Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

September 15, 2009

Dear Colleague:

We are at the beginning of a new academic year. New graduate students and faculty will soon wonder about research, whether they can come up with fundable projects, leading to the writing of publishable papers, which will then launch them to a successful career. These young researchers may find the following interview of interest. It was conducted by Science with the astronomer Catherine Cesarsky, the outgoing president of the International Astronomical Union (Science, 28 August 2009, p. 1060).

   Q:     Hasn't astronomy benefited from road maps and decadal plans?
   CC: Of course...
   Q:      What's the downside?
   CC:   You predefine what is important, what should be done, and how it should be done. I am worried that young scientists may be brainwashed as a result. It's like telling them, "Here is this cookbook—all you have to do to come up with a fundable proposal is read this well." It may be quenching creativity from the start.
   Q:     Have you seen the problem occurring?
   CC:   I do see some of it when I serve on panels for fellowships. You get proposals that are clones of each other.
   Q:     What's an example of a bandwagon?
   CC: Dark energy would be one. A lot of people want to work on the problem, and many of them are thinking along similar lines. It may be that after we have done all these experiments, we may know as little about dark energy as we know now. When I got my PhD in 1971, things were not so well organized. Papers had very few authors. Even PhD topics were chosen a little more individually... Now we do this community work. I think young scientists should look at things from a distance, to connect different ideas.

Of course I think of geographers when I read this interview. We don't have deadening spelt-out road maps as astronomers do, but we do have accepted research paths that faculty advise their students to follow. In their paternal way, faculty want their students' proposals to be funded, which means following lines of research that are mainstream and that will not unduly upset the equilibrium (the kind of feeling one has after a good lunch) of the reviewing board. The work so done is not likely to rise much above B-. It offers no surprise, no reason to shout "Eureka!" Indeed, how can it since it has to be so specific even at the proposal stage? Democratic procedure, excellent in government, is not necessarily the best in promoting creativity. It should make all of us a little uneasy to know that nearly all the world's greatest artists and thinkers have lived under nondemocratic governments; moreover, they obtained the money to do their work through nondemocratic procedures—inherited wealth and the patronage of an enlightened despot—or through such means of livelihood as working in an optician's shop (Spinoza), a patent office (Einstein), or a bank (T. S. Eliot).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu