cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
Glad to have you here tonight. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center and for UW
Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of the Science
Alliance, the Wisconsin Alumni Association and Wisconsin Public
Television, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight I'm delighted to have Dave Nelson be the first
speaker. Dave is a professor of
biochemistry. He, up until recently, was also
the director for Center of Biology Education here.
He is co-author of one of the most popular biochemistry
textbooks out there. For those of you who know
Lehninger, Professor Lehninger died a while ago.
How long ago? >> 25 years.
25 years ago. And Michael Cox and Dave Nelson
have been keeping that name going for a long time.
Dave has also got a strong interest in the history of
science and particularly the history of biochemistry here at
UW-Madison. When the new biochemistry
addition opens up and the renovated old biochemistry
building opens up later this fall, the John Steuart Curry
murals will still be in place in no small part because of the
work that Dave put into preserving those.
Dave is going to talk tonight about science outreach at
UW-Madison, the first 50 years. It's been a delight for me to be
able to work with Dave for the last eight or nine years.
He's given me an hour of his time every week Thursday morning
at 9:00, that included my two years at NSF.
And he has great vision both looking forward and an excellent
grasp of where we have been. Please join me in welcoming
Dave Nelson to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE] >> Thanks, Tom.
We are going to work in tandem tonight.
I'm going to talk for I hope about 20 minutes about the
history of the campus' early outreach activities, and then
Tom is going to tell you about the current situation and the
future and some exciting possibilities that have come up
as a result of recent changes on campus, construction changes.
I'm talking about the first 50 years of outreach partly because
I think it's often helpful when you're trying to understand a
complicated problem to look at a simpler case.
And the complicated problem today of how the university can
coordinate its activities in talking to the public about what
we do here, specifically how scientists can do that, is
complicated by the fact that there are so many of us and
there's so much to talk about and there are so many places
that we should go. And I decided that it might be
helpful for us to look at a very simple case which is the way
things were here during the 50 years after the university
was founded in 1848. I think sometimes you get an
idea of where you've been and it helps you to formulate your
plans for where you're going. And that is in any case a
simpler case to us to look at and maybe we will be able to
combine what happened way before with what happens in the future
to make a good story for you. Let me begin by saying that when
the university first started and the Regents sat down to think
about what the university should do, one of the things they did
right away was to start making plans for a geology museum.
And I tell you about this because it's interesting the way
they did it. They actually sent out
invitations to the whole state, all over the state, asking
people, citizens, farmers that had large areas of ground that
belonged to them, to look for and bring in fossils and
geological specimens. So they actually asked the state
to come to them with the stuff that would become the teaching
materials for the geology museum.
And I want to talk about that again as we finish today.
I think it's an interesting precedent to have set.
Several legal changes during and just after the Civil War made a
big difference to the way universities were organized and
the way that they could do their outreach.
And one of them, one of the most important of them, was the
passage of the Moral Act of 1862 which established a plan for
funding land-grant colleges in all of the states.
The idea was that you got 30,000 acres worth of land for each
senator and representative that you had in Washington, and you
could use the proceeds for that land to set up a university
whose purpose was to teach the agricultural and mechanical
arts. Some states decided to make that
land-grant university a separate institution.
So we have Michigan and Michigan State.
Iowa and Iowa State. Texas and Texas A&M.
This university, after some competition with Ripon and
Lawrence, decided to make the land-grant university to be
here. And this is in a sense is
different from a lot of places. We have the two colleges,
letters and science, and the land-grant university all in the
same place. This was a one time shot of
money, and it was up to the states to figure out how to keep
going after this. And so it was a terrific start
but not a permanent solution to the problems.
At this time, just in the middle of the Civil War period
subsistence farming had been recognized to be not adequate
anymore. This country had been
industrialized, largely as a result of the Civil War, people
were switching from subsistence farming over to industrial
farming where they could make enough product to take care of
two or three people for every one that was on the farm.
And it was clear that something had to change if productivity
was going to up to allow this to happen.
And those who thought about this a little bit realized that one
had to actually figure out, scientifically, how to make
farms more productive and then teach people on farms, work with
them to develop means of making things better.
There were several university presidents, Chadbourne, Twombly,
Bascom, who were good presidents but not very interested in the
question of agriculture, and very little happened during
their tenures here that moved forward the program of
agricultural education. But then a dairyman, Hiram Smith
from Sheboygan, was appointed to the UW Board of Regents and he
immediately took over the whole planning for the Wisconsin
agricultural offerings at the university.
He essentially became the czar. And one of the thing that is
Hiram Smith did was to bring in a dean.
He called him a dean, William Henry, he actually was the dean
of a single department called the Department of Agriculture,
and he was brought in to develop a school to teach
agriculturalists how to make their products less expensive
and more nourishing and so on. When he came here the first
thing he realized was that he had a job and no students.
And his solution to that problem was really a very good one, I
think, he took the first year to simply travel around the state
of Wisconsin and talk to farmers.
Asked them what they needed, what they're problems were, how
they could be helped, what they had to offer to the university,
and he, as a result of that time, developed a set of
interactions and relationships that made a lot of difference to
him in the following years. Soon enough there were both
faculty members and students. The faculty was pretty small.
It consisted of these two people: Henry Armsby, who was
the agricultural chemist, and Trelease, who was the botany and
horticulture professor. Armsby stayed for a few years
and made some useful contributions to the university.
Trelease stayed for a few years and then left to become the
director of the St. Louis Botanical Gardens, a famous,
fabulous botanical garden. But both of them helped Dean
Henry to get the teaching of agriculture up and running here.
And they also were in on the planning and the initiation of
some several other programs that actually turned out to be early
outreach programs. There were, for example, the
farmers institutes, which were short meetings held all over
the state, two-three days long. The faculty for these things
included farmers who knew what they were doing and faculty
members who were trying to teach them what they learned in the
laboratory so that they could apply it to their agriculture.
And these things actually were very successful.
This thing on the right you can't read of course but it's a
list for all the farm institutes for the year 1892-'93 and there
are 80 some. Thousands of attendees, lots of
information passed there. In Iowa they took this idea one
step further. They actually got several
railroad cars and converted them into traveling classrooms.
Took them all over the state to talk about corn and breeds of
corn and corn yields and the things you needed to do to get
it to grow better. And thousands and thousands of
people in Iowa were able to see this right in their own
community. >> Did they get to every county
in the state? >> They didn't get to every
county in the state, but I've seen the numbers and they really
covered a lot of ground. In 1886 they started at this
university that hadn't, as far as I know, been done any place
else. They started a farm short course
which was timed so that farmers would be caught at their least
busy times in the winter. It was short so that the people
could come in for just a few weeks and get things that were
useful, and it was aimed at people who were actually working
on a farm and needed to know botany and chemistry and
veterinary medicine to do what they were doing better.
So these short courses began in '86.
The first one had 19 students. By 1910, hundreds of students
were going to these things. I once wandered around the attic
of the old Ag Hall up here and saw among the treasures that are
buried up there in the dust pictures of the graduating
classes of the farm short course.
Everybody was wearing a shirt and tie.
Formal pictures for all of them. It was a big deal and it
resulted in a lot of people being in contact with the
university who otherwise wouldn't have been able to for
lack of time. It was because it was timed in
the winter that they could do this.
The Hatch Act was another legislative change that made
outreach and the teaching of agriculture easier to do,
outreach more effective. The Hatch Act,
Hatch was a senator from Missouri, provided yearly
ongoing grants for research. The original moral grant had
simply funded the buildings, the start of a college.
This one funded the continuation of a college of agriculture
all over the country. The amount of money that was
made available was small by today's standards, but it was
enough to allow the small faculty of a place like this to
start doing research that actually was relevant to the
farmers. One of the very interesting and
clear things about this early period was that the faculty
members were going out to talk to the farmers first to ask
what do you need. And the dean, who I said had
already circulated around the state and talked to farmers, got
his small faculty together and said, look, here are the things
that are real problems for the farmers in this state and we're
going to concentrate on them. So the result was a real
interaction very early on in the planning of the research and
that meant that whatever was found by this research was
usually valuable to the farmers who had initially suggested it.
The value was made by a publication of the year of an
annual report and the publication periodically of
bulletins on some specific subject that went to the
farmers, and the result of that was that the research very
quickly got into the hands of the people for actually needed
it who could apply it immediately in the field.
This is a picture of South Hall. Some of you may know it as a
place where the dean of L&S lives, but that actually is
where the agricultural chemists and the agronomists first were.
It's actually South Hall, not North Hall.
But it soon became too small, and they eventually built the
thing we now call Ag Hall. I have just a couple of slides
to remind of you what many of you know already, namely that
these faculty members were here early in the 20th century or
late in the 19th, were doing things that really had practical
applications. So for example here's Babcock.
He was a famous biochemist, left here when he retired with the
whole state ready to elect him governor if he wanted to be.
And Babcock's principal contribution was a simple
chemical test that allowed a farmer or a dairy to look at the
milk that was being sold by the farmer to the dairy and
determine its quality. And the quality could be
determined by measuring the fat content which took away all of
the incentive for a farmer to dilute his milk and sell it by
the pound and get more money for it.
And Babcock's work, therefore, was often said to have made more
farmers honest than the bible. Here's Babcock standing with one
of his simple devices. He actually eventually designed
a small gadget that you could hold in your hands and that a
10-year-old person can operate to do this determination of
butter fat content. He also publicized this.
He didn't patent it but he put out literature that made it
possible for anybody who could read to do this, and it quickly
became an international standard for the evaluation of butter
milk. Here's another of the early
pioneers here that made contributions both in the
laboratory and on the farm. KP Link was a biochemist, it was
called agricultural chemistry then, who in the course of
working with a farmer from northern Wisconsin discovered
the reason that cows in this state periodically got a disease
in which they bled internally and died.
He located the causative agent which was a product of formed
and spoiled sweet clover. Isolated it, showed that you
could actually overcome its effect either by not feeding it
anymore or by giving the cattle an injection of vitamin K.
And in the course of doing this study he realized that he had a
compound that was also a very potent rodenticide, which he
patented. And then instead of simply
letting the patent go, he actually took this finding out
to the farms. Here he is teaching somebody to
use a trap that's been set with this warfarin.
So again his work began in the laboratory, well it actually
began on the farm when a farmer brought him a problem and then
it continued in the lab until he solved the problem and then it
went back to the farm where the problems could be addressed.
There is, as Tom said, in the biochemistry building right
across the street a famous mural by John Steuart Curry who was
the artist in residence here in the 1940s.
And the mural tends to say what the title says social benefits
of biochemical research. It shows on the left farmers and
farm animals and farm plants that have not prospered.
They have been poorly nourished. The child here has the bow legs
of rickets. Over on the right we have
healthy animals and healthy and happy children all with nice
straight legs. And in the back we have a row of
characters who are the scientists who made the
discoveries that changed this situation to this one.
It was during the period between 1915 and 1935, a tremendous
outflowing of new information about vitamins and the
importance of those vitamins for nutrition which did really
change life, not only on the farm but in the city as well.
President Van Hise was apparently the first one to have
said something that you will hear often if you stay around
here long enough, namely the statement of the Wisconsin Idea
in 1904. I shall never be content until
the beneficent influence of the university reaches every home in
the state. We talk very often about this
ideal. And much of what Tom will have
to tell you about is our efforts to actually meet this challenge
of taking the things that we learn in the laboratory here and
bringing them so far out of the university that they actually
reach every corner of the state or even further.
Van Hise's idea is a hundred years old and we still work on
it. One of the changes that's taken
place during the period of the first 75 years of the ag school
was the development of agricultural extension.
And I don't whether Tom plans to talk to you about this or not,
but it's certainly an example of the way a university can
organize to bring its research out into the world where it can
do somebody some good. There was an agricultural
extension program actually developed early in England in
1866. As far as I know the first one
here in this country was in 1891 at Rutgers where a few courses
were taught as ag extension. These courses eventually
included children because the teachers in the courses realized
the best way to get farmers to participate was to get their
children involved first and then the farmers would be more likely
to participate. These ag extension courses went
beyond field farming, and they took into account all of the
things that a farm family has to do to be efficient and effective
in their jobs. And so they had a big element of
education for women who were often the people who ran the
economy of the farm. Ag economics was taught to them
and home economics, in a broader sense, became one of the topics
that was covered in ag extension.
Seaman Knapp is the guy who is generally considered the father
of extension, and he was a Texan who set up the plan in Texas to
send a county agent out to each county in the state and have
that agent be sort of the antenna for the university to
find out what was needed, what was wanted in the community so
that he could bring if back to the university and ask somebody
to help with it. There were farm bureaus set up.
First in New York in the late 1890s.
And the idea there was to have an organization for farmers that
was like the Kiwanis for businessmen, where they get
together and talk about their problems at a regular time and
solve them together. Another piece of legislation
that had a big impact was the Smith-Lever Act of 1914.
Two senators here shown put up the money to fund cooperative
extension service in all the states.
And one by one the states actually set up to do this.
Now I think all of the 50 states have extension programs.
So that's briefly what things were like here during the first
50 years or so of the university and of the College of
Agriculture. And it seems to me when you look
at what was going on, at how the outreach was organized, there
are certain principles that fall out, and I think those
principles are worth using when you think about the future of
outreach on this campus. One of them was that the process
of learning was reciprocal. It wasn't the teachers, the
professors going out and telling the farmers what to do.
That wouldn't have worked anyway, they wouldn't have paid
any attention. They didn't respect the kind of
silliness that goes on in the university.
So it was reciprocal. They actually went out and they
asked people what do you need. What are your problems?
The problems were brought in here, made the focus of
research, and very often the solution turned out to be not
only a solution to the specific problem, but it very often
allowed one to do something more like the discovery of the
rodenticide warfarin. Another of the features of that
early outreach was mutual hospitality.
The people from the university went out to the farms, the
farmers came here for those short courses for example.
There was a lot of going back and forth.
And I think that that was a critical part of making what was
going on in the research laboratories germane to what was
going on on the farms. The process of outreach was
informed by UW research, and so it was a genuine use of
scientific principles to improve agriculture.
And because it actually worked, it was valuable.
The farmers knew it was valuable both to their families and to
the state economy. And because it was valuable it
was valued and continued. I think one of the significant
advantages of the smallness of the outreach program then was
that it was possible to tailor the program pretty precisely to
the audience that you were concerned with.
And so the short courses could be planned at exactly that time
of the year when farmers had time.
And other courses, the 4-H programs could be planned and
integrated with the school programs so that the children
had time for these things. The outreach here was not aimed
at a specific demographic but it was actually for everybody.
It included kids, it included working farmers, it included men
and women, it included the whole collection of people who needed
and wanted the benefit of research at the university.
And finally, and surprisingly, it was really quite inexpensive.
I haven't cited the dollar values of these several pieces
of legislation, but these were not very luxuriously funded
programs. They were run on the cheap.
But it was possible because much of the work that was being done
was done by faculty who were paid by the university anyway or
by volunteers who didn't need to be paid.
So if we fast forward to 2011 now, I'll turn this discussion
over to Tom, but I hope that some of this history will inform
what we think about in the future.
Now the campus is loaded with people who do outreach.
If you exclude those whose job formally is extension and just
talk about people who are members of the faculty and staff
who have a part of their job be outreach, it's well over 200
people. And if you look at where the
outreach is being done, the science outreach I'm talking
about now, it comes from all over the place, all of the
colleges and most of the departments.
There was a survey about 10 years ago asking faculty what
they thought about outreach. And I would have guessed that
that survey would have revealed the attitude that outreach was a
lot of trouble and it interfered with other things that faculty
did. But in fact that's not at all
what it showed. It turned out that people who
did outreach really enjoyed it, found that it had improved their
own teaching and in some cases had informed their own research.
And so it's valuable to the faculty here.
Now, as then, funding for outreach is a problem.
It's varied, its sources are varied.
The sources generally are small in amount.
There are some programs on campus, like the Baldwin
Wisconsin Idea grant, which interestingly comes from the
dean of the College of Agriculture, Ira Baldwin, and
his wife who set aside money for this purpose.
There are now government grants that can be obtained in
connection with the research grants as supplements to the
research grants and those are one of the places where science
outreach is being funded now. There is no place on campus, as
of six months ago let's say or three months ago, no single
locus on campus where you can come and know that you'll hear
about science. This is an unusual thing you're
attending now. This is one of the very few
things that provides for the public a regular venue at a
regular time where you can count on a discussion of something
related to science. There aren't very many such
venues on campus, and Tom will tell you about a wonderful
development here that has offered the opportunity to make
a single place or a single group of places the venue.
So I'm going to turn the mic over to Tom now and hope that
he'll tell us about the next 75 years.
I don't know about 75, but maybe five to seven.
I'd like to thank Dave for giving such a splendid
background of the origins here at UW-Madison.
If Dave had been in another department besides biochemistry,
if he were in physics he might talk about radio and the
launching of Wisconsin Public Radio and eventually Wisconsin
Public Television. If he was in the School of
Medicine and Public Health, he could talk about the early days
of public outreach in cities and in rural communities across
Wisconsin. If he was in physics, he could
have talked about the Ingersoll Physics Museum launched in 1917,
one of the earliest examples of a hands-on museum where the
exhibits were intended, designed to be interactive.
So we have many, many places on campus that are very proud, and
justifiably so, of their long history of public engagement in
science. Today I get to talk with you
about what we're calling now the science constellation and the
idea that the Madison campus can be viewed as a constellation of
science. And I wanted to start off with
this intro and to say thanks to many of you who have been coming
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We're almost done with our fifth
year here. We started this on February 22nd
of 2006. And it's a splendid thing to be
able to see a program that endures and with the help of
Wisconsin Public Television can go to places all over the state.
And because I work for Cooperative Extension, I will
always ask for questions first. So if there are any questions
that you would like to ask first.
There's even a thing of chalk. Yes?
So if I understood the first speaker correctly, either
Lawrence or Ripon colleges might have become state sponsored
institutions if they had started the land-grant schools there.
Correct. Yes.
So the question was either Lawrence or Ripon could have
become the state sponsored agricultural college and that is
a possibility. That's actually the model that
you have with Cornell and Syracuse.
Cornell is a land-grant university, Syracuse has the
school of forestry for the state of New York.
Dane County provided $40,000 for the starting of the ag
school here. >> Dave is saying that Dane
County provided $40,000 to help, I was going to say help convince
or sway the state legislature, Dave used the B word.
Any other questions? Okay.
The idea of the science constellation goes back, in my
personal experience, at least to 1997.
I was struck by the fact that we had all these yellow school
buses driving through campus. And where were they heading?
To the state capitol which I think today has about 80,000
visitors. And I thought it's really
unfortunate we don't have any place here to lure them
every day so that they would have a destination on campus
just as they do at the state capitol.
At that time, the new building of the foundation, the UW
Foundation, had just opened up and their whole first floor was
empty. It was their surge space, and
I went to talk to somebody there and I said, I know you're going
to need this in five or ten years but would you be
interested in setting up a hands-on science center here?
And they said, well no, not really, this is our surge space,
would you be interested in the dairy barn?
And I said, sure, what dairy barn?
And I had been on this campus as a PhD student starting in 1982,
and I had no idea this dairy barn, and it was right across
the street, right across Campus Drive.
Well come to find it this is the cradle of the discovery of
vitamins, it's where Henry Lardy and his major professor
developed work on artificial insemination in dairy cows.
It is now a national historic landmark.
At that time it was, and it still is, a not very well used
building. But that was the beginning of
it. And Ken Smith's one son
suggested that we call it the museum, not of the museum of
life science, but the museum of living sciences.
Is that the same as the stock pavilion?
No. The stock pavilion is brick with
a green tile roof, and it is on this side of the overpass.
And the dairy barn is this white building with a silo with a
little conical hat. It could be much more prominent,
if we painted it red I think people would know what it is.
In 1999, an interesting thing happened.
We had the university sesquicentennial and as part of
that there were four major open house events and one of them was
in science and that was called the life sciences lunch.
And we held it at the stock pavilion, and that was the first
time in my experience, and I started here as an extension
specialist in 1991, that we had gotten together with a whole
bunch of people beyond our departments.
So that was the first eye opening experience for me to see
what we'd be able to do. The following year we did the
UW Madison Open House Summer Celebration.
We couldn't call it a sesquicentennial, and I don't
know what the Latin is for 151, so we'll just call it open
house. And then it dropped.
We just stopped doing it, which was unfortunate.
In 2002 I had a chance to do a cultural tourism project with
the Bolz Center for Arts administration which is in the
School of Business. And that is pretty interesting
because it raises this whole idea of can the university
campus be a cultural tourism destination.
And if you know Harvard or the service academies or the
University of Cambridge or the University of oxford in Britain
or Stanford University, you know that these are historic places
that people go for the architecture, for the history,
for the culture, oftentimes for the science, and that's
something that I think this place very well qualifies for
also. In 2003 we had a chance to set
up science expeditions. The planning for group for that
morphed into the Science Alliance, and Ken Smith set up
the science.wisc.edu web portal.
And it was the first portal on a par for arts or athletics that
we had for a web portal for science outreach.
In 2004 Dave and I organized a conference on the future of
science outreach. And then in '05 we morphed the
Museum of Living Sciences to the Wisconsin Idea of Science
Center, and that was because we got some advice from Alan Fish
who said it would be a good idea to de-link the idea of a venue
on campus for science outreach and rehabbing the dairy barn.
I thought originally that you got two good ideas and they'd be
better linked together, and Alan pointed out actually you have
two good ideas and they're actually stronger separated than
together. And then, of course, we started
Wednesday Nite at the Lab with the Alumni Association and PLATO
in '06. And '06 was a pretty amazing
year because that was the year all these announcements came out
that there would be not only the Wisconsin Institutes for
Discovery but the Morgridges had committed $50 million and the
plans for the first floor started coming out.
And that the first floor wasn't going to be just another
research floor, it was going to be what today we know, here we
are three weeks into the Town Center of the Wisconsin
Institutes for Discovery. The students also voted that
year to tear down and build up a new Union South, which is going
to be pretty splendid also. In '07 the Science Alliance
started a series that ran all year called the
New Constellation Seminar. And was the built around the
theme that Dave Nelson articulated and that is the
clock is ticking. We have these splendid new
physical venues on the drawing board, funded and they're going
to be built and they're underway.
When the doors open, will we be ready?
Will we have the programmatic infrastructure, organizational
infrastructure, the social infrastructure to match the new
buildings? And out of that came this idea
of not only of a new constellation of buildings, but
looking at the whole campus as a science constellation, and
that's in contrast to a science center.
I've had conversations with Ken Smith since 1991, and Ken and I
had lots and lots of conversations as we started
working on the barn project. These are four big points that
Ken articulated. One is envision and project the
whole campus as a destination for exploration.
It sounds pretty straightforward but not very many campuses do
that. As a matter of fact, if you know
of any campuses that do that, let me know.
He also said you got to be intentional about hospitality
and access. You got to think about this.
You got to learn from your mistakes.
You got to invest in it and you have to think about how is this
going to fit for your learners, people who are coming from the
neighborhoods, from the city of Madison, from Dane County and
from all over the state of Wisconsin.
He impressed on me that new media supplement but do not
supplant the old media. So when things come up like web
or social media, it doesn't mean that you forget about the old
ones but you use those to supplement what you have going.
And that you use communications, not only to communicate, but to
build a community. Many of you are familiar with
the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
It started in 1967 and it has spawned probably 200 science
centers like it. Hands-on, interactive exhibits
not based primarily on collections but based on
interactions with exhibits. Most people don't know that the
same year and across the bay at UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Hall
of Science opened. The Lawrence Hall of Science is
named for a gentleman by the name of Lawrence who first won
a Nobel Prize at the University of California Berkeley.
It was for the, help me here, accelerometer, accelerator, yes,
thank you. [INAUDIBLE]
101. Also at the UC system
at UC San Diego, about nearly 20 years ago now, the Birch
Aquarium opened up at the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography which is part of UC San Diego.
And what's interesting about that place is the exhibits are
mostly about the research going on at the Scripps.
So if you go to Lawrence, at least the times I've been there,
the emphasis hasn't been solely on the research going on on the
Berkeley campus, but that is the emphasis at the Birch Aquarium.
It's not just about science, it's about research, it's about
how we figure out what we don't know yet, and the exhibits and
the interaction goes from the stuff that historically and
currently is being done at the Scripps.
The Burke Museum is at the University of Washington is a
natural history museum that I visited, and I think the thing
that impressed me about that is how to handle controversy
because the Burke Museum has a very strong anthropology
component. And in the last 20 years very
few sciences have been more controversial than anthropology,
especially when dealing with Native American artifacts.
It's one of the powerful things about the being on a campus is
that we don't quiver and quake in the face of controversy.
The Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota is
another natural history museum, but what's interesting about the
Bell is that they are trying to transform themselves into a
portal for the whole campus. The Twin Cities campus has got
the St. Paul campus for the agricultural and life sciences
and then the Minneapolis campus for much of the rest.
The Bell Museum currently is on the Minneapolis side, but they
hope to move to the St. Paul side and expand beyond
natural history to all things environmental.
And they also want to project themselves as the portal to
campus, the entire campus. The MIT Museum is an interesting
place because, one, it's at MIT, two, it's the only museum at
MIT, and three, they have a curatorial function.
In other words, the prototypes that are invented and tested at
MIT get deposited at the MIT Museum.
So they've got great exhibits because they've got the
originals right there. And then they do many of the
same things that other science centers and museums do.
They're on campus and they have this focus on engaging the
public in the life of the university.
The Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill started in the '30s, and in the last few years they
have been converting themselves into both a planetarium and a
science center. Again, the idea that some
universities are recognizing, if we had a central building, we
could welcome people to this central destination and
introduce them to science throughout the campus.
And finally, the Hatfield Marine Science Center is a research
center that has a visitors center at Oregon State
University. It's not at the Corvallis
campus. It's across the mountains at
Newport. But it's another example, very
similar in my mind to the Birch Aquarium, where you get
introduced to science through the research projects at the
Hatfield. One of the amazing things about
inviting people to come to a research campus, you remember
they only have so many days or so many hours a year that
they're going to be able to say am I going to go to science
museum, am I going to science center, am I going to go to a
campus, how should I spend that time?
Why come here? Here are some things to think
about. The experience.
The strength of the university campuses I don't think is ever
going to be an interactive scientific exhibit.
I think our strength is always going to be interactions with
scientists rather than interactions with exhibits.
And we have a lot of scientists and a lot of different flavors.
I don't think our strength is going to be solely in informing
but it's going to be in encouraging people to understand
the nature of exploration and not just in explaining but
getting them to feel how do we go about testing ideas through
experimentation and other means. So the experience actually is
the epistemology that among the most important things and most
valuable things that universities can share with
visitors are the ways that scientists view and do science,
and we do science not as learning all the stuff that we
already know but digging into stuff that nobody has ever known
before. So our aspiration is to invite
people to come to campus to experience science, as exploring
the unknown within and with a community of researchers.
And these are things that I hope are echoing some of the themes
that Dave mentioned starting back in 1850.
So one of the handouts that you have and I'll go through real
quickly now are what I consider the five core components of the
science constellation concept. The first one is the brand name
and the concept of the UW Madison science constellation.
So if a science center is a hub and spoke, and here's the hub,
we don't have a hub. I don't think we're going to get
a hub. But if you take all the venues
that we have open them up, you end up with a spangling of
venues across the campus map. If you take a gold star and
stick it on the campus map at the site of the 30, 35, 36
scientific venues on or around campus, that's where the idea of
constellation comes in. The human brain, the human mind
has the ability to take a spangling of stars and apply a
pattern to it, and that pattern is very useful in helping people
navigate. That's the metaphor.
The next core component is the website science.wisc.edu.
And the reason for that is it's a portal for welcoming people to
campus. It's a large, complex
institution. On the third Wednesday of
January this is going to be about the eighth largest city in
Wisconsin because we have about 60,000 people here, even more if
you count the hospital. We need to be able to organize
if we intend to synergize. And one of the great new
inventions in the last 20 years has been the idea of the web as
a portal. We want to be able to learn from
our colleagues in arts and in athletics.
The common denominator is who really wants to welcome people
to campus? Certainly the arts people do,
and certainly the athletics people do.
I would argue that the hospital folks do also.
So we've watched what happens at other universities and at that
university and how the folks in arts and the folks in athletics
organize their enterprises to be able to welcome people to
campus. It's a very interesting thing
you might want to do sometime when you have a week to blow and
nothing to do, get a list from the National Science Foundation
of the top universities based on research budget and go through
each one, the website of each one, and ask yourself where do
you first run into the arts link, where do you first run
into the athletics link and where do you first run into the
science outreach link. In the last three months we've
been able to convert science. wisc.edu
from one of the old web 1.0 to a web 2.0 format
from informing visitors to also being able to engage
them in the conversation. We have a long way to go with
this, but it's a pretty powerful thing to start to see that the
web is something that's no longer just a bulletin board but
also a forum and a conversation starter.
And if you think this is a good idea, so do other people.
If you have a chance, go to the Smithsonian Institution's
website sometime. It's one of the shortest
websites I know, SI.edu, and there they have a special
website for visitors. It's SI.edu/visit.
They have a complex problem too because they have a complex
institution. They have 19 places, 17 of them
in Washington, DC, two of them in New York City plus the
National Zoo. So they have dedicated a
significant amount of resources for their visitor website.
And that's the kind of thing that I think we will want to be
able to do. I put this in here because the
National Research Council came out with a report two years ago
called Learning Science and Informal Environments: People,
Places and Pursuits. It was basically asking what's
the impact of informal science learning.
What's the impact of science museums and science centers and
websites and other modes of informal learning.
And the thing that struck me the most was universities were not
specifically mentioned. Since I do science outreach for
informal science learners at a university, I was wondering why
that was. I still don't know.
But the other thing was there was no hue and cry from
universities. Now maybe they had better things
to do. But I think it's interesting
because it may be a case of people don't even recognize what
we have yet. It may be a case of what is
hiding in plain sight. So along those lines, I'd like
to keep saying that's one of the things about calling a place a
science constellation. It gives you a name to be able
to express what might otherwise be hiding in plain sight.
If you don't think that's important, think of the impact
that Dave mentioned: the Wisconsin Idea.
I went to school here, I work here, I like this place about as
much as any place on the planet, but I don't think this place has
any greater commitment to public engagement in science than other
public land-grant universities. But we do have this thing called
the Wisconsin Idea. It is a metaphor.
It's a handle. It's a brand name and it's
incredibly powerful. If you ask yourself how powerful
is a handle? What do you have when your
suitcase handle breaks? You just have luggage.
You got to lug that thing around.
It's very powerful to have an idea that helps people organize
and carry an idea. Here's the third of the five
core components of the science constellation: the science
outfitter. I use this metaphor because I
remember the first time I went to the Boundary Waters, and you
look at a map of the Boundary Waters and it's all these lakes
and portages and lakes and portages and you can get lost
very fast. It's very helpful to be able to
talk to somebody who's been there.
And that could be either your buddy who's been there or you
can go talk to a science outfitter.
Likewise, the campus is a daunting place.
There's lots of amazement here but it's also a maze.
And so the idea behind the science outfitters is to say can
we capture all the amazement and cut the maze?
One of the great things that's happening is that the UW-Madison
Visitor and Information Programs is doing this.
They already have had in place for several years a field trip
specialist, and she has worked first at Red Gym and then at
21 North Park Street but in April she's going to move
to Union South. That's a big deal because Union
South is right at the heart of the research campus now,
research in the sciences and engineering.
Across the street is the WID building, Wisconsin Institutes
for Discovery building and the Town Center, and the Visitor and
Information Programs folks and WARF are collaborating to fund
this new science outreach specialist job.
And they will be working at the welcome desk at the WID Town
Center. So we're going to go from, on
December 1st, there was no welcoming desk for visitors
coming to campus for science to, on April 16th, there will be two
places where you can come and be welcomed, get oriented, get
updated and be sent on your way to the various places around
campus. Again, this is in some ways
learning from the visitors center at the Smithsonian Castle
in Washington, DC. It always helps to be able to
point out when other people are doing things, especially places
like the Smithsonian that have that much cache.
The Smithsonian Castle used to the Smithsonian, now there's 20
other places. If you go there today on the
National Mall, the major function of the Smithsonian red
brick castle is the visitors center.
And it opens at 8:30 in the morning.
Almost all the other Smithsonian venues open at 10:00.
They have a concept of hospitality because you need to
be able to welcome people early so they can get oriented.
The fourth core component is the Science Alliance and that's
because, as Dave pointed out, this is a very diverse place.
It's large. It's complex.
If we don't have a reason to know each other, we may not know
each other. And so we would miss all these
opportunities to collaborate and corporate and work together and
any other word that you want to say for synergy and working
together. It started as the planning group
for science expeditions. Science expeditions has become a
trellis upon which we grow the science outreach community.
And we now have 420 or more subscribers on the list served.
And we hope soon to have a newsletter so that we can while
we're building or capacity to welcome people to campus we're
also building the social and organizational infrastructure of
science outreachers on campus. And the website is going to play
a key role on that also because of the new abilities for social
media. It's going to be helpful not
only for visitors but for those of us in science outreach.
And finally, the fifth one is the Office of Science Outreach.
It's the formal counterpart of the Science Alliance.
The Science Alliance we just make up.
It's a self-forming group. But the Office of Science
Outreach actually has a commission from the provost.
Their major role is enhancing science outreach for K-12
schools, students, teachers and school districts, but they can
also play a key role in being a point of first contact for our
science colleagues at institutions around the state.
This is one of the big themes that Dave made and that is the
reciprocity of hospitality. We need to be able to welcome
people here so that we can be welcomed into communities around
Wisconsin. Not only that, the university
has a college of agricultural and life sciences that has
agriculture research stations scattered at 10 or 11 places
around the state. That's really important,
politically as well as scientifically.
We don't have that kind of constellation of locations
around the state for science outreach in the broadest sense.
We do for the agriculture aspects but not for all the
rest. What if we could set up enduring
relationships with the science museums and science centers and
children's museums and all these others throughout the state of
Wisconsin because they have something that we really prize.
They have community venue and community connections.
I hope we have something that they prize.
And that is the research and outreach resources of this large
research university. And that's where this idea of
being able to use the theme of sharing research, sharing venue
and sharing in the discovery comes into play where in a few
years we might be able to say here's the map of Wisconsin and
here are the stars on the map where the University of
Wisconsin Madison and these other science institutions have
enduring relationships where we can share in the research, share
in the venue and learners of all ages can share in the discovery.
By the numbers. Here's some things at UW-Madison
that I think are really important.
More so than the buildings and more so than the programs is the
people. We have over 2,000 faculty,
6,000 academic staff, 12,000 graduate students,
28,000 undergraduates. There are 52,000 alumni living
in Dane County and 141,000 living alumni in Wisconsin.
Let's just say about half of them are in science and
engineering. Let's say we only get 3% of
those. I use 3% because that's the
percentage of milk fat in whole milk.
[LAUGHTER] And if you've ever tasted
whole milk versus skim milk, you know that 3% can make
a big difference. Actually it's 3.25%,
but I quibble. So one of the things that we
have to offer is this extraordinary number and range
in age and experience and in fields of interest that I think,
because it's so hard for other science museums and science
centers so match this, I think we have a duty to be able to
share science this way through these people and these places.
Some more by the numbers. You probably read the story of
about six weeks ago that UW-Madison's research budget
recently surpassed $1 billion a year.
You know that our football team is ranked fourth.
We're ranked third and have been second, third or fourth for the
last 30 years in size of research budget.
UW-Madison is not alone. We were third in 2008 at
$881 million, and $7 million behind us was UCLA.
That just goes to show what a close run thing these are.
Look at this number of what it could be if every university
could take its campus map, put the stars on its campus map of
all its science venues and programs, organize itself,
project it as a destination for exploration and welcome people
every day in an organized way to come experience science as
exploring the unknown. There are 29 US universities
that do $500 million of research a year or more.
There are 60 US universities that do more than
$300 million a year. And there are 131 that do
$100 million of research a year or more.
How many teams are there in the NFL?
32. >> 32.
And those universities train a lot of people.
Now the numbers here are all universities, not just the
research universities, but when you get an idea that there are
about a half million people a year that get bachelor's degrees
in science and 120,000 people a year who get master's degrees in
science and engineering and about 33,000 a year that get
doctorate degrees in science and engineering, there's a lot of
people out there. There are 50,000 postdocs now in
sciences and engineering at research universities around the
country. Because of the time I'm going to
skip these, but I do want to show you this one and that is
this is an example from the School of Medicine and Public
Health. A science constellation can be
on campus but it can also be statewide.
This is a map showing how the School of Medicine and Public
Health partners with clinics and other academic campuses around
the state to help in the training of new physicians and
the updating of old physicians and the caring for patients both
when they're sick and also in preventive measures and in
public health. So this idea of being able to
use what we have but upgrade it by synergy is a powerful
metaphor that other people use in many other fields.
So the science constellation is taking the science center idea
and breaking it open. It's turning it inside out.
Instead of being a central hub, it's the entire campus as a
destination for exploration. In order to do that, you need to
be able to welcome people every day to come to campus to
experience science as exploring the unknown.
The great thing about the new venues, the Wisconsin Institutes
for Discovery, Union South opening in April, biochemistry
opening in the fall, the School of Human Ecology opening next
year, as well as some of the other venues including the one
you're in right now, the key thing about the Institutes for
Discovery and Union South, they're going to be open every
day until at least 10:00 and on the weekends.
And Union South will be open not only on Saturday but also on
Sunday. We will be moving from having
science outreach available at banker's hours to having science
outreach available at Barnes and Noble's hours, at night and on
the weekend. And the miracle thing about
coming here to campus at night and on the weekend, what can you
find? >> Parking.
Parking. What else can you find?
Parking. And what's the third thing it
overcomes? Parking.
But we have to help learners to envision and find and navigate
and connect to this. It's this old idea of couldn't
see the forest for the trees. That's what we have here, that's
the opportunity we have is to help project it and enable
people to envision all the resources we have here and to be
able to see what they are throughout the state.
So the final thing is we hope if we can make this fly here as a
pilot model that it's the kind of thing that other research
universities would be able to do with their place because it
doesn't necessarily depend on new bricks and mortar, it
depends on being able to collaborate and cooperate and
synergize existing, it depends on the ability to see what is
hiding in plain sight. And with that, why don't I stop
and take your questions for me or for Dave.
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