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Top schools focus on science, engineering

STANFORD, Calif.-Stanford and other top universities are making huge new investments in science and engineering infrastructure.

Even schools traditionally associated with the humanities and social sciences have joined the trend. Yale University, for example, recently announced an initiative to invest $500 million in science and engineering facility upgrades.

Yale's announcement follows similar, though less ambitious, programs at Harvard and Princeton. And last October, Stanford christened its new $120 million Science and Engineering Quad, and received a $150 million donation from Netscape founder Jim Clark for the new Bio-X program, which will integrate basic science, medicine and engineering.

"Both Harvard and Yale are seeking to strengthen and expand both engineering and applied science activities," said Malcolm Beasley, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. "My sense is that at a deep level, this is trying to create the proper balance of the modern university between traditional liberal arts and engineering."

Yale's plan, which includes the construction of five buildings, will increase research space and upgrade existing classrooms and labs. In addition, Yale announced that it would create an "environmental campus" and a "molecular campus" that would be connected indoors, allowing for easier travel between science facilities.

Yale hopes to revitalize its science and engineering departments, which, according to the Yale Office of Public Affairs, have been weaker than its arts, humanities and social sciences programs.

Beasley said that Stanford, as a much younger university than those in the Ivy league, has always placed a larger emphasis on engineering.

"Is there a greater emphasis on science and engineering at Stanford? The answer is self-evidently yes," said history professor Bart Bernstein.

"Stanford is representative of a trend in competitive private education where more and more undergraduates are keyed to personal achievement and success," said comparative literature professor Seth Lerer.

However, according to Beasley and other members of the humanities faculty, Stanford's apparent bias toward engineering may not be as large as it seems.

"The needs in the humanities are often smaller, because projects are often on a smaller scale," Beasley said.

Bernstein also noted that it is more expensive to hire faculty in science and engineering than it is in the humanities.

"One of the related problems is that if a science department wants to hire somebody, they have to outfit a lab that may cost half a million dollars," he said. "If you want to hire a history professor, for example, there is no startup cost; we already have books in history."

Furthermore, Lerer and Beasley claim that efforts to improve humanities programs are harder to measure. "The school certainly supports initiatives in the humanities," Beasley said, "but these humanities efforts have been more programmatic."

Beasley also pointed out that the university made a large capital investment last year with the reconstruction of the Cantor Arts Center.

"Humanities is about people. It's not about buildings and labs," Lerer said. "I think everybody recognizes that it's really hard to recruit and keep good people because it's much more amorphous."

Beasley emphasized that Stanford is committed to providing students with a high quality of education in all disciplines.

"Stanford is in the business of producing very well-educated leaders, in whatever walk of life we have programs in," Beasley said. "And that's exactly what we should do. We firmly believe we need to have strong programs in all the areas we represent."