Graduate students in a good department have no such problem, because such faculty are rigorously kept away from graduate students, except when they serve as teaching assistants, in which case the contact is perfunctory. Cynicism toward undergraduate teaching is so pervasive among funded scientists in this country that embracing such teaching in my life was perhaps the most radical decision I made. I have used the obligation to teach as a chance to learn, and this notion seems to have resonated with the Ford Foundation , whose recent grant enables me to convene a faculty seminar representing medicine, law, public health, the humanities, and the arts. Advising, the last of my four laboratory-surrogates, is the least structured aspect of my professional life, but it is the part that most clearly reconstitutes the humane context I missed as a lab scientist. We might as well begin our reforms in the most conservative way, by rededicating ourselves to the meaning of the title we hold.
Affirmations are matters of the heart.
Professors do not deserve the title unless they are willing to take the time and make the effort to affirm something beyond their data, since data speak for themselves and need no affirmation. To be a professor, one must first have something of importance that needs affirming. But it is never too late to begin. In all three stages of a career, it should be possible to introduce social structures that ameliorate the anomic individualism of today's basic science, without diminishing the intellectual rigor of the science itself. Teaching, surely, is such a structure, an exemplary and essential one.