<p>[Brown</a> University awarded $15.5-million math institute | Brown University Media Relations](<a href=“http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/08/math]Brown”>http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/08/math)</p>
<p>This is a very big deal for Brown applied math and math.</p>
<p>thanks much, MM and good to hear from you! My son’s a math guy there, so I’m showing him the article now.</p>
<p>Wow. This looks to be an award for just the kind of thing Brown seems to do best: inter-disciplinary work. This, along with the upcoming Engineering School, should help make Brown an even more exciting place to be doing stuff.</p>
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Every school seems to claim “interdisciplinary” as its hallmak. Is there any institutional element of Brown that TRULY makes it a preeminent interdisciplinary school?</p>
<p>I’m not saying “Brown isn’t interdisciplinary and therefore worthless.” Brown has clear strengths and competitive advantages over its peers, but I don’t think interdisciplinary-ness is one of them.</p>
<p>Fair point, but I think the point might have been that Brown’s interdisciplinary approach is a strength of its curriculum, but it’s not necessarily an advantage Brown has over peer institutions. In fact, the Open Curriculum allows student to isolate their courses of study to the extent that they could avoid taking any courses outside one or two select fields of study. And, if said fields of study are big enough, they could even avoid taking courses that touched on other fields of study, which really undermines the whole interdisciplinary thing.</p>
<p>Case in point: one of my friends is really into math. Originally, he wanted to come to Brown so that he could spend all four years taking math, and only math. He doesn’t like applied math, so that’s 32 pure math courses. Nothing else.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Harvard’s Core is arguably interdisciplinary because it forces students to take broad courses in areas they would never study otherwise. Many of those courses are designed to touch on several different fields and modes of thought, which is why departmental courses will not suffice.</p>
<p>Obviously, there are merits and weaknesses to each approach, both of which have been debated heavily in this forum and elsewhere. Brown is “interdisciplinary,” as is most every other liberal arts school in the country, but the ways in which Brown is interdisciplinary varies considerably by individual student, concentration, and program.</p>
<p>…but why are we debating semantics?</p>
<p>No, we’re not debating semantics. Brown has had twice the concentrations, even without having internal colleges or professional schools to draw from, relative to the other Ivies since the 70s. We’re often the first among our peers to offer new academic disciplines.</p>
<p>It’s a direct result of a few things-- the Open Curriculum and the faculty culture among the top 2. There’s lots of reason to believe that Brown is at the forefront of the interdisciplines-- in fact, it’s something that reviewers from HYP and other peers praised during our NEASC reaccreditation interviews that I took part in.</p>
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<p>That may be true, but is just one isolated example. In reality, 95% of Brown students fufill a standard distribution requirement of 2 courses in the hummanities, social sciences and physical sciences before they graduate.</p>
<p>Sure, but I was arguing that the Open Curriculum makes virtually any course of study possible. Therefore, while many students may choose an interdisciplinary route, either within their concentration or within all the courses they take, Brown does not force students to be “interdisciplinary” (unlike schools with requirements).</p>
<p>Brown’s point about being interdisciplinary is not that more students take courses in different departments than any other school, but rather that there are more interdisciplinary majors (because of the New Curriculum) than in lots of other schools.</p>
<p>Being interdisciplinary is not just about taking courses in different fields, but also about making connections between those fields. I know of no school with distribution requirements that force you to make those connections , but that does happen in Browns interdisciplinary majors, most notably in theses.</p>
<p>…uh… I don’t really care about whether Brown is interdisciplinary or whatnot…</p>
<p>but I do care
when Brown gets MONEY to TEACH and LEARN! YAY!</p>
<p>^ seconded</p>