Campus: isolate or integrate?

In the post-Brexit, Trumpian world, several things have become clear, or at least are becoming clearer. For many of us, a key realisation is that statistics and models predicting the mood of the society are often misleading, and sometimes brazenly wrong. Human feelings and emotions, frustrations and fears, cannot be captured in a clean mathematical model that looks at data, trends and statistics. Those who try to model the human behaviour, from modelling stock markets to collective social response, have known this for a long time. But for many of us, these movements are a rude awakening. Human behaviour cannot be simply predicted with high accuracy all the time.

For natural and physical scientists, technologists and quantitative thinkers, it is also an important lesson to recognise the importance of understanding the role of empathy, frustration, fear and human connection that cannot be described by any equation or a fundamental theorem. The lesson to those of us, who try to create solutions for society at large is to learn and listen to those who do not fit our bins, and can not be described by data based on prior experience.

Brexit and the US elections remind us to engage across disciplines, to learn from not just scientists, but also social scientists and humanists, to read philosophy and sociology in addition to mathematics and statistics. We need to open our academic borders, not build walls, if we are to understand each other.

Unfortunately campuses across the world, and most certainly in Pakistan, are built with an approach to isolate rather than to integrate or engage. The science block with its labs, sometimes old and sometimes with a shiny new glass, is in its own corner. The humanities block is far, both in true distance and in spirit. Students in sciences either do not have to read classic works, and discuss philosophy, ethics, history and sociology, or if they are forced to do so because of some requirement, they do comply grudgingly, and often find short cuts. The campus physical architecture and the architecture of the curriculum both makes it highly improbable for students of different disciplines to interact with and learn from each other. Most importantly, interaction of science and engineering students, with faculty from social sciences and humanities is non-existent. The university architecture is doing little to help that.

I understand that the architecture of universities represent a previous era where disciplinary boundaries were paramount, and a single-minded focus on the discipline was all that mattered. But the world has changed, and while it is not feasible to change the buildings, or build labs in the department of history, there is every reason to encourage interaction between students, and students and faculty if we want to create people who have empathy and understanding of each other.

A starting point to build bridges may start with humanities classes with guest lectures from colleagues in science, and science classes that focus not just on the technical aspects but also the society and its people. The point is to not to dilute the material, or to lose the rigour, but to ensure that students get to see the world behind the high walls of disciplines. While seminars by outside guests are increasingly common at our universities, university-wide seminars that bring together interdisciplinary experts are rare. University-wide lectures on topics ranging from ethics of biotechnology to the environmental impact of urban development (and in our case, CPEC) are other avenues to bring together students and scholars from various disciplines. Incentivising faculty through small grants that require investigators from science and humanities disciplines to pursue joint projects is another avenue. There is no single prescription for every institution, except a realisation that the status quo of isolationism in training is extremely dangerous.

Fear of the outsider and construction of high walls is the fad these days. Universities should be the last place to follow this trend. We need to engage, not isolate.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 22^nd, 2016.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.