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January 25, 2011

President Graham Spanier

Provost Rodney A. Erickson

Office of the President

201 Old Main

University Park, PA 16802

Dear President Spanier and Provost Erickson:

Like many of my STS colleagues, I learned with dismay of Penn States decision to eliminate its

longstanding and widely recognized STS Program, to terminate the appointments of the Programs

junior faculty, and to disperse the tenured faculty among disparate departments. I write to you as

founding director of the Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy

School, founding chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University,

past president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and former Board member of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science. My scholarly and professional life has been identified

with the field of STS for more than a quarter century. I therefore bring both a historical perspective

and a breadth of knowledge about the field that I hope gives this unsolicited letter some credibility.

The economic concerns driving the decision to eliminate the STS Program are familiar to us all.

Indeed, on an evening when the President of the United States announces a program of belt-tighteningand a five-year federal spending freeze, who could fail to recognize the need for sacrifice? Still, it is

precisely in this moment of fiscal constraints that it is important to make the right choices about what

to cut and what to save, what to nurture and what to abandon to the fates. As experienced

administrators, you know better than the rest of us that good management requires a growth and

conservation strategy as well as a strategy for cutting unnecessary expense.

As an emerging discipline, STS has yet to achieve proper institutional recognition in American higher

education, although a thriving STS department exists at Cornell, an undergraduate degree program at

Brown, a new graduate minor at Harvard, and formal STS presence at tens of dozens of other

universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Because of its relatively loose organizational

structure, STS scholarship has not always been recognized as a coherent body of work, and STSs

extensive contributions to undergraduate education, graduate and postdoctoral training, and public

policy have tended to be underestimated. It would be a very great pity if Penn State were to makeirrevocable decisions concerning STS without a thorough appreciation of the evidence.

Most major problems in todays world require solutions at the intersection of science, technology and

society: food safety and security, climate change, epidemic diseases, renewable energy,

cyberinfrastructures, non-fossil fuel transport systems, and many lesser needs. Yet, political events of

the last few years suggest that understanding of these issues has, if anything, diminished among this

nations political elite. ANew York Times article reported in October 2010, for example, that Of the

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Re: STS and Penn State

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20 Republican Senate candidates in contested races, 19 question the science of global warming and

oppose any comprehensive legislation to deal with it, according to a National Journal survey.

STS has sought to make students, decisionmakers and publics more aware of science as a process of

truth-seeking, the nature of uncertainty, the sources of technical controversy, the credibility (and

sometimes non-credibility) of expertise, the causes of technological disasters, the factors that lead to

success and failure in technological design, and most broadly the complex connections among science,technology and democracy. These wide-ranging contributionscutting across the natural and social

sciences, engineering, medicine, and the humanitieshave been possible because STS increasingly

functions as a coherent intellectual field. It is simply not feasible today for a university to deliver STS

learning and insights through disaggregated or amateurish efforts by untrained individuals in scattered

departments and faculties.

Harvard, as you know, is notoriously slow and conservative when it comes to acknowledging

developments beyond the traditional disciplines. But even at Harvard STS is finally beginning to take

root. This fall, we worked successfully through the Kennedy School of Government and the School of

Engineering and Applied Sciences to create a graduate Secondary Field (minor) in STS. This minor is

now available to all Ph.D. students at Harvard, including scientists, engineers, and doctoral candidates

in law and design. A new undergraduate course in Technology and Society has been launched,

staffed in part by STS-trained teaching assistants. We hope that this course will become the core of anew undergraduate major in Technology and Society.

It is ironic that Penn State, which early recognized the value of STS, should dismantle its

achievements at just the time when so many other universities are finally beginning to understand the

importance of the paths that your faculty trail-blazed. The late Rustum Roy, who passed away just last

year, was a pioneer in thinking about science policy. Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, noted

STS scholars now at Stanford, established their early academic standing at Penn State. Rich Doyles

oeuvre has set the standard for other students of the rhetoric of science. Jonathan Marks, a lawyer,

bioethicist and STS scholar, has been a valued visitor in my STS Program at Harvard for two years.

Even your junior faculty are already making their mark in the world. For example, Chloe Silvermans

study of autism has made important contributions to bioethics and medical anthropology even before

its publication as a book.

Many difficult assessments and choices must have preceded the decision to cut STS at Penn State. It

would be presumptuous of me to think otherwise. At the same time, as a concerned university citizen

and one of the pioneers in this field, I would respectfully request you to take a second look, if it is still

possible, at measures short of eliminating the field and redistributing all of its resources. America

urgently needs the intellectual and practical services that STS offers. This is not a time to turn away

from gaining, and disseminating, deeper insight into the complex relations of science and technology

to their social, political, and cultural environments.

Needless to say, I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Respectfully yours,

Sheila Jasanoff

Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies

Director, Program on Science, Technology and Society

Harvard Kennedy School