Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Jason Meyers has been hooked on the liberal arts since his undergraduate days at Williams College. So, when looking for a position as a professor, Meyers knew he wanted to teach science in a community that emphasized those core components of intellectual development across fields.
“It was my interactions with my undergraduate advisor that helped to turn me into the scientist that I am today,” Meyers said. “Seeing what education and training looked like at a liberal arts college felt much more valuable than what I was seeing at the undergraduate level of big medical colleges. I knew I really wanted to come back to the intimacy of a small liberal arts college.”
Part of Colgate University’s hiring process is to expose candidate professors not only to faculty, but also to students, often through short “job talks” and presentations. This mutual interview lets prospective faculty gauge a sense of the university, and vice versa.
Meyers recalls his own job talk as being the first taste of Colgate’s commitment to and passion for academics in the broadest sense.
“When I gave my job talk, a lot of students started asking questions — and not just kind of silly questions but questions that showed that they had a real understanding of some advanced ideas and techniques, and were really listening to my presentation,” Meyers said. “I thought this was an environment that I would want to come to, with a tradition of letting students lead the questions.”
One of the foundational values of the liberal arts curriculum is diverse thought and discipline. By exposing students to a variety of academic fields, Colgate fosters creativity in approaching and addressing problems of various natures. This creativity is central not only in the arts and humanities — where “creativity” is often implicated — but also in the sciences, where Meyers’ daily work necessitates working and re-working, and then re-working again.
“There is that ‘eureka’ moment when, after a lot of thought and engineering of the technical bits, you finally get to see this one [result]. I still find tremendous joy when I see something that came out of a really thoughtfully designed experiment,” Meyers said. “The question in science then becomes, how do you design something that really shows you these cool things that might be unexpected or counter to what’s in the literature, or even counter to what someone else is thinking?”
Despite operating within a niche of developmental biology and neurobiology, Meyers does not consider himself restricted to the people and practices of that field. Instead, Meyers finds equal — and sometimes greater — value in collaborating with those who operate in apparently divergent academic areas, even if they are unfamiliar with zebrafish, his model organism of choice.
“I’ve been having some conversations with faculty in art about their creative practices and I think there’s a lot of synergy in how all of us approach thinking creatively within our disciplines,” Meyers said.
While Colgate remains committed to all kinds of academic achievement, the current political narrative has placed undue emphasis on ‘types’ science: defunding those which it sees as non-essential or otherwise inappropriate. Within his own research, Meyers remains committed to asking questions which are important not because they have obvious bearing, but because they are valuable in adjusting or expounding upon some part of the scientific narrative.
“I think we do a disservice when we think about funding only those things which focus on disease x and y,” Meyers said. “It’s not to say we shouldn’t be trying to apply that knowledge, but we shouldn’t start with such a narrow focus. We’re here at a liberal arts university because we think there’s real value in all of the things that we do here, in all of those little creative spaces.”
According to Meyers, those creative spaces are often found beyond traditional conceptions of science which anticipate immediate and incontrovertible impact.
“We’re in a climate where there needs to be marketability in everything we do. But we need to talk about the value in other research disciplines and encourage people to think creatively about, say, political science and religion and philosophy, and find out where those ideas take us,” Meyers said.
Rather than promoting an image of science in which identical experiments yield instantly pertinent results, Meyers believes in the importance of embracing science as a practice which can not be necessarily perfected, but can always be expanded upon.
“My advisor said ‘treasure your anomalies,’ and I really liked that; sometimes people have a vision of science as some sort of steamroller where we’re paving the way to something specific, and a lot of times the really interesting things [happen] when you realize you don’t understand the system as well as you thought you did.”
Science is synonymous with asking questions, but the creative and often more subtle nature of science means asking the right questions in the right ways. In a society where science is increasingly met with distrust, it becomes the onus of scientists to simultaneously defend their data and acknowledge its shortcomings.
“One of the things we’re seeing in the current climate is this challenging of authority, which includes scientific authority, and it’s a funny place – a healthy scientific skepticism is needed to move science forward, but the balance between rejecting scientific findings and asking the right questions is a fine line. How we build a healthy skepticism in sciences but also a trust in scientific process is one of the things we’re delicately trying to balance in our pedagogy,” Meyers said.
As we practice, interpret and react to science in our lives, we are engaging in a creative endeavor: asking questions, finding solutions and formulating an account of controversial or inconspicuous data. As the pedagogy evolves, scientists like Meyers remain firm in their commitment to the scientific method as a means of fostering growth, creativity and knowledge in a dedicated student body.
