including (but not limited to):

  • Advanced Ecological Anthropology
  • Human Behavioral Ecology
  • Conservation and Evolutionary Ecology
  • Demography and Life History Theory
  • Environmental Change and Emerging Infectious Disease

Required classes deal with what you know, but equally important is how you know. We expect our students to engage in research from the outset of their graduate studies. Students attend weekly lab meetings. These can be within the Anthropology department (e.g., Rebecca Bird and I run a joint meeting or we have a joint spatial interest meeting this quarter) or in other departments (e.g., Biology, Woods Institute).  Students also attend a colloquium (comprised of visiting speakers) one quarter out of the year.

We're big on methods, but we don't legislate what methods students learn (other than research design and statistics).  Most students are interested in remote sensing and GIS, but we also have students working on social network analysis, demographic methods,  and advanced statistical methodology.

So, that's our idea for a graduate program.  We will have  a proper web page describing the program in detail some time in the future.