Why American Higher Education Needs Parasitologists

Although there are some more formal acknowledgments at the end, I would like to thank all of you for the honor of being elected President of ASP. This past year has been a very rewarding, although in some cases challenging, experience. I have always considered ASP to be a very open organization, offering many opportunities for professional development and interaction between members of all ages and stages in their careers, and I now know that those opportunities extend throughout our lives. So on behalf of Council, I also thank all of you for your work on behalf of the society and for your participation in these meetings. Today I’m going to address 4 topics that I believe not only characterize the discipline of parasitology, but also are largely missing from our national conversation about education, especially at the college and university level. Those topics are the production of transferable skills; our perceptions of the world, especially the natural world; access to reasonably difficult problems in natural settings; and intellectual epidemiology, or the movement of ideas, innovations, and cultural items through populations. These topics seem to have been a part of my discussions with fellow parasitologists for at least half a century, beginning with my choice to pursue a graduate degree under the supervision of Dr. J. Teague Self at the University of Oklahoma, so it seems natural to finish a career in the same way it started. My first ASP meeting was in June 1962, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. I had just become 1 of Self’s graduate students, and along with 2 others—Jerry Esch, later to become editor of the Journal of Parasitology, and Jim McDaniel, now deceased—drove from Norman to Washington in Jim’s car. Two experiences during that first ASP meeting left a lasting impression on me; one was a tour of the National Institutes of Health, during which Dr. Self introduced me to G. Robert Coatney; the other happened on Wednesday afternoon, June 13, when Ray Cable moderated a symposium entitled ‘‘The Future of Teaching in Parasitology.’’ Not only did those encounters make a lasting impression, they formed the basis for my mentoring philosophy during the next 50 yr, and they are the main reason I believe American higher education is in desperate need of parasitologists on the faculty. At NIH, as we walked down a hallway, I heard a blustery Irish voice coming out of one of the offices. Dr. Self grinned and said, ‘‘How’d you like to meet Coatney?’’ I had just started thinking about a doctoral project on bird malaria, so that question was the rough equivalent of saying ‘‘How’d you like to meet one of your most famous heroes?’’ We went into the office where Dr. Coatney was holding forth with a couple of colleagues. After we were introduced, he passed along his version of the Andrew Carnegie rules for success, again in that wonderful tone of voice: surround yourself with people smarter than you are; get out their way and let them work; then go out and brag about what they did. Then he added: and always be finishing something. Later, as a faculty member at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, I found those rules amazingly easy to follow, especially the first one!