Discovery (in its many forms)

Dear Friends and Colleagues, I begin with the kind of regular messaging to which you might have grown accustomed, I want to acknowledge something that I’m sure is already on your minds: Last week was rough. It will take some time before we can fully evaluate what happened, but I’m very aware—thanks to those of you who have given me insight into your particular situations—of how difficult Tuesday morning was for our community during the emergency alert. You hid, you locked, you reassured your students, you struggled with incomplete information. We know there are takeaways and lessons learned; we are focusing on those tasks now and in the very near future. For now, I simply want to say I’m so sorry that our community had to experience those extraordinarily difficult moments. No graceful segue from those comments to my usual messaging exists, so I’ll simply jump into what’s on my mind. Someone asked me the other day what the purpose is of these every-so-often missives (always a good question to ask in academia). Is it to acknowledge our fears that linger from last week’s incident? Perhaps, but I hope not to have opportunities for more of that. Do I want you to know who the provost is? Yes. Do I want to let folks know that I’m a real person and not an anonymous administrative mannequin? Absolutely. Do I hope to spark conversation, with me or others? Of course. After that, I’m not sure. And while the parsing of language is almost always part of our faculty arsenal, there is nothing magic about the content of these letters. I hope that my thoughts don’t come across solely as homilies (though that wouldn’t be terrible); I simply tend to write whatever is catching my ear across campus—so you’re unlikely to read breaking news here (we could all probably use a break from that these days anyway). My thoughts these days have been focused a lot on the idea of discovery. We use that word a lot around here—as we should! But I’m not just talking about the kind of discovery that shows up where you’d expect (publications, performances, patients, patents), although of course those matter enormously. I’ve been focused more on the kind of discovery, often incremental but not necessarily so, that happens in the everyday work we do—with students, within our communities, and, importantly, with one another as academics and colleagues. I love classroom discovery—the light bulbs that flicker before they fully turn on to embrace a concept, or perhaps the moment that students realize that it’s completely possible to hold two contradictory ideas in their head at once. Or when we watch students come to understand that something they’ve always assumed was obviously true is more nuanced, more complicated… or maybe just flat-out wrong. And yes, sometimes we can be flat-out wrong. I once listened to a colleague ask a classroom a yes-or-no question. The immediate response: “Yes.” My colleague paused and asked, “That’s great, but do you have a shorter answer?” It was funny, yes, but it also captured something essential: Real discovery doesn’t always fit into tidy binaries, as much as we might at times wish it would. Sometimes the answer is shorter, sometimes it is longer, and sometimes it just… isn’t. And the lack of a tight answer, at least to me as I straddle the social sciences and the humanities, can sometimes be a comfort, at least in the sense that mystery means that there is more to discover. I’ve been focusing on classroom discovery as something reserved for students, which is obviously wrong; I trust that you have experienced moments in which you learn from students as part of your own discovery process. This happens to me frequently, usually by giving me great ideas to write about, but I can recall a time when I had an embarrassing amount of ego in the mix and a student unintentionally crushed it. Many years ago, I drew on the board a diagram that struck me as a particularly clever juxtaposition of two concepts. Now that I recall it, I think I thought this idea was beyond clever; maybe even elegant, and particularly so in my own head. I asked the class if they saw the hidden elegance of my diagram, though I hope I used different words. After a few solid tries, one student offered a fantastic explanation that was more elegant by a mile than what I had in mind. My response: “Yes, that’s right… and there’s another correlation as well,” as if I had planned it that way all along. I confessed to the student later how they had been a step ahead of me. We’re still in touch decades later, and I still occasionally bring up that moment, usually to their embarrassment (and mine). We know discovery also happens through service. For me, that has often meant clinical legal education, when students who work directly with clients who otherwise wouldn’t have access to representation discover both the complexity of the law and the humanity that it attempts to order at its core, as well as something important about themselves as they serve. Across our medical campus, clinical faculty and trainees experience discovery every day—not only in research breakthroughs, but through patient care itself, where learning and service are inseparable. And service takes many forms—reading a colleague’s work, mentoring a junior scholar, grabbing lunch with someone from another school on campus—each of these moments can lead to incredible discovery. Finally, research is one of the more obvious buckets of discovery. Discovery-as-research is everywhere on our campus. Consider Rohit Pappu’s work, as he shapes the way we understand the basic principles of cellular organization and disease. Or in Chemistry, where Jen Heemstra and her colleagues are designing programmable biomolecules that open entirely new possibilities for therapeutics and diagnostics. Across the humanities, our colleagues are uncovering histories that have been overlooked, asking new questions of familiar texts, and reconsidering our understanding of culture, power, and identity—work that changes how we see the present as much as the past. (At his recent chair installation, Markus Baer’s quote of Mark Twain was apropos: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”) And now a question—and I’m asking a real question sincerely; it is not intended to be rhetorical. Do you remember when you first discovered the thing that pulled you into your field? The problem, the scientific question, the case, the piece of literature, the clinical insight? Do you still feel that spark? What would it take for you to feel it again? Can you manifest that feeling now? I hope so. Our students, the University, the academy, and the world benefit not only from your expertise but also from your sense of discovery. But what I think truly distinguishes our community and the work we do together is our shared commitment to discovery. To question. To rethink. To chase down the right words to write a perfect paragraph, followed by the realization that those words probably belong in a footnote, and finally to eliminate the footnote. To find answers. To admit we might be wrong (and occasionally to admit a student was right!). And to keep going. Thank you for continuing to discover and create, and for your role in nurturing an environment in which others can do the same. I’m grateful to be on this journey with you. Especially now, please take care of yourselves. As always… Onward! Best, Mark  Mark D. West Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs