Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

Small by Design: Resilience in an Era of Mass Higher Education
Small Science is Excellent Science
The fascination with bigness influenced American
approaches to science education and research while providing
a model for managing the growth of undergraduate
enrollments. The large university campuses gained attention
and support after World War II when Presidential science
advisor Vannevar Bush persuaded Congress to invest in
serious, high-level scientific research and development as a
permanent post-war commitment. Central to his case was
the motto, “Big Science is the Best Science.” The underlying
premise was that advanced scientific research would flourish
when concentrated in a select group of large, established
universities. During the next decade, the consequences of this
priority became evident. Ranking institutions by the gross
dollars of federal grants received was quickly accepted as a
proxy for prestige. As a result, by 1960 15 large universities
were receiving about 80 percent of all federal research grants.
Small liberal arts colleges had a difficult time competing for
these grants in the sciences.
It is easy to assume that the small liberal arts colleges
were completely left out of the picture in the decades
of “Big Science,” simply because the majority of federal
research grants went to a handful of large doctoral-granting
universities. But that assumption is wrong because the full
picture was more complex. Many systematic studies now
show that small colleges made significant contributions to
the education of future scientists all through the 20 th century.
Nobel laureate Thomas Cech offers a good account of this
contribution in his essay “Sciences at Liberal Arts Colleges:
A Better Education” which appeared in Stephen Koblik
and Stephen R. Graubard’s anthology, Distinctively American
(1999).
One reason for the popular misconception about
science in the small colleges is that many casual observers
presumed that “the liberal arts” do not include the sciences.
In fact, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and mathematics
were staples of the liberal arts curriculum before psychology,
political science, and sociology. As Cech observes, the
curriculum and culture of the liberal arts college often made
it more likely that its students would take science courses
than students at larger institutions. One result is that
graduates of liberal arts colleges tend to pursue Ph.D.s in
science and mathematics at a rate substantially greater than
graduates of other institutions.
As one would expect, such academically selective
small colleges as Oberlin, Swarthmore, Williams, Harvey
Mudd, and Pomona are high on the lists of future Ph.D.
producers. But other liberal arts institutions with less
visibility and smaller endowments also have very strong
20