The program has been funded by the Leadership Initiative in Science and Humanities Education of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We believe that the idea of team teaching not only provides a higher level of expertise, but dramatizes for the students as few individual lecturers are able to do the ways in which deeply held points of view, based on radically different disciplinary foundations, can be integrated into a meaningful, individual synthesis. Such an integrated personal synthesis is the sine qua non for individual decision making, whether we are talking about voting for members of Congress who have an enlightened view of science and technology policy, or working to deal with local environmental or ethical issues related to science. As to the impact of team teaching in this context on students, it is much too early to tell. There is certainly value in team teaching as a way of enriching and enlivening the classroom atmosphere.
Boundaries are important in every relationship.
They are particularly important in the relationship between teachers and students because of the difference in power between the two groups. I like to tell my advisees that they are here, in part, to learn to be adults and to learn how to interact with adults. They get to start down that path by practicing with me. For instance, I find it problematic for a professor to be giving personal advice and counseling to a student who is in his or her class. In short, to misquote Robert Frost, I believe that good boundaries make good universities.