Writing

Steven Johnson’s book “The Ghost Map” was selected this year for reading by all incoming first-year students at the University of Vermont. This was a wonderful selection, for which I congratulate and thank the first-year book selection committee. I enjoyed this book on many levels. It spoke to my interests in the history of science, the role of science in informing policy, disruptive technologies and disruptive thinking, communication and presentation of information, engineering and public health.I also love a great mystery. As I reflected on the book, the messages it contained, and the author’s way of telling this remarkable story, it occurred to me that “The Ghost Map” can serve remarkably well as “a road map” for our students during their time at the University of Vermont.

“The Ghost Map”– part detective novel, part history of science, part social theory, and part futurist – beautifully describes the unraveling of the mystery of the deadly cholera outbreaks in London in the mid-1800’s. It is also the story of a remarkable time in human history, the foundation of the world’s public health systems, the conflict between emerging scientific and prevailing social theories, and even the underpinnings of today’s broad-based liberal education models.

As I reflected on the book, the messages it contained, and the author’s way of telling this remarkable story, it occurred to me that “The Ghost Map” could serve exceedingly well as “a road map” for how we prepare and inspire our students, vision and re-envision our curricular and degree offerings, and even how we posit the University of Vermont as a distinctive and impactful land grant university.

Universities and colleges are constantly being challenged to define a diversity agenda, speak to the ever growing importance of ensuring diversity in their organizations, build culture and community that both reflects and fosters diversity, and demonstrate progress towards measurable diversity goals. Academic institutions seek diversity in the broadest sense and across the broadest spectrum of definitions. We must embrace diversity not as a set of constraints, but as a strategic priority that has inclusiveness at its core. Doing anything less is not realizing the full potential of the University, and therefore not maximizing its impact, as an institution, on our world.

Like all professions, engineering has evolved. We have acquired new knowledge, we have better tools at our disposal, and this has enabled more creative and sophisticated solutions to increasingly challenging and complex problems. We’ve been evolving in this way since the first stone tools were crafted two million years ago.

The rate of knowledge creation (and its digital incarnation, information creation) is increasing exponentially. But the stakes of this evolution also are higher. As we push through technological boundaries, we create materials, mechanisms, systems and policies that challenge our environment – not just our air and water, but our societies, our economies, and our ability to sustain ourselves. We have entered a period in our history where we are permanently depleting natural resources and negatively impacting the ability of our planet to sustain us.

Our students want to save the planet. They join Renssalaer with a nascent perspective on the global challenges before us, the global risks we were exposed to as a people and a planet, and the power of our global connectivity. Our goal at the university is to develop those perspectives more fully and with benefit of a broad academic community. Following this generation defining passion, however, is not at the exclusion of a student’s goals of finding a job and becoming successful. Once disparate, these goals are increasingly aligned and intertwined.