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282Cairns: Eco-Ethics and Sustainability Ethicsunderstood the seminar, but both regarded it as profound and scholarly. Regrettably, I cannot findthe reference for a much more quantitative study with the same results when a Dr S.L.Y. Fox(really a professional actor) gave a lecture with no content, but the formed attributes of a scholarlypresentation to a very large audience at a major national professional meeting. The lecturewas then judged on an evaluation form passed out to the audience as scholarly, scientific,brilliant, and the like.COMMUNICATION, ACADEMIC FREEDOM, AND TEAM RESEARCHAn academic male’s view of freedom is addressed in Tannen’s book 1 from pages 40 to 42, titled“In Pursuit of Freedom”. In a survey carried out by the Chronicle of Higher Education, men referredto independence as their main motive for joining academic institutions and regarded independenceas freedom from being told what to do (page 42). Members of interdisciplinary teams in a senselose freedom because, if they are to function effectively, the needs of the team will impose restrictionsthat might be regarded as a loss of freedom. Another way of looking at the team is as anenriching experience expanding each member’s horizons to see how other disciplines regard acommon problem.My musings about communicating would have ended with these few thoughts had my wife Jeannot pointed out an interview 2 of Deborah Tannen, entitled “Can We Talk?” The following questionposed by the interviewer refocused my attention on the interesting parallels just mentioned: “Inyour book, you characterized the boy’s world as dominated by a hierarchical social order whereyou’re either one up or one down. Girls, on the other hand, live in a network of social connections,where intimacy and community are paramount. How does this affect our way of communicating?”In the answer, Deborah Tannen said, for males, “You use talk to preserve your independence.Females, on the other hand, use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy”. An uncharitableperson might substitute the term ‘reductionist science’ for the word males and interdisciplinaryscience’ for females.ARE TEAM INVESTIGATORS INFERIOR TO ‘LONE WOLF’ INVESTIGATORS?I am told by people who study wolves that ‘lone wolves’ become solitary when food is abundantand easily acquired. The lone wolves quickly join teams when the abundant small food (rabbits,mice and the like) go underground, and larger prey, well beyond the capabilities of a lone wolf, mustbe attacked. What an interesting similarity the small food items have with the small problems chosenby reductionists (for more detail on this, see ref.3) and the large food items have with the larger,more complex, multivariate problems that require an interdisciplinary team.Many years ago, I lost a valued assistant skilled in all aspects of interdisciplinary team management,including the acquisition of extramural funding. Although this colleague had impeccable academiccredentials in both research and teaching, the tenure and promotion committee professedinability to ‘see’ this colleague’s accomplishments due to the fact that the majority of his publicationswere multi-authored. Worse yet, many of the numerous publications were in ‘other’ fieldssuch as physics, chemistry, and engineering. Physics and chemistry, of course, are among thehardest of sciences, and engineering enjoys a somewhat similar status since it deals with concretedata. When I am frustrated professionally, I invariably reduce the tension by writing. Since I had justreceived an invitation to address an international meeting on the Potomac/Thames Rivers, I choseto analyze the situation just described. 4 The published address proved to be a popular one withpeople facing the frustrations of establishing interdisciplinary teams in an age of lone wolf special-
Article 34283ization. Not until I heard Rev. Snyder’s talk did I realize that some key components had not beenincluded in that discussion!As I read Professor Tannen’s book, I recalled serving on the College of Arts and Sciences Tenureand Promotion Committee at the request of the dean. Each committee member was assigned severalcandidates, but none from the department that we represented. One of the candidates I wasassigned to review was a physicist who seldom was a sole author on a scientific paper. Moreover,on some of the key papers, six to eight authors were listed. In addition, the candidate was seldomlisted as the first author. As part of my assignment, I called friends in the physics departments ofseveral prestigious and nationally ranked universities. To my surprise, even though the telephonecall had undoubtedly caught them unawares, they could not only identify the candidate’s contributionto the team effort, but also all the other co-authors’ contributions as well. That happenedroughly a decade ago, but, in retrospect, it seems similar to male communication within a club(i.e. persons of very similar but not identical interests) and, unlike female communication, whereconnections and community are paramount. If this is true, it does not falsify the hypothesis that, oninterdisciplinary teams, the purpose of communication is to be understood, and in the reductionistorienteddisciplines it is to establish status.THE SECURITY OF SPECIALIZATIONOne of the facts noted in the Tannen interview 2 is that men generally do not stop to ask for directionsand women to [SIC]. For women, asking for directions means a fleeting connection with astranger. As Tannen 2 notes, “That’s a positive thing. You don’t lose anything. But for a man, itmeans you’re putting yourself ‘one down’ to a stranger, and that’s very uncomfortable.” As anextension of this, men often assume that if the person being asked does not know the answer thatthey person will answer incorrectly since admitting ignorance would put him ‘one down’. Womenassume that if the person does not know that she will simply say so.A fascinating article by Jared Diamond 4 on the relationship between soft and hard sciences isparticularly persuasive because some of his research is soft and some hard. Similarly, I have theadvantage (or disadvantage) of having a lifetime of both research in a strictly reductionist disciplinarymode and a slightly less lengthy (but nevertheless considerable) period of working in the interdisciplinarymode. In fact, I often switch from one to the other, sometimes several times, in thecourse of a single day. The contrast is startling. In the disciplinary reductionist mode, I decidewhich problems to address, the boundary conditions (how much is manageable and how muchseems unmanageable), and the time frame in which the project will be carried out. I do this with thecertain knowledge that, if the timing proves to be poorly estimated, I can reschedule the variousactivities to suit my convenience. There is no compelling need to ask colleagues with a similar areaof specialization for advice. However, if I choose to ask for assistance, it is not within a ‘one up’ or‘one down’ situation as it would be if I were asking directions from a local inhabitant of a town whoknow much more about the town than I did. It is instead a situation similar to that of two explorersin territory unknown to either, deciding which of several routes would prove most satisfactory. If anyof their judgments proved to be inaccurate, the explorers, if they survived, could choose whetherto tell others about the mistake. Most importantly, since they are both specialists in the same field,they would have a variety of means for checking each other’s judgment. Finally, if a mistake ismade on the part of one explorer, the error in judgment is more likely to be forgiven by the otherexplorer, who knows the complexities and uncertainties leading to the judgment and is thus morelikely to be sympathetic when error occurs.
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