I would like to thank Elan Kluger ’26 for his history lesson on Ph.D.s and the precursors to our Dartmouth Society of Fellows. However, I wonder if Kluger has reached out to engage directly with any of the current members of the SoF, or participated in any of the invited lecture and discussion events organised by the SoF?
Let me take the opportunity to share my own first-hand experiences being a member of the SoF and what it has meant to me since joining in fall 2019. As a professor situated within the department of physics and astronomy, I have valued highly the uniquely interdisciplinary nature of the SoF, where postdoctoral fellows are recruited from far and wide without any a priori restrictions on research discipline.
A paradoxical aspect of Dartmouth as a liberal arts college is that only undergraduate students can enjoy an unfettered liberal arts education, exploring their interests across multiple disciplines. The SoF goes a little way towards extending the liberal arts experience to the broader community of scholars at Dartmouth, in particular to postdocs and faculty who wish to actively engage with scholars outside their own immediate disciplines.
Over the years, I have heard lectures and participated in discussions on numerous topics presented by the postdoctoral fellows, opening my often too-specialized academic mind. These have included interactions with anthropologists and social scientists who do fieldwork around the globe, sometimes at risk to their own physical well-being, including one notable colleague who worked with residents in the former evacuation zone of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident; a literary studies scholar who explores written representations of bird song and whistling in poems, tales and commentary from pre-17th-century China; a geoscientist seeking to understand through laboratory investigation the interactions between the Earth system and microbial life that shape global climate; a musician and musicologist studying how radio transmission technology and musical performances mediated fascism in Italy and abroad during the 1930-40s; a philosopher who seeks to understand color perception through empirically guided studies. I have the SoF community to thank for encouraging and informing my own recent interdisciplinary work that uses sound to convey the microscopic quantum realm in the form of soundscapes and music, accessible to the non-expert.
As faculty members of the SoF, one of our key responsibilities is to select a cohort of around five postdoctoral fellows each year. This is an extremely challenging task, with annual applications in the many hundreds to over one thousand; one of the qualities we look for in a candidate is a willingness and interest in actively engaging across the disciplines, as well as a commitment on the part of a department or program to provide the candidate with an academic home.
Postdocs have told me how their SoF community-led activities have had a positive impact on their long-term careers. Such activities include helping with the sharing of ideas across the disciplines, workshopping papers, book chapters, practicing talks, inviting and engaging with speakers, organizing workshops and teaching small undergraduate classes. Dartmouth would be poorer without the uniquely interdisciplinary riches that the SoF postdocs bring to our scholarly community.
Yes, I am all for engaging with and learning from scholars that have taken unconventional paths, with or without a PhD. I remember the outstanding electricity and magnetism teacher and distinguished plasma physicist, Mr. A. E. Dangor, while I was an undergraduate studying at Imperial College, London. But by far the majority of physicists, the scholars I can speak for best, have pursued their education beyond the Ph.D. level. Only in research and teaching universities do we commonly find both the necessary breadth and concentration of expertise and an environment suited for learning freely over a span of multiple years. For sure, it is a difficult internship, but we take this academic route, formally supervised by our professor mentors, and sometimes informally by unsung postdocs and fellow graduate students, because we want to learn deeply and with rigor, and in return share our hard-earned knowledge and insights with students and society at large.
Professor Miles Blencowe is the Eleanor and A. Kelvin Smith Distinguished Professor in Physics at Dartmouth College. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.