Darwin & the Strategic Plan

Abstract

It is tough to come up with a novel approach to Darwin, especially this year, when Darwin is everywhere. It would be nice if Darwin had been a teacher, then it might be easier to find a suitable angle for ABT. Unfortunately, Darwin never taught in the traditional sense of the term, though I think he was, in fact, a great teacher, in his writings and in the education of his children, several of whom followed in his scientific footsteps. But there are also other ways into Darwin's work that might be relevant here, because luckily, Darwin's oeuvre is so large and his life so rich that it can be mined almost endlessly. Darwin is truly a figure for the ages, whose contributions are so vast that they can shed light on the issues of our time--of any time. As I was considering what to write about this month, I was also busy--as usual--with dozens of tasks at work. One of them is membership on the Academic Planning Committee which is helping to draft the Strategic Plan for the next five years. The framework we are using is based on three major goals briefly stated as Student Engagement, Global Education, and Mission. Blessedly for him, Darwin was wealthy so he didn't have to work for a living and therefore didn't have to have an academic appointment with its attendant administrative duties--which were a plague even in the 19th century. But because of the universality of some of his experiences and ideas, I think he does have something to tell present-day educators, particularly in relation to our Academic Plan. Student Engagement On first consideration, Darwin doesn't seem to be much help on the student engagement front, because he doesn't appear to have been a very engaged student. He definitely didn't throw himself into his medical studies at Edinburgh University where he began his higher education. As for many of our students, it was family pressure that determined his course of study. His father was a physician, and his older brother was also studying medicine in Edinburgh (Desmond & Moore, 1991). But as with many students, because medicine wasn't his path, wasn't his interest, he didn't do well, he was not engaged. So then he moved on to Cambridge University and studied to be a clergyman, another occupation considered suitable for a member of his class. What made his time at Cambridge different from Edinburgh was that while doing what he was supposed to do, he also managed to do what he wanted to do. He fell in with John Henslow, a clergyman who was also Regis Professor of Botany and founder of the University's Botanic Garden. Darwin studied with Henslow, and it was also through Henslow that he was introduced to the scientific life of Cambridge, meeting such important figures as the philosopher of science, William Whewell, and Adam Sedgwick, a leading geologist of the day. Through these interactions Darwin became excited about the ideas of natural history and thus became an engaged student. This illustrates that encounters both inside and outside the classroom are essential to such engagement, an idea that is at the fore of our new Strategic Plan where service to students is considered of paramount importance. In terms of out-of-class activities, Henslow and Darwin went on field trips together to collect the insects that Darwin particularly fancied and also to botanize, collecting specimens for Henslow's herbarium which still exists and has recently received attention from a group of historians and botanists (Kohn et al., 2005). They examined the 3,654 herbarium sheets with the 10,172 plants Henslow collected and identified. They argue that these sheets clearly indicate Henslow's interest in variation within species. They note that Henslow's research on this fundamental question was at its peak during the three years Darwin attended Henslow's lectures (1829-1831). What makes this botanist's herbarium sheets of pressed plants noteworthy is that he frequently attempted to compare specimens on the same sheet. …