By Peter Glick
Professor of psychology
Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2003
Originally published in the November 2002 issue of Observer, a publication of the American Psychological Society, and reprinted by permission.
The virtues of the liberal arts college are usually expressed in terms of the teaching, not the scholarly, mission of these institutions, yet there are advantages to the liberal arts college setting that can deepen a faculty member's research contribution. One of the most important is an intellectual climate that fosters knowledge of other disciplines and intellectual breadth. Specifically, three forces promote interdisciplinary awareness: colleagues, students, and the structure of the curriculum. Interdisciplinarity need not weaken commitment to one's own field (though this is a potential danger); rather, it can encourage fresh approaches to enduring topics, leading to innovative research and theoretical advances.
Having small departments (at Lawrence, six full-time faculty covering all of psychology) means that colleagues and close friends not only work in different subfields, but that many will not be psychologists. At the lunch table where one mixes with philosophers, physicists, and English professors, conversations often revolve around the mundane (such as whether a new restaurant in town has raised the local, depressingly low, culinary bar), but not always. Exposure to people in entirely foreign fields can have a salutary effect; information is accrued through what seems like a process of osmosis. Knowing that witchcraft accusations in Ghana often included charges of infanticide may not be necessary, but such bits of information have expanded my perspective as a sexism researcher.
Students often serve as the indirect conduit of intellectual stimulation from one's colleagues. Undergraduates at liberal arts colleges usually have wide-ranging interests (and distribution requirements ensure their exposure to a variety of fields), leading them to connect the dots between their classes. I may first learn about the theoretical perspectives of an anthropologist, whose office is just down the hall, from the student who is taking both her class and mine. Not infrequently, in-class discussions determine the subsequent content of exchanges with colleagues. Exposure to different fields (through both students and colleagues) has influenced me to take account of different levels of analysis, not just the psychological, in my own research (e.g. emphasizing the role of social structure in generating prejudice).
Students are also a direct source of inspiration. Teaching undergraduates and doing research need not be competing obligations; they can be mutually reinforcing. In psychology, as in other empirical fields, undergraduate research meshes perfectly with the liberal arts mission. Undergraduate students are capable of participating in high quality research (they have served as co-authors on many of my own publications) and involving them in research is one of the surest ways to foster their intellectual development. Because they have not yet acquired the blinders of specialized knowledge and are immersed in classes from a variety of disciplines, students often generate (more readily than those of us with a Ph.D.) basic, yet innovative research questions. My first foray into sexism research — now my bread and butter — stemmed from a project in my Research Methods class generated by two students' interest in sex discrimination.
Looking at curriculum, the liberal arts college demands that faculty teach a wider range and a greater number of courses compared to our colleagues at research institutions. We may be expected to teach outside our own sub-areas of psychology, to contribute to interdisciplinary programs, and even to participate in a college-wide course that is completely outside the field.
The specialization encouraged in graduate school does not prepare one for these wide-ranging demands, and it is extraordinarily difficult for faculty just beginning their careers to fulfill them while maintaining a research program. But there are advantages to taking a wider focus. Teaching more broadly within psychology diminishes the tunnel vision that can develop in graduate school and thus can enhance one's creativity as a researcher. The development of courses in an interdisciplinary program entails exposure to alternative approaches to shared questions. Teaching outside of psychology entirely is a daunting experience, but can be an intellectually energizing chance to relive being an undergraduate, but with a set of skills you did not have back then.
Teaching in Lawrence's Freshman Studies program has been valuable to me as a researcher. Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Marx's Communist Manifesto, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness have deepened my scholarly approach to sexism and to prejudice in general. Virginia Woolf's little gem of a book, which is full of psychological insight about how men think about women and vice versa, directly influenced the development of ambivalent sexism theory.
I might have benefited from reading such works on my own, but (a) I probably wouldn't have picked them up if not for Freshman Studies and (b) the desperate knowledge that I had to teach these books to undergraduates and lead intelligent discussions on them motivated a deeper engagement with the works that has been truly eye-opening.
Similarly, teaching an interdisciplinary course on the Holocaust with a religious studies professor (in this case, my wife) directly informed the development of a general model of scapegoating. Teaching about the Holocaust required me to know specific historical details, and this knowledge sparked insights about the nature of scapegoating that contradict psychology's conventional wisdom. For example, I propose that targets are scapegoated because they are perceived as powerful, not weak, and that the lessening of frustrations, if attributed to the actions of a genocidal political movement, can foster, rather than diminish, commitment to genocide. Although these insights were rooted in a particular historical case, comparisons to other genocides (e.g., Rwanda) suggest that they can be generalized.
I do not mean to leave readers with an unrealistically rosy view of research in a liberal arts context. I urgently needed to spend my first sabbatical at a research institution to develop and test some of the ideas inspired by teaching at a liberal arts college. The sabbatical had an equally important effect of helping me to expand my connections with others in the discipline. Although faculty at liberal arts colleges have to work harder to forge and maintain such connections, the current age of global communication, along with the fact that research in psychology is conducive to collaboration, means that isolation can be overcome. The reward is involvement in two intellectual communities: one local and interdisciplinary, the other international but more narrowly focused.
Having a foot in each world creates a friction that can spark inspiration.
Peter Glick has been a member of the Lawrence University faculty since 1985. He received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Oberlin College and the Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on understanding prejudice. Glick and co-author Susan T. Fiske of Princeton University received the 1995 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize for their work on ambivalent sexism. Since then, their Ambivalent Sexism Inventory has generated research involving more than 20,000 participants in 24 nations. Readers can take an interactive ambivalent sexism test and compare their scores to national averages from various nations at www.understandingprejudice.org.