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Article 34285example, all faculty teaching introductory courses, especially those required as part of a core curriculum,must have a sense of theater if they are to keep students awake, much less appreciative.They faculty member of an institution devoted primarily to teaching ignores student response at hisperil. Even at teaching/research institutions, failure to consider student response can be damaging.As the courses become more advanced, especially at the graduate level, competence alone maycarry the day. The easiest way to retain student attention in introductory courses is a bit of humorfrom time to time. But as Tannen correctly notes, a faculty member’s intention and a student’sperception of a joke may be light years apart. All of us in academe have known teachers whoselecturing styles have had to change in an era of student evaluations, affirmative action offices oncampuses, increased enrollment of women in what were formerly male courses, and the like. Consideringthis, the ‘independence’ of a lone wolf may not be so much greater than that of an interdisciplinaryteam member.As for financial independence, even senior scientists depend on extramural funding (I recognizethis is less so in fields that don’t require instrumentation and the like, such as philosophy). My MSthesis studied the response of freshwater protozoan communities to pollution. This research ledme to an interest in how these communities are structured and changed in sites unaffected by pollutionand to a career-long interest in global transport systems, competition, mutualism and relatedideas.However, my priority list did not always coincide with the priority lists of funding agencies. As thewoman (Dr Ruth Patrick of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia), who became mymentor after I acquired the MS and PhD, once remarked, “People are much more likely to give youmoney to solve problems that interest them than problems that interest you”. This remark seemsobvious and almost platitudinous, if it were not for the large number of unfunded academicianswaiting for their dissertation topics to become ‘hot’ again and liberally funded. Just as real life plotsoften outrun those of the most imaginative fiction writers, so the problems of the real world eclipsethose of specialists, in both scope and complexity. As Will Rogers once put it much more effectively,“It’s hard to make a living as a comedian when the US Congress is in session”.Since the Planet’s major problems are beyond the capabilities of a single discipline, funding maybe easier to obtain for solving problems of general interest than those of specialized interests. Inscience, at least, the ‘haves’ get money for instrumentation, travel, technical assistance, pagecharges, and the like, all of which makes them markedly more mobile than their colleagues amongthe ‘have nots’. In the academic world, there is surely some close correlation between the degreeof independence and the number of options open to an individual! Put in this way, perhaps thecommonly held view of independence should be modified, as appears to be happening in this eraof budget deficits where professional survival is more closely linked to performance than it hasbeen in the past.COMMUNICATION AND PROBLEM SOLVINGThis discussion has focused on communication and status as the dilemma of an environmentalscientist. The kind of communicating among the disciplines to resolve an environmental problembeyond the capabilities of a single discipline is a style attributed to women by Professor DeborahTannen. I have noted the correspondence between the communication style of men, for whombeing understood is less important than establishing status, and ‘communication’ between practitionersin a specialized discipline, who are achieving status within their own discipline. Tannenobserved that men referred to a wish for independence as their primary motive for joining acade-