Broadening the Existing Intergenerational Structure of Scholarly Development in Chemistry

Who discovers new knowledge, what are the structures that support its discovery, and what infrastructures enable new discoverers to join in? The answers to these questions vary wildly across different disciplines. New knowledge in the classics, for example, takes place primarily, if not nearly exclusively, at academic institutions. New knowledge in chemistry, on the other hand, is created in academic departments as well as in the laboratories of companies-Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Dupont, Dow, Abbott, General Electric, Procter and Gamble, 3M, et al.-and increasingly at places known as biotech, materials, or nanotechnology start up companies. Such corporate settings are a significant source of employment for our disciplines annual out put of about 2,200 PhD students, whom we consider to be the most important products of our scholarly research programs. In academic settings, the models for doing discovery research vary considerably. At the University of Michigan, there are thirty-five faculty members in the Department of Classics and twenty-four graduate students in classical studies. If you removed the students from the classics department today, it is safe to say that new knowledge in the classics would be discovered tomorrow. In chemistry, although we have about the same number of faculty (thirty-nine), we also have, in residence, 290 graduate students, seventy-five postdoctoral students, and a steady state of about 100 undergraduate research students. If students were removed from chemistry department today, we daresay that new knowledge in chemistry would be reduced considerably, if not disappear, tomorrow. Although the goals for how new scholars are educated in these two departments probably overlap greatly, the tactics for how scholarship is developed must clearly be different. In chemistry, there is a historically robust and finely grained model of scholarly development. This model casts a broad net into the first-year college classroom and, within the same eight- to twelve-year time period that has been used for 150 years, transforms some of these novices into stewards of the chemical profession. First-year undergraduate chemistry courses resound with the rhetorical designs of "discovery laboratories" and "teaching chemistry by doing chemistry," and, accompanied by the widespread availability of undergraduate research experiences, the chemistry discipline provides actively and early the opportunities for the next generation to display its stewardship potential. When undergraduate chemistry research students join research groups, they are residing immediately in an intergenerauonal community of widely ranging experiences. And while a faculty member (the research advisor) sets the overall direction and scope of the work and ensures adequate space, money, and scientific resources, the graduate students (at doctoral departments) are often responsible for supervising the day-to-day scientific and scholarly development of the undergraduate students. This is only one link in the chain, though, since a faculty research director interacts with all of the students to varying degrees, postdoctoral scientists take on certain immediate tasks on a day-by-day basis in the laboratories, senior graduate students mentor their junior colleagues, and undergraduates are moving through the infrastructure of scholarly development according to their own gilts and experiences. In chemistry, developing disciplinary stewardship for conducting research is a highly evolved and finely articulated process where the epistemologieal knowledge is inherited through the intergenerational community described here. Chemical Sciences at the Interface of Education If the strategy of forming intergenerational communities has evolved in response to the need to advance disciplinary stewardship for conducting scientific research, can this deliberate design be adapted to advance understanding in areas where this system did not arise? …